was a purpose of irony even there in regard
to our vaunted freedom. With all your Magna Charta and your juries, what
are you but snobs! There is nothing so often misguided as general
indignation, and I think that in his judgment of outside things, in the
measure which he usually took of them, Thackeray was very frequently
misguided. A satirist by trade will learn to satirise everything, till
the light of the sun and the moon's loveliness will become evil and mean
to him. I think that he was mistaken in his views of things. But we have
to do with him as a writer, not as a political economist or a
politician. His indignation was all true, and the expression of it was
often perfect. The lines in which he addresses that Pallis Court, at
the end of Jacob Omnium's Hoss, are almost sublime.

O Pallis Court, you move
My pity most profound.
A most amusing sport
You thought it, I'll be bound,
To saddle hup a three-pound debt,
With two-and-twenty pound.

Good sport it is to you
To grind the honest poor,
To pay their just or unjust debts
With eight hundred per cent, for Lor;
Make haste and get your costes in,
They will not last much mor!

Come down from that tribewn,
Thou shameless and unjust;
Thou swindle, picking pockets in
The name of Truth august;
Come down, thou hoary Blasphemy,
For die thou shalt and must.

And go it, Jacob Homnium,
And ply your iron pen,
And rise up, Sir John Jervis,
And shut me up that den;
That sty for fattening lawyers in,
On the bones of honest men.

"Come down from that tribewn, thou shameless and unjust!" It is
impossible not to feel that he felt this as he wrote it.

There is a branch of his poetry which he calls,--or which at any rate is
now called, _Lyra Hybernica_, for which no doubt _The Groves of Blarney_
was his model. There have been many imitations since, of which perhaps
Barham's ballad on the coronation was the best, "When to Westminster the
Royal Spinster and the Duke of Leinster all in order did repair!"
Thackeray in some of his attempts has been equally droll and equally
graphic. That on _The Cristal Palace_,--not that at Sydenham, but its
forerunner, the palace of the Great Exhibition,--is very good, as the
following catalogue of its contents will show;

There's holy saints
And window paints,
By Maydiayval Pug