On Dr. Cheyne, the Vegetarian
ELL me from whom, fat-headed Scot,
Thou didst thy system learn;
From Hippocrates thou hadst it not,
Nor Celsus, nor Pitcairn.
Suppose we own that milk is good,
And say the same of grass;
The one for babes is only food,
The other for an ass.
Doctor! our new prescription try
(A friend's advice forgive);
Eat grass, reduce thyself, and die ;
Thy patients then may live.
Y system, Doctor, is my own,
No tutor I pretend;—
My blunders hurt myself alone,
But yours your dearest friend.
Were you to milk and straw confined,
Thrice happy might you be;
Perhaps you might regain your mind,
And from your wit get free.
I can't your kind prescription try,
But heartily forgive;
'Tis nat 'ral you should bid me die,
That you yourself may live.
'HRO' long millenial years our world has swung, And gloomy Death, with iron hand and tongue
Man's grave has digged, and doleful requiem sung"Earth unto earth," "dust back again to dust." The evil man, the good, the wise, the just,
The tottering child of age, the babe at birth,
Must find alike their rest in Mother Earth.
Death reigns, not only in her caves of gloom and night, But thro' her open valleys, fair and bright,
For fount of endless youth not yet is found
Amid her rocks, or dells with flowers crowned.
Wise Eschylus, two thousand years agone,
Spoke the one truth this world has ever known:
"Death only of the Gods cares not for gifts;
For him no altar sacrifice uplifts,
Nor hymn of praise from mortal lips ascends,
Since sweet Persuasion ne 'er before him bends."
And Seneca, while speaking of the dead
In Christ's own century, sublimely said:
"There's no one but can snatch man's life away,
But none from man grim death can turn or stay;
A thousand gates stand open wide that way."
And so, the wail of pestilential woes
That in the early ages first arose,
Sweeps on in chorus pitiful and low,
Humanity's sad wail, as on its echoes go,
That man is not immortal here below!
Afar in Egypt, men's strong love essayed
Death's crumbling power to check, if not evade,
And by embalming arts, whose secret lay
Hid with the generations of their day,
They sought to hold the body from decay
Till back the spirit came in some far distant day;
While o'er their mummied forms with wondrous skill
They piled the caverened pyramids, which still
Hold fast the blackened visages of kings
Behind the symbol of expanded wings,
And other strange and hieroglyphic things
That hint of far off flights for those hence flown
Within the limitless and deep unknown.
Yet they, who with the surgeon's skillful knife
Opened the veins thro' which this fancied life
(Steeped in sweet spices, frankincense and wine)
Was well embalmed, fled from the temple's shrine
With curses hot pursued and showers of stone
For thus profaning Egypt's flesh and bone;
While down amid the lowest depths of caste,
These early surgeons of the world were past
The priestly superstitions of the time,
As often since in many another clime,
Held struggling Science then in iron fetters fast.
And so in later Greece the same stern rule
Still held its sway in every new-born school;
Though Homer, in his ancient battle-song,
Sings of the healer's deeds in war's wild throng,
And says in words we here may quote again,
'A HEALER'S WORTH A HUNDRED OTHER MEN;"
Yet brave Hippocrates, whose heart was fired
And with Humanity's own love inspired,
Though by the laws dissection of his kind
Was contraband, with penalties assigned,
Discounted Darwin and the Law's red tape
By keen dissection of th' ancestral ape,
And so began the myst 'ry to unfold,
Of bones and nerves and muscles manifold,
And soon he hazarded the amputation,
Set close the fracture and dislocation,
Ventured beneath the ribs with bloody blade,
And faltered not, though friends stood back dismayed
Cauteries, and cruel moxa with its brand.
And bandaging of wounds with gentle hand,
Were so by him in his dark age displayed,
That he the coming centuries shaped and swayed;
And so tonight, back on the stream of time,
We send a cheer for this Old Man Sublime.
And Rome for full six hundred years or more,
When her grand soldiers daily dripped with gore,
Found no one standing in her martial van
A healing helper of poor stricken man
Till Celsus rose, who, when the soldier bled,
Stripped off the battered helmet, bound up the bruiséd head, Tied up the ruptured arteries with skill,
And left a name the Ages cherish still.
But lo! the Christian Star ascends the sky,
The world's Great Healer to the world draws nigh,
Walks forth among the smitten ones of Earth,
And by His deeds discloses Heavenly birth.
He healed the lame, the halt, the blind,
And "cast out devils" from the shattered mind;
Bade trembling palsy from the limbs be gone,
Made straight the withered arm and shrunken bone,
And from foul Leprosy's infected cave
Forth drew the men accursed, and cleansing gave;
Then, reaching down the grave, all dark and cold,
He snatched his mouldering friend from Death's stronghold,
And Ages still stand awed at deed so bold.
His skill we see, but whence His mighty power
We know not yet, e 'en in Earth's latest hour;
Save that He seemed all Nature's laws to know,
And how to turn their currents' mystic flow
Along the burdened body's crippled form,
And lift the sick to health,
With all its joyous wealth,
The sleeping dead to life, all fresh and warm.
Himself, He humbly styled, "The Son of Man;"
Yet, King of Life was He, ere yet the world began.
Say, shall it ever be
This side the fathomless eternity,
That Nature's kingdom with her hidden laws
And all their power with every secret cause
And every undeveloped latent force,
In knowledge ample, from their buried source
Shall be revealed to scientific scan,
As once they were to His, this "Son of Man?"
But with His Star's approach, as by a spell,
From off the feet of Truth the fetters fell;
And onward, onward she was bade to go,
Walking divinely, all the wide world thro'.
And soon fair Science, creeping from her hold,
Grew daily more inquisitive and bold;
And though the early church still frowned the while,
And vain Astrology came with her smile,
Still did the healers" slowly press their way,
And gather wisdom with each new-born day,
Till Alchemy and all her magic arts
And martyr-relics from the Church's marts
And senseless nostrums vanished to the night,
As to the front came Science in her might.
And as the schools arise on Europe's plains,
Fair Science, calmly entering there, explains
To those who turn on her their wondering eyes
The secrets of her new-born mysteries.
Arabia trims her golden lamps to shine;
Then Spain, and France, and Italy conjoin
To throw their light far out upon the world,
And over land and over sea 'tis whirled,
Till grand old England's towers reflect its beams
And a new glory on her banner gleams.
Rudely at first the surgeon there appeared,
As we behold him sketched and high upreared
By poet-first in England's royal line-
Good Master Chaucer, full of wit and wine,
Who more than full five hundred years ago,
When poetry was in its vernal glow,
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