Offer their secret vows! thou plenteous Ceres
Of their Eleusis, hail!

SWINE

Eigh! eigh! eigh! eigh!

SWELLFOOT

Ha! what are ye,

Who, crowned with leaves devoted to the Furies, Cling round this sacred shrine?

SWINE

Aigh aigh aigh!

SWELLFOOT

What! ye

that are

The very beasts that, offered at her altar

With blood and groans, salt-cake, and fat, and

inwards,

Ever propitiate her reluctant will

When taxes are withheld?

SWINE

Ugh! ugh ugh!

SWELLFOOT

What! ye who grub

With filthy snouts my red potatoes up
In Allan's rushy bog? who eat the oats
Up, from my cavalry in the Hebrides?
Who swill the hog-wash soup my cooks digest
From bones, and rags, and scraps of shoe-leather,
Which should be given to cleaner Pigs than you?

SEMICHORUS II OF SWINE

If 'twere your kingly will

Us wretched Swine to kill,

What should we yield to thee?

SWELLFOOT

Why, skin and bones, and some few hairs for

mortar.

CHORUS OF SWINE

I have heard your Laureate sing

That pity was a royal thing;

Under your mighty ancestors we Pigs

Were blessed as nightingales on myrtle sprigs
Or grasshoppers that live on noonday dew,
And sung, old annals tell, as sweetly too;
But now our sties are fallen in, we catch

The murrain and the mange, the scab and itch;
Sometimes your royal dogs tear down our thatch,
And then we seek the shelter of a ditch;
Hog-wash or grains, or rutabaga, none
Has yet been ours since your reign begun.

FIRST SOW

My Pigs, 'tis in vain to tug.

SECOND SOW

I could almost eat my litter.

FIRST PIG

I suck, but no milk will come from the dug.

SECOND PIG

Our skin and our bones would be bitter.

BOARS

We fight for this rag of greasy rug,
Though a trough of wash would be fitter.

SEMICHORUS

Happier Swine were they than we,
Drowned in the Gadarean sea!

I wish that pity would drive out the devils
Which in your royal bosom hold their revels,
And sink us in the waves of thy compassion!
Alas, the Pigs are an unhappy nation!
Now if your Majesty would have our bristles

To bind your mortar with, or fill our colons With rich blood, or make brawn out of our gris

tles,

In policy - ask else your royal Solons You ought to give us hog-wash and clean straw, And sties well thatched; besides, it is the law!

SWELLFOOT

This is sedition, and rank blasphemy!

Ho! there, my guards!

Enter a GUARD

GUARD

Your sacred Majesty.

SWELLFOOT

Call in the Jews, Solomon the court Porkman,
Moses the Sow-gelder, and Zephaniah

The Hog-butcher.

GUARD

They are in waiting, Sire.

Enter SOLOMON, MOSES, and ZEPHANIAH

SWELLFOOT

Out with your knife, old Moses, and spay those Sows [The Pigs run about in consternation.

That load the earth with Pigs; cut close and deep.
Moral restraint I see has no effect,

Nor prostitution, nor our own example,
Starvation, typhus-fever, war, nor prison.

This was the art which the arch-priest of Famine
Hinted at in his charge to the Theban clergy.
Cut close and deep, good Moses.

MOSES

Let your Majesty

Keep the Boars quiet, else

SWELLFOOT

Zephaniah, cut

That fat Hog's throat, the brute seems overfed;
Seditious hunks! to whine for want of grains!

ZEPHANIAH

Your sacred Majesty, he has the dropsy.
We shall find pints of hydatids in's liver;
He has not half an inch of wholesome fat
Upon his carious ribs-

SWELLFOOT

"Tis all the same.

He'll serve instead of riot-money, when

Our murmuring troops bivouac in Thebes' streets;
And January winds, after a day

Of butchering, will make them relish carrion.
Now, Solomon, I'll sell you in a lump

The whole kit of them.

SOLOMON

Why, your Majesty,

I could not give

SWELLFOOT

Kill them out of the way —

That shall be price enough; and let me hear
Their everlasting grunts and whines no more !

[Exeunt, driving in the Swine.

Enter MAMMON, the Arch-Priest; and PURGANAX, Chief of the Council of Wizards

PURGANAX

The future looks as black as death; a cloud,
Dark as the frown of Hell, hangs over it.
The troops grow mutinous, the revenue fails,
There's something rotten in us; for the level
Of the state slopes, its very bases topple ;
The boldest turn their backs upon themselves!

MAMMON

Why, what's the matter, my dear fellow, now?
Do the troops mutiny?-decimate some regiments.

Does money fail?

come to mint
my

coin paper,