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“Behold, thou art fair, my love: behold, thou art fair; thou hast dove’s eyes within thy locks; thy hair is as a flock of goats that appear from Mt. Gilead. Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which came up from the washing; whereof every one bear twins, and none is barren among them. Thy lips are like a thread of scarlet, and thy speech is comely; thy temples are like a piece of pomegranate within thy locks. Thy neck is a tower of ivory; thine eyes like the fishpools of Heshbon, by the gate of Bath-rabbim; thy nose is as the tower of Lebanon looking towards Damascus.”

Really, we think that will do for one instalment. What the mischief this “poet” means, with his goat’s hair, sheep’s teeth, and temples like a piece of pomegranate, is quite beyond our mental reach. We would suggest that the ignorance of English grammar displayed in the phrase “every one bear twins,” is not atoned for by comparing his mistress’s eyes to a duck pond, and her nose to the “tower of Lebanon looking towards Damascus.” The latter simile is suggestive of unpleasant consequences to the inhabitants of that village in case the young lady should decide to blow that astounding feature! Our very young contributor will consider himself dismissed with such ignominy as is implied by our frantic indifference.

…. A liberal reward will be paid by the writer for a suitably vituperative epithet to be applied to the ordinary street preacher. The writer has himself laboured with so unflagging a zeal in the pursuit of the proper word, has expended the midnight oil with so lavish and matchless a prodigality, has kneaded his brain with such a singular forgetfulness of self-that he is gone clean daft. And all, without adequate result! From the profoundest deep of his teeming invention he succeeded in evolving only such utterly unsatisfying results as “rhinoceros,” “polypus,” and “sheeptick” in the animal kingdom, and “rhubarb,” “snakeroot,” and “smartweed” in the vegetable. The mineral world was ransacked, but gave forth only “old red sandstone,” which is tolerably severe, but had been previously used to stigmatize a member of the Academy of Sciences.

Now, what we wish to secure is a word that shall contain within itself all the essential principles of downright abuse; the mere pronouncing of which in the public street would subject one to the inconvenience of being rent asunder by an infuriated populace-something so atrociously apt and so exquisitely diabolical that any person to whom it should be applied would go right away out and kick himself to death with a jackass. We covenant that the inventor shall be slain the moment we are in possession of his infernal secret, as life would of course be a miserable burden to him ever afterward.

With a calm reliance upon the fertile scurrility of our readers, we leave the matter in their hands, commending their souls to the merciful God who contrived them.

…. We have received from a prominent clergyman a long letter of earnest remonstrance against what he is pleased to term our “unprovoked attacks upon God’s elect.”

We emphatically deny that we have ever made any unprovoked attacks upon them. “God’s elect” are always irritating us. They are eternally lying in wait with some monstrous absurdity, to spring it upon us at the very moment when we are least prepared. They take a fiendish delight in torturing us with tantrums, galling us with gammon, and pelting us with platitudes. Whenever we disguise ourself in the seemly toggery of the godly, and enter meekly into the tabernacle, hoping to pass unobserved, the parson is sure to detect us and explode a bombful of bosh upon our devoted head. No sooner do we pick up a religious weekly than we stumble and sprawl through a bewildering succession of inanities, manufactured expressly to ensnare our simple feet. If we take up a tract we are laid out cold by an apostolic knock straight from the clerical shoulder. We cannot walk out of a pleasant Sunday without being keeled Over by a stroke of pious lightning flashed from the tempestuous eye of an irate churchman at our secular attire. Should we cast our thoughtless glance upon the demure Methodist Rachel we are paralysed by a scowl of disapprobation, which prostrates like the shock of a gymnotus; and any of our mild pleasantry at the expense of young Squaretoes is cut short by a Bible rebuke, shot out of his mouth like a rock from a catapult.