Goddess of mercy! oh impart
Thy kindness to the doctor's heart:
Bid him words of pardon say--
Cast the blood-stained scourge away.
In vain, in vain! he will not hear:
Mercy is a stranger there.
Justice, unrelenting dame,
First asserts her lawful claim.
This is aye her maxim true:
"They who sin must suffer too."
When of fun we've had our fill,
Justice then sends in her bill,
And as soon as we have read it,
Pay we must: she gives no credit.
There is some rather fine doggerel too, in which the doctor--the Dr.
Portman _Pendennis_--apostrophizes a monitor in whom he had believed,
but finds to have been as bad as the rest. _The Doctor_ (with voice
indicative of tears and indignation):
Oh, Simon Steady! Simon Steady, oh!
What would your father say to see you so?--
You whom I always trusted, whom I deemed
As really good and honest as you seemed.
Are you the leader of this lawless throng,
The chief of all that's dissolute and wrong?
_Then with awful emphasis_:
Bad is the drunkard, shameless is the youth
Who dares desert the sacred paths of truth;
But he who hides himself 'neath Virtue's pall,
The painted hypocrite, is worse than all!
In acting this play the manner of the real doctor (Mr. Gladstone's old
tutor, now dean of Peterborough) was often imitated to the life, which
of course brought down the house.
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