Each with never-ceasing labour,

Whilst he thinks he cheats his neighbour
Cheating his own heart of quiet.

And all these meet at levees;
Dinners convivial and political;
Suppers of epic poets; teas,
Where small talk dies in agonies;
Breakfasts professional and critical;

Lunches and snacks so aldermanic

That one would furnish forth ten dinners, Where reigns a Cretan-tongued panic, Lest news Russ, Dutch, or Alemannic Should make some losers, and some winners;

At conversazioni-balls

Conventicles and drawing-rooms-
Courts of law-committees-calls
Of a morning-clubs-book-stalls—
Churches-masquerades-and tombs.

And this is Hell-and in this smother
Are all damnable and damned;
Each one damning, damns the other;
They are damned by one another,
By none other are they damned.

'Tis a lie to say,

"God damns!" *

*This libel on our national oath, and this accusation of all our countrymen of being in the daily practice of solemnly

Where was Heaven's Attorney-General
When they first gave out such flams?
Let there be an end of shams:

They are mines of poisonous mineral.

Statesmen damn themselves to be

Cursed; and lawyers damn their souls
To the auction of a fee;

Churchmen damn themselves to see
God's sweet love in burning coals.

The rich are damned, beyond all cure,

To taunt, and starve, and trample on The weak and wretched; and the poor Damn their broken hearts to endure

Stripe on stripe, with groan on groan :

Sometimes the poor are damned indeed

To take,-not means for being blest,— But Cobbett's snuff, revenge; that weed From which the worms that it doth feed Squeeze less than they before possessed:

And some few, like we know who,
Damned-but God alone knows why-
To believe their minds are given
To make this ugly Hell a Heaven;

In which faith they live and die.

asseverating the most enormous falsehood, I fear deserves the notice of a more active Attorney-General than that here alluded to.

Thus, as in a town, plague-stricken,

Each man be he sound or no

Must indifferently sicken ;

As when day begins to thicken,
None knows a pigeon from a crow;

So good and bad, sane and mad,

The oppressor and the oppressed; Those who weep to see what others Smile to inflict upon their brothers; Lovers, haters, worst and best;

All are damned-they breathe the air,
Thick, infected, joy-dispelling:
Each pursues what seems most fair,
Mining like moles through mind, and there
Scoop palace-caverns vast, where Care
In throned state is ever dwelling.

PART THE FOURTH.

SIN.

Lo, Peter in Hell's Grosvenor-square,

A footman in the devil's service! And the misjudging world would swear That every man in service there

To virtue would prefer vice.

But Peter, though now damned, was not
What Peter was before damnation.

Men oftentimes prepare a lot

Which ere it finds them, is not what
Suits with their genuine station.

All things that Peter saw and felt
Had a peculiar aspect to him;
nd when they came within the belt
his own nature, seemed to melt,
Like cloud to cloud, into him.

And so the outward world uniting
To that within him, he became
Considerably uninviting

To those, who meditation slighting,
Were moulded in a different frame.

And he scorned them, and they scorned him;
And he scorned all they did; and they

Did all that men of their own trim
Are wont to do to please their whim,—
Drinking, lying, swearing, play.

Such were his fellow-servants; thus
His virtue, like our own, was built
Too much on that indignant fuss
Hypocrite Pride stirs up in us

To bully out another's guilt.

He had a mind which was somehow

At once circumference and centre Of all he might or feel or know; Nothing went ever out, although Something did ever enter.

He had as much imagination
As a pint-pot;-he never could
Fancy another situation,

From which to dart his contemplation,
Than that wherein he stood.

Yet his was individual mind,
And new-created all he saw
In a new manner, and refined
Those new-creations, and combined
Them, by a master-spirit's law.

Thus though unimaginative—
An apprehension clear, intense,
Of his mind's work, had made alive
The things it wrought on; I believe
Wakening a sort of thought in sense.

But from the first 'twas Peter's drift
To be a kind of moral eunuch;
He touched the hem of nature's shift,
Felt faint-and never dared uplift

The closest, all-concealing tunic.