Page:Two Mock Epics (Hanuman and Tantum Religio), Lyrics, Post Meridian Verse, The Turret Captain's Toast and other Verses.pdf/114

 The straw and truckle bed were fiction.

Rome’s priests indeed vowed vows inflated,

Three straws were mixed up with the swans’-down,

But legends won’t be reinstated

By quibblings such as these when once down.

In vain: the myth to mockery yielded

Two years since when truth first revealed it.

And with it those perennial fountains

Of credulous and verdant coppers

That nourished once the sacred mountains

Of seven-fold Rome, like meal from hoppers,

By some malignant sorcery banished

Now sank into the ground and vanished.

From all these causes acting slowly,

But surely with convergent forces

It came to pass one day the Holy-

Father awoke without resources.

The plough of faith that once the lowly

Had kibed so well, now stuck sans horses;

Its cash-boxes were vacuums void

As father Denza’s aneroid.

The only thing that had not dwindled

Was Rome’s imperious need of spending,

That, whether swindling or swindled,

From age to age ran on unending.

’Twas an insatiate fire that kindled

Faith’s noblest deeds, though sometimes blending,

It must be owned, in breasts seraphic,

A taste for haggling, greed, and traffic.

Now it convoked, to solve the crisis,