The Palace of Humbug
Lays of Mystery,Imagination, and Humor
Number 1
I dreamt I dwelt in marble halls,And each damp thing that creeps and crawlsWent wobble-wobble on the walls.
Faint odours of departed cheese,Blown on the dank, unwholesome breeze,Awoke the never ending sneeze.
Strange pictures decked the arras drear,Strange characters of woe and fear,The humbugs of the social sphere.
One showed a vain and noisy prig,That shouted empty words and bigAt him that nodded in a wig.
And one, a dotard grim and gray,Who wasteth childhood's happy dayIn work more profitless than play.
Whose icy breast no pity warms,Whose little victims sit in swarms,And slowly sob on lower forms.
And one, a green thyme-honoured Bank,Where flowers are growing wild and rank,Like weeds that fringe a poisoned tank.
All birds of evil omen thereFlood with rich Notes the tainted air,The witless wanderer to snare.
The fatal Notes neglected fall,No creature heeds the treacherous call,For all those goodly Strawn Baits Pall.
The wandering phantom broke and fled,Straightway I saw within my headA vision of a ghostly bed,
Where lay two worn decrepit men,The fictions of a lawyer's pen,Who never more might breathe again.
The serving-man of Richard RoeWept, inarticulate with woe:She wept, that waiting on John Doe.
"Oh rouse", I urged, "the waning senseWith tales of tangled evidence,Of suit, demurrer, and defence."
"Vain", she replied, "such mockeries:For morbid fancies, such as these,No suits can suit, no plea can please."
And bending o'er that man of straw,She cried in grief and sudden awe,Not inappropriately, "Law!"
The well-remembered voice he knew,He smiled, he faintly muttered "Sue!"(Her very name was legal too.)
The night was fled, the dawn was nigh:A hurricane went raving by,And swept the Vision from mine eye.
Vanished that dim and ghostly bed,(The hangings, tape; the tape was red happy'Tis o'er, and Doe and Roe are dead!
Oh, yet my spirit inly crawls,What time it shudderingly recallsThat horrid dream of marble halls!
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