in his eye.  After the usual salutations, he took his seat beside us, lifted a pipe of the kind called “churchwarden” from the box on the ground, filled and lighted it, and for a little while we were silent all three.  The clergyman then drew an old magazine from his side pocket, opened it at a place where the leaf had been carefully turned down, and drew my attention to a short poem which had for its title, “Vanity Fair,” imprinted in German text.  This poem he desired me to read aloud.  Laying down my pipe carefully beside me, I complied with his request.  It ran thus; for as after my friends went it was left behind, I have written it down word for word:—­

  “The world-old Fair of Vanity
    Since Bunyan’s day has grown discreeter
  No more it flocks in crowds to see
    A blazing Paul or Peter.

  “Not that a single inch it swerves
    From hate of saint or love of sinner,
  But martyrs shock aesthetic nerves,
    And spoil the gout of dinner.

  “Raise but a shout, or flaunt a scarf,—­
    Its mobs are all agog and flying;
  They ’ll cram the levee of a dwarf,
    And leave a Haydon dying.

  “They live upon each newest thing,
    They fill their idle days with seeing;
  Fresh news of courtier and of king
    Sustains their empty being.

  “The statelier, from year to year,
    Maintain their comfortable stations
  At the wide windows that o’erpeer
    The public square of nations;

  “While through it heaves, with cheers and groans,
    Harsh drums of battle in the distance,
  Frightful with gallows, ropes, and thrones,
    The medley of existence;

  “Amongst them tongues are wagging much: 
    Hark to the philosophic sisters! 
  To his, whose keen satiric touch,
    Like the Medusa, blisters!

  “All things are made for talk,—­St. Paul;
    The pattern of an altar cushion;
  A Paris wild with carnival,
    Or red with revolution.

  “And much they knew, that sneering crew,
    Of things above the world and under: 
  They search’d the hoary deep; they knew
    The secret of the thunder;

  “The pure white arrow of the light
    They split into its colours seven;
  They weighed the sun; they dwelt, like night,
    Among the stars of heaven;

  “They ’ve found out life and death,—­the first
    Is known but to the upper classes;
  The second, pooh! ’t is at the worst
    A dissolution into gases.

  “And vice and virtue are akin,
    As black and white from Adam issue,—­
  One flesh, one blood, though sheeted in
    A different coloured tissue.

  “Their science groped from star to star;—­
    But then herself found nothing greater. 
  What wonder?—­in a Leyden jar
    They bottled the Creator.

  “Fires fluttered on their lightning-rod;
    They cleared the human mind from error;
  They emptied heaven of its God,
    And Tophet of its terror.