When rods are laid on school-boys' bums,
The more they frisk and skip:
The school-boys' top but louder hums
The more they use the whip.
Thus, a lean beast beneath a load
(A beast of Irish breed)
Will, in a tedious dirty road,
Outgo the prancing steed.
You knock him down and down in vain,
And lay him flat before ye,
For soon as he gets up again,
He'll strut, and cry, Victoria!
At every stroke of mine, he fell,
'Tis true he roar'd and cried;
But his impenetrable shell
Could feel no harm beside.
The tortoise thus, with motion slow,
Will clamber up a wall;
Yet, senseless to the hardest blow,
Gets nothing but a fall.
Dear Dan, then, why should you, or I,
Attack his pericrany?
And, since it is in vain to try,
We'll send him to Delany.
POSTSCRIPT
Lean Tom, when I saw him last week on his horse awry,
Threaten'd loudly to turn me to stone with his sorcery,
But, I think, little Dan, that in spite of what our foe says,
He will find I read Ovid and his Metamorphoses,
For omitting the first (where I make a comparison,
With a sort of allusion to Putland or Harrison)
Yet, by my description, you'll find he in short is
A pack and a garran, a top and a tortoise.
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