Where shall I turn me not to view its bonds,
    For I will never feel them:—­Italy! 
  Thy late reviving Roman soul desponds
    Beneath the lie this State-thing breathed o’er thee—­
  Thy clanking chain, and Erin’s yet green wounds,
    Have voices—­tongues to cry aloud for me. 
  Europe has slaves—­allies—­kings—­armies still,
  And Southey lives to sing them very ill.

  XVII.

  Meantime, Sir Laureate, I proceed to dedicate,
    In honest simple verse, this song to you. 
  And if in flattering strains I do not predicate,
    ’Tis that I still retain my “buff and blue”;
  My politics as yet are all to educate: 
    Apostasy’s so fashionable, too,
  To keep one creed’s a task grown quite Herculean: 
  Is it not so, my Tory, Ultra-Julian?

VENICE, September 16, 1818.

THOMAS HOOD.

(1798-1845.)

LXI.  COCKLE v.  CACKLE.

This is not meant as a “cut” at that standard medicine named therein which has wrought such good in its day; but is a satire on quack advertising generally.  The more worthless the nostrum, the more universal the advertising of it, such is the moral of Hood’s satire.

  Those who much read advertisements and bills,
  Must have seen puffs of Cockle’s Pills,
      Call’d Anti-bilious—­
  Which some physicians sneer at, supercilious,
  But which we are assured, if timely taken,
      May save your liver and bacon;
  Whether or not they really give one ease,
      I, who have never tried,
      Will not decide;
  But no two things in union go like these—­
  Viz.—­quacks and pills—­save ducks and pease. 
  Now Mrs. W. was getting sallow,
  Her lilies not of the white kind, but yellow,
  And friends portended was preparing for
      A human pate perigord;
  She was, indeed, so very far from well,
  Her son, in filial fear, procured a box
  Of those said pellets to resist bile’s shocks,
  And—­tho’ upon the ear it strangely knocks—­
  To save her by a Cockle from a shell! 
  But Mrs. W., just like Macbeth,
  Who very vehemently bids us “throw
  Bark to the Bow-wows”, hated physic so,
  It seem’d to share “the bitterness of Death”: 
  Rhubarb—­Magnesia—­Jalap, and the kind—­
  Senna—­Steel—­Assa-foetida, and Squills—­
  Powder or Draught—­but least her throat inclined
  To give a course to boluses or pills;
  No—­not to save her life, in lung or lobe,
  For all her lights’ or all her liver’s sake,
  Would her convulsive thorax undertake,
  Only one little uncelestial globe!