If it still is your luck to be left in the ruck,
      and of fame you’re an impotent seeker,
  If you fruitlessly aim at a Senate’s acclaim
      when you can’t catch the eye of the Speaker,
  If whenever you rise you observe with surprise
      that the House is perceptibly thinner,
  And your eloquent pleas are a sign to M.P.’s
      that it’s nearly the time for their dinner: 

  Should you sigh for the heights where the eminent lights,
      in the region of letters who shine, are;
  Should your novels and tales have indifferent sales
      and your verses be hopelessly minor,
  Should the public refuse your attempts to peruse
      when you try to instruct or to shock it,
  While it adds to the spoils of its Barries and Doyles,
      and increases the hoards of a Crockett: 

  If you’re baffled, in short, by the fame that you court,
      and your name’s overlooked by the papers,—­
  There’s a road to success without toil or distress,
      or nocturnal consumption of tapers: 
  By adopting this plan you’re a prominent man,
      and no longer a painful aspirant: 
  You must come on the scene as a bold Philhellene,
      and a foe to the Turk and the Tyrant!

  You’ll orate to the crowd on the heritage proud
      which by Greece is bequeathed to the nations
  (You can gain in a week an acquaintance with Greek
      by a liberal use of translations),
  And the names that you quote with the aid of your “Grote”
      and a noble assumption of choler,
  Will attest that you feel that excusable zeal
      which belongs to an eminent scholar.

  You will prate before mobs of Lord Salisbury’s jobs
      and the villainous schemes of the Kaiser,
  Which will make them believe you’ve a plan up your sleeve
      if they’d only take you for adviser;
  You may cheerfully speak of assisting the Greek
      ’gainst the foes that his country environ: 
  ’Tis improbable quite you’ll be wanted to fight,
      and the phrase will remind them of Byron.

  If you can’t get a place in Society’s race,
      and you have to confess that you’re beaten,
  Yet I hope I have shown you may make yourself known
      by espousing the cause of the Cretan: 
  You will sell all your works by denouncing the Turks,
      and the public will hasten to read ’em,
  When in reverent tones you are mentioned as “Jones,
      the Defender and Champion of Freedom!”

L’AFFAIRE (CHAPTER ONE)

  It was a little Bordereau that lay upon the ground: 
  The Franco-Gallic Government that document it found,
  And straightway drew the inference, though how I do not know,
  Some Jew had sold to Germany this dreadful Bordereau.

  ’Tis all (they said) a Hebrew trick—–­a treasonable plan—­
  And, now we come to think of it, why Dreyfus is the man! 
  At any rate (they argued thus), it is for him to show
  That he is not the criminal who sold the Bordereau.