Ancestral Enormities

by Egomet Bonmot

[We believe we owe to Mr. Bonmot's goodness the following pretty poem, with its excellent introduction.]

ANCESTRAL ENORMITIES.

(Taken, with liberties, from the French.)

The French people, it has been lately said by one of their own writers, have much less affection for liberty than for equality. The restless vanity of individuals, running through all classes, has rendered varieties of rank quite unpopular in France. Each person feels his neighbour's distinction to be an indignity to himself. Such a sentiment, directed against the degrees of society, is by no means a magnanimous one. The loftiest sense of independence induces a man to recognise implicitly the forms of social distinctions as matters of course, important in a public view, and indifferent in a personal one. Every high mind must be made aware, by its own consciousness, that no essential difference in worth or respectability is denoted by the various styles in which individuals are addressed; but a certain weak impatience is often found pushing people to a childish resistance against these forms; and this resistance denotes, more than anything else, a feverish sensibility to their import. They who are most anxious to state what little store they set by dukes and lords, are precisely such as would set the most store by their titles, had the accident of birth bestowed them. Such persons, if closely watched, will be generally found, at one time or other, to make awkward allusions to their familiarity with knights, baronets, and barons, and to plume themselves on titled friendships. At the same time, in such a country as France, where the Bourgeois classes, until of late years, were really felt to be degraded, attempts to show that worth alone makes the man, were to be considered both useful and spirited. Nor do we know that it can, in any country, be regarded as unfair, to bring to the recollection of the privileged orders, that intellect has nothing necessarily to do with patents of nobility—although there are many brilliant examples, living ones and others, proving that such patents, and the highest intellectual honours, may be united. The following verses, however, are to be considered as bearing, in in every way, a foreign character, rather than a British one.

Three thousand years, if I count right,
Have heard the critics Homer cite,
   (His poem's good 'tis true;)

But what can hide the Poet's shame,—
No one can tell from whence he came—
   The son of Lord-knows-who!

Virgil, who sang of war and farming,
His case is nearly as alarming,
   Though Cesar spoke him well:
Much did the thoughtless Muse mistake her,
Who chose the issue of a baker
   Such wond'rous tales to tell.

Alas! who into hist'ry pushes
Will find perpetual cause for blushes—
   There's Athens—shocking place!
Demosthenes declaim'd with pith,
But he was gotten by a smith,
   To Attica's disgrace.

I'm really puzzled to proceed;—
To write what 'tis n't fit to read
   All decent pens refuse:
There's Socrates, so wise and pure,
Was born of an old accoucheur,—
   I should say accoucheuse.

So with the ancients let's have done,
Who, every man and mother's son,
   Were but of yesterday;
One more—that Esop—was there ever!—
A slave write fables—I shall never!—
   'Tis now high time to stay!

But with the moderns shall we gain?
Faith, that's a case that's not quite plain;
   Piron's papa sold drugs;
A mere upholsterer got Moliere,
And Rollin was a cutler's heir,
   And What's-his-name made jugs.

Rousseau—(not Jacques, but Jean Baptiste)
Whose odes to read are quite a feast—
   His ancestor made shoes;

And is not Jaques himself as bad,
Who took a watchmaker for dad,
   Our patience to abuse?

At home, if curious to know
The parent-stocks of So-and-so,
   We'll find the bad turn'd worse;
Milton, for all his epic fire,
Claims but a scriv'ner for his sire—
   And he to write blank verse!

Some folks affirm the proof is full,
That Shakspeare senior dealt in wool—
   Let's hope it is the case:
For, though one scorns in fleece to deal,
Were he a butcher^[1] all must feel
   'Twould his poor son disgrace.

I'm glad to find there is a doubt
From what trunk Chaucer was a sprout;—
   A noble one some say:
But whispers go, that Chaucer's father
A vintner was—or cobler rather—
   Hence his French name—Chaucier.

In short, the man of generous mind
Who views the world, must loathe his kind;
   Such facts his feelings hurting:
The elder Pope, whose boy wrote satires,
Kept a cheap warehouse next a hatter's,
   Where he sold Irish shirting!

Nought then remains, but hope—which still
Lurks, as of old, behind each ill,
   Close to the box's bottom:
And, after all, the hazard runs,
That, though they're all their mothers' sons,
   Their fathers mayn't have got 'em!

1. Some give it for the wool-merchant, others for the butcher.