Punch (102.1892)

186 PUNCH, OR THE LONDON CHARIVARI. [April 16, 1892.

SO FRIVOLOUS!

Wife. "Solomon, I have a Bone to pick with to it."

Solomon (flipjiantly). "With pleasure, my dear, so long as it's a Funny Bone I"

THE DYNAMITE DRAGON.

A Dragon ! Faugh! that foul and writhing
Worm

Seems scarcely worthy of the ancient term
That fills old myth, and typifies the fight
'Twixt wrathful evil and the force of right.
The dragons of the prime, fierce saurian

things m
"With ogre gorges and with harpy wings,
Fitted their hour; the haunts that gave them

birth,

The semi-chaos of the early earth,
The slime, the earthquake shock, the whelm-
ing flood,

Made battle ground for the colossal brood.
But now, when centuries of love and light
Have warmed and brightened man's old

home; when might
Is not all sinister, nor all desire
Fierce appetite, that all-devouring fire,—
When life is not alone a wasting scourge,
But from the swamps of soulless strife emerge
Some Pisgah peaks of promise where the dove
Finds footing, high the whirling gulfs above,—
Now the intrusion of this loathly shape,
With pestilence-breathing jaws that blackly

£aP.e

For indiscriminate prey, is sure a thing
To set celestial guards once more a-wing ;
To fire a new St. Michael or St. George
With the bright death to cleave the monster's

gorge, _ [breath

And trample out the Laidly Worm's last
In the convulsions of reluctant death.
A crawling, craven, sneaking, snaking

brute;

Purposeless spite, and hatred absolute,

In hideous shape incarnate! Venomed Gad
In Civilisation's path ; malignant-mad,
And blindly biting; raising an asp-neck
In Beauty's foot-tracks, and prepared to
wreck

The ordered work of ages in a day,
To raze and shatter, to abase and slay.
Blind as the earthquake, headlong as the
storm,

Tet in such hideous subter-human form,
Vulgar as venomous! _ Dragon indeed,
And dangerous, but with no soul save greed,
No aim save chaos. Bloody, yet so blind,
The common enemy of humankind,
Whose age-stored works and ways it yearns
to blast,

To smite to ruined fragments, and to cast
Prone—as itself is prone—in common dust.
The Beautiful, the Wise, the Strong, the
Just,

All fruit of labour, and all spoil of thought,
All that co-operant Man hath won or
wrought,

All that the heart has loved, the mind has
taught

Through the long generations, hoarded
gains

Of plastic fancies, and of potent brains ;
Thrones, Temples, Marts, Art's alcoves,

Learning's domes,
Patrician palaces, and bourgeois homes.
Down, down!—to glut its spleen, the paltry

thing,

Impotent, save to lurk, and coil, and spring,
But powerful as the poison-drop, once> sped,
That creeps, corrupts, and leaves its victim—
dead I

As the asp's fang could turn to pulseless clay
The Pride of Egypt, so this Worm can slay

If left long covert for its crawling course.
Up, up against it every virile force,
And every valorous virtue ! By its_hiss
'Tis known hostis humani generis,
Let Civilisation snatch St. Michael's sword,
And slay this Dragon, of a tribe abhorred
The meanest and the most malignant Worm"
Which can spill venom, but, attacked, will
squirm,

Shrink, splutter, vanish. With no noble end,
All men must be its foes, blind hatred its sole
friend!

BREAKING.

[In Ms spot-barred Billiard-Match with H. Coles,
Peall made breaks of 108,133,64,52,78,77,and 80.]

Break, break, break

On thy Billiard-board, oh P.!

As easy as cutting butter
The business seems to thee.

" Oh, well that the spot is barred,"
The knowing ones glibly say,

" Or we might get no chance
Of a Coles' strike here to-day."

And the marvellous game goes on,
Till the watchers have their fill;

And one drops off, and dreams
He 's taken the " Red " f or a pill.

Break, break, break!

And there 's one that will broken be ;
For the Pony I put on the other man

Will never come back to me.

Suggestion from "Chllde Harold " at
Olympia—"I stood in Venice on the Bridge
of Size And paint," &c, &c.