e doctor, sometimes by the clergyman. T'other evening
the doctor and myself were sitting in the garden, smoking each a
meditative pipe. Dreamthorp lay below, with its old castle and its
lake, and its hundred wreaths of smoke floating upward into the sunset.
Where we sat, the voices of children playing in the street could hardly
reach us. Suddenly a step was heard on the gravel, and the next moment
the clergyman appeared, as it seemed to me, with a peculiar airiness of
aspect, and the light of a humourous satisfaction 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,