ODE TO SIR ANDREW AGNEW, BART.[33]

    “At certain seasons he makes a prodigious clattering
    with his bill.”—­SELBY.

    “The bill is rather long, flat, and tinged with
    green.”—­BEWICK.

[Footnote 33:  A Scotch baronet, and the once well-known promoter of Sabbatarian legislation.  Sir Andrew identified himself in the House of Commons with the efforts of an English Association, the “Lord’s Day Society,” and introduced a Bill to prohibit all open labour on Sunday, excepting “works of necessity and mercy,”—­a measure bound, under any scheme of working, to inflict the direst hardship and injustice.  After three defeats, the Bill was actually carried in 1837, but was afterwards allowed to drop.]

O Andrew Fairservice,—­but I beg pardon,
You never labor’d in Di Vernon’s garden,
On curly kale and cabbages intent,—­
Andrew Churchservice was the thing I meant,—­
You are a Christian—­I would be the same,
Although we differ, and I’ll tell you why,
Not meaning to make game,
I do not like my Church so very High!

When people talk, as talk they will,
     About your bill,
They say, among their other jibes and small jeers,
That, if you had your way,
You’d make the seventh day
As overbearing as the Dey of Algiers. 
Talk of converting Blacks—­
      By your attacks,
You make a thing so horrible of one day,
Each nigger, they will bet a something tidy,
Would rather be a heathenish Man Friday,
     Than your Man Sunday!

     So poor men speak,
     Who, once a week,
P’rhaps, after weaving artificial flowers,
Can snatch a glance of Nature’s kinder bowers,
     And revel in a bloom
     That is not of the loom,
Making the earth, the streams, the skies, the trees,
     A Chapel of Ease. 
Whereas, as you would plan it,
Wall’d in with hard Scotch granite,
People all day should look to their behaviors;—­
But though there be, as Shakspeare owns,
     “Sermons in stones,”
Zounds!  Would you have us work at them like paviors?

Spontaneous is pure devotion’s fire;
And in a green wood many a soul has built
A new Church, with a fir-tree for its spire,
Where Sin has prayed for peace, and wept for guilt,
Better than if an architect the plan drew;
We know of old how medicines were back’d,
But true Religion needs not to be quack’d
By an Un-merry Andrew!

Suppose a poor town-weary sallow elf
At Primrose-hill would renovate himself,
    Or drink (and no great harm)
Milk genuine at Chalk Farm,—­
The innocent intention who would balk,
And drive him back into St. Bennet Fink? 
For my part, for my life, I cannot think
A walk on Sunday is “the Devil’s Walk.”

But there’s a sect of Deists, and their creed
Is D——­ing other people to be d——­d,—­
Yeas, all that are not of their saintly level,
They make a pious point
To send, with an “aroint,”
Down to that great Fillhellenist, the Devil. 
To such, a ramble by the River Lea
Is really treading on the “Banks of D——.”