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Power’s best beloved, the law of libel
(A bright link in the legal chain)
Expounded, settled, and made plain,
By your own charge, the juror’s Bible,
Has clipped the venomed tongue of slander,
That dared to call you “Party’s gander,
The leader of the geese who make
Our city’s parks and ponds their home,
And keep her liberties awake
By cackling, as their sires saved Rome.
Gander of Party’s pond, wherein
Lizard, and toad, and terrapin,
Your ale-house patriots, are seen,
In Faction’s feverish sunshine basking:”
And now, to rend this veil of lies,
Word-woven by your enemies,
And keep your sainted memory free
From tarnish with posterity,
I take the liberty of asking
Permission, sir, to write your life,
With all its scenes of calm and strife,
And all its turnings and its windings,
A poem, in a quarto volume—
Verse, like the subject, blank and solemn,
With elegant appropriate bindings,
Of rat and mole skin the one half,
The other a part fox, part calf.
Your portrait, graven line for line,
From that immortal bust in plaster,