nds by,
With a knowing wink in his funny old eye.
He grasps by the top an immense fool's cap,
Which he calls a philosophaster-trap:
And rightly enough, for while these little men
Croak loud as a concert of frogs in a fen,
He first singles out one, and then another,
Down goes the cap--lo! a moment's pother,
A spirit like that which a rushlight utters
As just at the last it kicks and gutters:
When the cruel smotherer is raised again
Only snuff, and but little of that, will remain.

But though _uno avulso_ thus comes every day
_Non deficit alter_ is also in play:
For the vacant parts are, one and all,
Soon taken by puppets just as small;
Who chirp, chirp, chirp, with a grasshopper's glee,
We're the lamps of the Universe, We! We! We!
But Time, whose speech is never long,--
He hasn't time for it--stops the song
And says--Lilliput lamps! leave the twopenny boxes,
And shine in the Budget of Paradoxes!

When a paradoxer parades capital letters and diagrams which are as good as
Newton's to all who know nothing about it, some persons wonder why science
does not rise and triturate the whole thing. This is why: all who are fit
to read the refutation are satisfied already, and can, if they please,
detect the paradoxer for themselves. Those who are not fit to do this would
not know the difference between the true answer and the new capitals and
diagrams on which the delighted paradoxer would declare {355} that he had
crumbled the philosophers, and not they him. Trust him for having the last
word: and what matters it whether he crow the unanswerable sooner or later?
There are but two courses to take. One is to wait until he has committed
himself in something which all can understand, as Mr. Reddie has done in
his fancy about the Astronomer Royal's change of opinion: he can then be
put in his true place. The other is to construct a Budget of Paradoxes,
that the world may see how the thing is always going on, and that the
picture I have concocted by cribbing and spoiling a bit of poetry is drawn
from life. He who wonders at there being no answer has seen one or two: he
does not know that there are always fifty with equal claims, each of whom
regards his being ranked with the rest as forty-nine distinct and several
slanders upon himself, the great Mully Ully Gue. And the fifty would soon
be five hundred if any notice were taken of them. They call mankind to
witness that science _will not_