“What? shall Earl Rodolph’s sturdy strength,
    After six hundred years, at length
      Be recklessly laid low? 
    His grey machicolated tower
    Torn down within one outraged hour
    By worse than Vandals’ ruthless power?—­
      Haro! a l’aide, Haro!

    “Nine years old Cornet for the throne
    Against rebellion stood alone—­
      And honoured still shall stand,
    For heroism so sublime,
    A relic of the olden time,
    Renowned in Guernsey prose and rhyme,
      The glory of her land!

    “Ay,—­let your science scheme and plan
      With better skill than so;
    Touch not this dear old barbican,
      Nor dare to lay it low!

    “On Vazon’s ill-protected bay
    Build and blow up, as best ye may,
    And do your worst to scare away
      Some visionary foe,—­
    But, if in brute and blundering power
    You tear down Rodolph’s granite tower,
    Defeat and scorn and shame that hour
    Shall whelm you like an arrowy shower—­
      Haro! a l’aide, Haro!”

When my antiquarian cousin Ferdinand, the historian of “Sarnia” and our “Family Records,” saw these lines, he positively made serious objection—­while generally approving them—­against my saying “six hundred years,” whereas, according to him, it was only five hundred and ninety-three! he actually wanted me to alter it, or at all events insert “almost,”—­so difficult is it to reconcile literal accuracy with poetical rhyme and rhythm.  I seem to remember that he wrote to the local papers about this.  However, it is some consolation to know that these heartfelt verses forced the War Office to spare Castle Cornet:  the Norman appeal by Haro being a privilege of Channel-Islanders to bring their grievances direct to the Queen in council.  As I have continually the honour “Monstrari digito praetereuntium” in the role of a “Fidicen,” I suppose that poetries in such a self-record as this are not positive bores—­they can always be skipped if they are—­so I will even give here a cheerful bit of rhyme which I jotted down at midnight on the deck of a yacht in a half-gale off Cherbourg, when going with a deputation from Guernsey to meet the French President in 1850:—­

    A Night-Sail in the Race of Alderney.

    I.

    “Sprinkled thick with shining studs
      Stretches wide the tent of heaven,
    Blue, begemmed with golden buds,—­
        Calm, and bright, and deep, and clear,
        Glory’s hollow hemisphere
    Arch’d above these frothing floods
      Right and left asunder riven,
    As our cutter madly scuds,
      By the fitful breezes driven,
        When exultingly she sweeps
        Like a dolphin through the deeps,
        And from wave to wave she leaps
      Rolling in this yeasty leaven,—­
        Ragingly that never sleeps,
      Like the wicked unforgiven!