from Canto XII

11

But whether all, or each, or none of these
    May be the hoarder’s principle of action,
The fool will call such mania a disease:—
     What is his own?—Go look at each transaction,
Wars, revels, loves—do these bring men more ease
     Than the mere plodding through each “vulgar fraction”?
Or do they benefit mankind? Lean Miser!
Let spendthrifts’ heirs enquire of yours—who’s wiser?

12

How beauteous are rouleaus! how charming chests,
     Containing ingots, bags of dollars, coins
(Not of old Victors, all whose heads and crests
     Weigh not the thin ore where their visage shines,
But) of fine unclipt gold, where dully rests
     Some likeness, which the glittering cirque confines,
Of modern, reigning, sterling, stupid stamp:—
Yes! ready money is Aladdin’s lamp.

13

“Love rules the camp, the court, the grove,”—”for Love
     Is Heaven, and Heaven is Love”:—so sings the bard;
Which it were rather difficult to prove,
     (A thing with poetry in general hard).
Perhaps there may be something in “the grove,”
     At least it rhymes to “Love”; but I’m prepared
To doubt (no less than Landlords of their rental)
If “courts” and “camps” be quite so sentimental.

14

But if Love don’t, Cash does, and Cash alone:
     Cash rules the grove, and fells it too besides;
Without cash, camps were thin, and courts were none;
     Without cash, Malthus tells you, “take no brides.”
So Cash rules Love the ruler, on his own
     High ground, as Virgin Cynthia sways the tides;
And as for “Heaven being Love,” why not say honey
Is wax? Heaven is not Love, ‘tis Matrimony.

15

Is not all love prohibited whatever,
     Excepting marriage? which is love no doubt
After a sort; but somehow people never
     With the same thought the two words have helped out:
Love may exist with marriage, and should ever,
     And marriage also may exist without;
But love sans banns is both a sin and shame,
And ought to go by quite another name.

16

Now, if the “court” and “camp” and “grove” be not
     Recruited all with constant married men,
Who never coveted their neighbour’s lot,
    I say that line’s a lapsus of the pen;—
Strange too in my “buon camerado” Scott,
     So celebrated for his morals, when
My Jeffrey held him up as an example
To me;—of which these morals are a sample.

17

Well, if I don’t succeed, I have succeeded,
     And that’s enough; succeeded in my youth,
The only time when much success is needed:
     And my success produced what I in sooth
Cared most about; it need not now be pleaded—
     Whate’er it was, ‘twas mine: I’ve paid, in truth,
Of late, the penalty of such success,
But have not learned to wish it any less.

18

That suit in Chancery,—which some persons plead
     In an appeal to the unborn, whom they,
In the faith of their procreative creed,
     Baptize Posterity, or future clay,—
To me seems but a dubious kind of reed
     To lean on for support in any way;
Since odds are that Posterity will know
No more of them, than they of her, I trow.

19

Why, I’m Posterity—and so are you;
     And whom do we remember? Not a hundred.
Were every memory written down all true,
     The tenth or twentieth name would be but blundered:
Even Plutarch’s lives have but picked out a few,
    And ‘gainst those few your annalists have thundered;
And Mitford in the nineteenth century
Gives, with Greek truth, the good old Greek the lie.

20

Good People all, of every degree,
    Ye gentle readers and ungentle writers,
In this twelfth Canto ‘tis my wish to be
    As serious as if I had for inditers
Malthus and Wilberforce:—the last set free
     The Negroes, and is worth a million fighters;
While Wellington has but enslaved the whites,
And Malthus does the thing ‘gainst which he writes.