The showman (blessing in a thousand shapes!)
Parades a “School of Educated Apes!”
Small education’s needed, I opine,
Or native wit, to make a monkey shine;
The brute exhibited has naught to do
But ape the larger apes who come to view—
The hoodlum with his horrible grimace,
Long upper lip and furtive, shuffling
pace,
Significant reminders of the time
When hunters, not policemen, made him
climb;
The lady loafer with her draggling “trail,”
That free translation of an ancient tail;
The sand-lot quadrumane in hairy suit,
Whose heels are thumbs perverted by the
boot;
The painted actress throwing down the
gage
To elder artists of the sylvan stage,
Proving that in the time of Noah’s
flood
Two ape-skins held her whole profession’s
blood;
The critic waiting, like a hungry pup,
To write the school—perhaps
to eat it—up,
As chance or luck occasion may reveal
To earn a dollar or maraud a meal.
To view the school of apes these creatures
go,
Unconscious that themselves are half the
show.
These, if the simian his course but trim
To copy them as they have copied him,
Will call him “educated.”
Of a verity
There’s much to learn by study of
posterity.
A POET’S HOPE.
’Twas a weary-looking mortal, and
he wandered near the portal
Of the melancholy City of
the Discontented Dead.
He was pale and worn exceeding and his
manner was unheeding,
As if it could not matter
what he did nor what he said.
“Sacred stranger”—I
addressed him with a reverence befitting
The austere, unintermitting,
dread solemnity he wore;
’Tis the custom, too, prevailing
in that vicinage when hailing
One who possibly may be a
person lately “gone before”—
“Sacred stranger, much I ponder
on your evident dejection,
But my carefulest reflection
leaves the riddle still unread.
How do you yourself explain your dismal
tendency to wander
By the melancholy City of
the Discontented Dead?”
Then that solemn person, pausing in the
march that he was making,
Roused himself as if awaking,
fixed his dull and stony eye
On my countenance and, slowly, like a
priest devout and holy,
Chanted in a mournful monotone
the following reply:
“O my brother, do not fear it; I’m
no disembodied spirit—
I am Lampton, the Slang Poet,
with a price upon my head.
I am watching by this portal for some
late lamented mortal
To arise in his disquietude
and leave his earthy bed.
“Then I hope to take possession
and pull in the earth above me
And, renouncing my profession,
ne’er be heard of any more.
For there’s not a soul to love me
and no living thing respects me,
Which so painfully affects
me that I fain would ‘go before.’”
Then I felt a deep compassion for the
gentleman’s dejection,
For privation of affection
would refrigerate a frog.
So I said: “If nothing human,
and if neither man nor woman
Can appreciate the fashion
of your merit—buy a dog.”
