THOUGHTS ON THE LATE DESTRUCTIVE PROPOSITIONS OF THE TORIES.[1]
BY A COMMON-COUNCILMAN.
1835.
I sat me down in my easy chair,
To read, as usual, the morning papers;
But--who shall describe my look of despair,
When I came to Lefroy's "destructive" capers!
That _he_--that, of all live men, Lefroy
Should join in the cry "Destroy, destroy!"
Who, even when a babe, as I've heard said,
On Orange conserve was chiefly fed,
And never, till now, a movement made
That wasn't manfully retrograde!
Only think--to sweep from the light of day
Mayors, maces, criers and wigs away;
To annihilate--never to rise again--
A whole generation of aldermen,
Nor leave them even the accustomed tolls,
To keep together their bodies and souls!--
At a time too when snug posts and places
Are falling away from us one by one,
Crash--crash--like the mummy-cases
Belzoni, in Egypt, sat upon,
Wherein lay pickled, in state sublime,
Conservatives of the ancient time;--
To choose such a moment to overset
The few snug nuisances left us yet;
To add to the ruin that round us reigns,
By knocking out mayors' and town-clerks' brains;
By dooming all corporate bodies to fall,
Till they leave at last no bodies at all--
Naught but the ghosts of by-gone glory,
Wrecks of a world that once was Tory!--
Where pensive criers, like owls unblest,
Robbed of their roosts, shall still hoot o'er them:
Nor _mayors_ shall know where to seek a _nest_,
Till Gaily Knight shall _find_ one for them;--
Till mayors and kings, with none to rue 'em,
Shall perish all in one common plague;
And the _sovereigns_ of Belfast and Tuam
Must join their brother, Charles Dix, at Prague.
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