With those and other works of note
  He was not at all a “people’s man,”
  Though public, for the works he wrote
  Were not that sort the people can
  Admire or read; they were Mathematic
  The most part, some were Hydrostatic;
  But Algebraic, in the main,
  And full of a, b, c, and n—­
  And other letters which perplex—­
  The last was full of double x! 
  In fact, such stuff as one may easily
  Imagine, didn’t go down greasily,
  Nor calculated to produce
  Such heat as “cooks the public goose,”
  And does it of so brown a hue
  Men wonder while they relish too.

  It therefore was that much alone
  He studied; and a room is shown
  In a coffee-house, an upper room,
  Where none but hungry devils come,
  Wherein ’tis said, with animation
  He read “Vestiges of Creation.”

  Accordingly, a month about
  After he’d chalked up steak and stout
  For the last time, he gave the world
  A pamphlet, wherein he unfurled
  A tissue of facts which, soon as blown,
  Ran like wildfire through the town. 
  And, first of all, he plainly showed
  A capital error in the mode
  Of national defences, thus—­
  “The Greek one thousand miles from us,”
  Said he, (for nine hundred and ninety-nine
  The citadel stood above the brine
  In perpendicular height, allowing
  For slope of glacis, thereby showing
  An increase of a mile,) “’tis plain
  The force that shot and shell would gain,
  By gravitation, with their own,
  Would fire the ground by friction alone;
  Which, being once in fusion schooled
  Ere cool, as Fire-mist had cooled”
  Would gain a motion, which must soon,
  Just as the earth detached the moon
  And gave her locomotive birth,
  Detach some twenty miles of earth,
  And send it swinging in the air,
  The Devil only could tell where! 
  Then came the probability
  With what increased facility
  The Greeks, by this projectile power,
  Might land on Ilion’s highest tower,
  All safe and sound, in battle array,
  With howitzers prepared to play,
  And muskets to the muzzles rammed;—­
  Why, the town would be utterly smashed and jammed,
  And positively, as the phrase is
  Vernacular, be “sent to blazes”!

  In the second place, he then would ask,
  (And here he took several members to task,
  And wondered—­“he really must presume
  To wonder” a statesman like—­you know whom—­
  Who ever evinced the deepest sense
  Of a crying sin in any expense,
  Should so besotted be, and lost
  To the fact that now, at public cost,
  Powder was being day by day
  Wantonly wasted, blown away);—­
  Yes, he would ask, “with what intent
  But to perch the Greeks on a battlement
  From which they might o’erlook the town,
  The easier to batter it down,