SWELLFOOT: 
What! ye that are
The very beasts that, offered at her altar 20
With blood and groans, salt-cake, and fat, and inwards,
Ever propitiate her reluctant will
When taxes are withheld?

SWINE: 
Ugh! ugh! ugh!

SWELLFOOT: 
What! ye who grub
With filthy snouts my red potatoes up
In Allan’s rushy bog?  Who eat the oats 25
Up, from my cavalry in the Hebrides? 
Who swill the hog-wash soup my cooks digest
From bones, and rags, and scraps of shoe-leather,
Which should be given to cleaner Pigs than you?

SWINE—­SEMICHORUS 1: 
The same, alas! the same; 30
Though only now the name
Of Pig remains to me.

SEMICHORUS 2: 
If ’twere your kingly will
Us wretched Swine to kill,
What should we yield to thee? 35

SWELLFOOT: 
Why, skin and bones, and some few hairs for mortar.

CHORUS OF SWINE: 
I have heard your Laureate sing,
That pity was a royal thing;
Under your mighty ancestors, we Pigs
Were bless’d as nightingales on myrtle sprigs, 40
Or grasshoppers that live on noonday dew,
And sung, old annals tell, as sweetly too;
But now our sties are fallen in, we catch
The murrain and the mange, the scab and itch;
Sometimes your royal dogs tear down our thatch, 45
And then we seek the shelter of a ditch;
Hog-wash or grains, or ruta-baga, none
Has yet been ours since your reign begun.

FIRST SOW: 
My Pigs, ’tis in vain to tug.

SECOND SOW: 
I could almost eat my litter. 50

FIRST PIG: 
I suck, but no milk will come from the dug.

SECOND PIG: 
Our skin and our bones would be bitter.

THE BOARS: 
We fight for this rag of greasy rug,
Though a trough of wash would be fitter.

SEMICHORUS: 
Happier Swine were they than we, 55
Drowned in the Gadarean sea—­
I wish that pity would drive out the devils,
Which in your royal bosom hold their revels,
And sink us in the waves of thy compassion! 
Alas! the Pigs are an unhappy nation! 60
Now if your Majesty would have our bristles
To bind your mortar with, or fill our colons
With rich blood, or make brawn out of our gristles,
In policy—­ask else your royal Solons—­
You ought to give us hog-wash and clean straw, 65
And sties well thatched; besides it is the law!

NOTE: 
59 thy edition 1820; your edition 1839.

SWELLFOOT: 
This is sedition, and rank blasphemy! 
Ho! there, my guards!

[ENTER A GUARD.]