CANTO IV. GRAND ATTACK! ARGUMENT. Now Caustic finding Logic sound The MIGHTY ROYAL COLLEGE musters; Then marches to o'erturn and knock dead OUR 'foresaid MANIFESTO, first done, 95 The boldest sons of Galen call on. I say the boldest, for we cannot rely on the aid of the whole Esculapian phalanx. Many white Sound Discord's jarring tocsin louder, livered dastards who disgrace our profession have shewn a disposition to remain neuter, or fight under Perkinean banners! 96 Than Howard's fulminating powder. It is a long time since the public have had any reports from the honourable Mr. Howard's Fulminating Powder, which, three years since, made so much noise, that the world had reason to expect that thunderiferous Chemist would make no more of exploding to Old Nick a whole army of Frenchmen, with Bonaparte at its head, than would a Cockney Sportsman of shooting a tame goose on the first of September. Whether this mighty affair is all blown up, or what may have been the cause of the silence of those who defended a thing, which so loudly proclaimed its own merits, it becomes Mr. Howard to explain. Of this he may be assured, if he do not stir his stumps in order to fulfil some of the fair promises, which he and his friends have made to the Royal Society and the Public, of the astonishing atchievements they were about to perform, by the demiomnipotent power of his new-invented artificial thunder, I hereby give the alarming intelligence that I will apply my own superior talents to this sonorous subject. Should that happen, those laurels which were designed to decorate the brow of Mr. Howard, will be tied in a bow-knot round my venerable temples. For, in that case, the learned Then into battle like brave men go, chemist's acquisitions, in the art of intonation, will bear no better comparison to those of Dr. Caustic, than the clattering waggon-wheels of Salmoneus to the world-astounding thunderbolts of Jupiter. No person can doubt my being able to accomplish all this, who is apprised, as he may be from perusing this performance, of the vast quantity of the most detonating kind of mercury, which exists in my composition, and which will fulminate with greater effect, than the gold and silver that line the magnipotent purse of the honourable the heir ap parent to the Duke of Norfolk, 97 Kill'd off' at Marengo. I have several times taken a confounded deal of trouble to haul into my poem this beautiful specimen of parliamentary elocution; and, in my opinion, nothing can be better imagined or more happily accomplished. Poetry and Oratory, as the ancients inform us, were both whelped at one litter; consequently the same phrase which glittered in the harangue of my bull-baiting friend, William Windham, a British Senator, cannot fail to cut a dash in the stanza of his seraphical friend, Christopher Caustic, a British Poet. Now as I am a great admirer of French Principles, and that new and accommodating kind of morality, by Frenchmen discovered, and which I ever have and ever will eulogise, to the utmost extent of my faculties, perhaps your Worships will express no small degree of wonderment why But choose a chief before you start, And to make sure of well succeeding, Step forth thou POTENT PRINCE OF PUFFERS! For thou canst sound (a thing the oddest, I should be the intimate friend of a gentleman, the blaze of whose oratory, one would suppose, would have blasted Bonaparte, and even singed the whole French Republic. But those, who are admitted behind the political curtain, will perceive that the tendency of the measures, which Mr. Windham supports, is to promote those Jacobinic principles, of which Dr. Caustic openly and honestly professes himself to be the determined propagator and defender. 98 And never meddle with a strumpet. Surely no person will imagine that I would, for And soon that name's continuous roar Shall roll sublime from shore to shore; No more shall merciless reviewers the world, allude to any other lady than Madam Fame herself. 99 And blaze through either frozen zone. I have very substantial reasons for spreading glad tidings of our redoubtable chieftain among the most distant inhabitants of the globe, in preference to endeavouring to add to his great celebrity within the periphery of his associates.' And whereas it has been said that this gentleman's reputation will ever stand highest where he is either not known at all, or known only by those literary productions, in which he is himself the theme of his own most ardent praise,' mine shall be the humble task of trumpeting the Doctor's name among the distant inhabitants of this dirty planet, while the Doctor shall himself dip his pen in ' ethereal and indelible ink, and impress his ob'servations in characters legible in the great vo'lume of the heavens.' |