Page:The New Monthly Magazine - Volume 102.djvu/158

144 A very godsend for Apollodorus! Seraphic melody to him is the costermonger's strain. He thanks heaven that here he has lighted on a genuine bard, a creature of high impulse, and unsoiled by coarse conventionalities of rule; on a heaven-born minstrel, who labours not to sing, because his bright thoughts resolve themselves at once, artlessly, with grace beyond the reach of art, into truest divinest poesy, without the aid of balanced artifice, and in all the freshness and simplicity that beseem the songster's profession. And therefore Apollodorus greets his new protégé in posse with an emphatic "All hail, great poet!" The great poet, thus arrested in his inspired career of minstrelsy, wonders what the civil-spoken gent is after, and evidently suspects him of a design to chaff him. "Save you, my merry master," answers the great poet, in courteous return for the All hail. And then, with an eye to the main chance, he continues: "Need you any leeks or onions? Here's the primest cauliflower, though I say it, in all Badajoz. Set it up at a distance of some ten yards, and I'll forfeit my ass if it does not look bigger than the Alcayde's wig. Or would these radishes suit your turn? There's nothing like your radish for cooling the blood and purging distempered humours."but here the costermonger puts in his oar. He has been patient up to this swell in the rhapsody; but 'tis the last ounce breaks the camel's back, and the costermonger, who has put up with the allusions to his donkey and his drag, finds the meddling with his "reins" too much for him. So he says, says he, "Lookye, master, I've dusted a better jacket than yours before now, so you had best keep a civil tongue in your head. Once for all, will you buy my radishes?"

No!

Then go to the devil and shake yourself!