Oh, would that this were all! The oracle!

MAMMON.

Why it was I who spoke that oracle,
And whether I was dead drunk or inspired,
I cannot well remember; nor, in truth,
The oracle itself!

PURGANAX.

The words went thus:"Baotia, choose reform or civil war! When through the streets, instead of hare with dogs, A Consort Queen shall hunt a King with hogs, Riding on the Ionian Minotaur."

MAMMON.

Now if the oracle had ne'er foretold
This sad alternative, it must arrive,
Or not, and so it must now that it has;
And whether I was urged by grace divine,
Or Lesbian liquor to declare these words,
Which must, as all words must, be false or true;
It matters not; for the same power made all,
Oracle, wine, and me and you or none-
"Tis the same thing. If you knew as much
Of oracles as I do-

PURGANAX.

You arch-priests Believe in nothing: if you were to dream Of a particular number in the lottery, You would not buy the ticket!

MAMMON.

Yet our tickets Are seldom blanks. But what steps have you taken? For prophecies, when once they get abroad, Like liars who tell the truth to serve their ends, Or hypocrites, who, from assuming virtue, Do the same actions that the virtuous do, Contrive their fulfilment. This IonaWell you know what the chaste Pasiphae did, Wife to that most religious King of Crete, And still how popular the tale is here;

And these dull swine of Thebes boast their descent
From the free Minotaur. You know they still
Call themselves bulls, though thus degenerate;
And every thing relating to a bull

Is popular and respectable in Thebes:
Their arms are seven bulls in a field gules.
They think their strength consists in eating beef,-
Now there were danger in the precedent
If Queen Iona

PURGANAX.

I have taken good care

That shall not be. I struck the crust o' the earth
With this enchanted rod, and hell lay bare!
And from a cavern full of ugly shapes,

I chose a LEECH, a GADFLY, and a RAT.
The gadfly was the same which Juno sent
That the Lord whistled for out of the mountains
To agitate Io, and which Ezechielt mentions

The Prometheus Bound of Eschylus.

And the Lord whistled for the gadfly out Ethiopia, and for the bee of Egypt, &c.-EZECHIEL.

Of utmost Ethiopia, to torment
Mesopotamian Babylon. The beast

Has a loud trumpet like the Scarabee;
His crooked tail is barbed with many stings,
Each able to make a thousand wounds, and each
Immedicable; from his convex eyes

He sees fair things in many hideous shapes,
And trumpets all his falsehood to the world.
Like other beetles he is fed on dung-
He has eleven feet with which he crawls,
Trailing a blistering slime; and this foul beast
Has tracked Iona from the Theban limits,
From isle to isle, from city unto city,
Urging her flight from the far Chersonese
To fabulous Solyma, and the Ætnean Isle,
Ortygia, Melite, and Calypso's Rock,
And the swart tribes of Garamant and Fez,
Eolia and Elysium, and thy shores,
Parthenope, which now, alas! are free!
And through the fortunate Satunnian land,
Into the darkness of the West.

A high connexion, Purganax. The bridegroom
Is of a very ancient family

Of Hounslow Heath, Tyburn, and the New Drop,
And has great influence in both Houses-Oh!
He makes the fondest husband; nay too fond :-
New-married people should not kiss in public;-
But the poor souls love one another so!
And then my little grandchildren, the Gibbets,
Promising children as you ever saw,—
The young playing at hanging, the elder learning
How to hold radicals. They are well taught too,
For every Gibbet says its catechism,

And reads a select chapter in the Bible
Before he goes to play.

[A most tremendous humming is heard.

With canting and quirking,

She could not be deader than she will be soon;I have driven her close to you, under the moon. Night and day, hum! hum! ha!

I have hummed her and drummed her

From place to place, till at last I have dumbed her. Hum! hum! hum!

A jury of the pigs.

SWELLFOOT.

Pack them then.

PURGANAX.

Or fattening some few in two separate sties,
And giving them clean straw, tying some bits
Of ribbon round their legs-giving their sows
Some tawdry lace, and bits of lustre glass,
And their young boars white and red rags, and tails
Of cows, and jay feathers, and sticking cauliflowers
Between the ears of the old ones; and when
They are persuaded, that by the inherent virtue
Of these things, they are all imperial pigs,
Good Lord! they'd rip each other's bellies up,
Not to say help us in destroying her.

SWELLFOOT.

This plan might be tried too;-where's General Laoctonos?

Enter LAOCTONOS and DAKRY.

It is my royal pleasure

That you, Lord General, bring the head and body,
If separate it would please me better, hither
Of Queen Iona.

LAOCTONOS.

That pleasure I well knew,

And made a charge with those battalions bold,
Called, from their dress and grin, the royal apes,
Upon the swine, who in a hollow square
Enclosed her, and received the first attack
Like so many rhinoceroses, and then
Retreating in good order, with bare tusks
And wrinkled snouts presented to the foe,
Bore her in triumph to the public sty.

What is still worse, some sows upon the ground
Have given the ape-guards apples, nuts, and gin,
And they all whisk their tails aloft, and cry,
"Long live Iona! down with Swellfoot!"

PURGANAX.

And spell some scheme to make it ugly then.

Enter SWELLFOOT. SWELLFOOT.

She is returned! Taurina is in Thebes
When Swellfoot wishes that she were in hell!
Oh, Hymen! clothed in yellow jealousy,
And waving o'er the couch of wedded kings
The torch of Discord with its fiery hair!
This is thy work, thou patron saint of queens!
Swellfoot is wived! though parted by the sea,
The very name of wife had conjugal rights;
Her cursed image ate, drank, slept with me,
And in the arms of Adiposa oft
Her memory has received a husband's-

[A loud tumult, and cries of “Iona for ever!--No
Swellfoot!"
SWELLFOOT.

How the swine cry Iona Taurina!

Hark!

THE SWINE (without.)

Long live Iona! down with Swellfoot!

DAKRY.

I

Hark!

Went to the garret of the swineherd's tower,
Which overlooks the sty, and made a long
Harangue (all words) to the assembled swine,
Of delicacy, mercy, judgment, law,
Morals, and precedents, and purity,
Adultery, destitution, and divorce,
Piety, faith, and state necessity,

And how I loved the queen!--and then I wept,
With the pathos of my own eloquence,
And every tear turned to a millstone, which
Brained many a gaping pig, and there was made
A slough of blood and brains upon the place,

Greased with the pounded bacon; round and round
The millstones rolled, ploughing the pavement up,
And hurling sucking pigs into the air,
With dust and stones.

Enter MAMMON.

MAMMON.

I wonder that gray wizards
Like you should be so beardless in their schemes;
It had been but a point of policy
To keep Iona and the swine apart.

Divide and rule! but ye have made a junction
Between two parties who will govern you,
But for my art.-Behold this BAG! it is
The poison BAG of that Green Spider huge,
On which our spies skulked in ovation through
The streets of Thebes, when they were paved with
dead:

A bane so much the deadlier fills it now,
As calumny is worse than death,-for here
The Gadfly's venom, fifty times distilled,
Is mingled with the vomit of the Leech,
In due proportion, and black ratsbane, which
That very Rat, who, like the Pontic tyrant,
Nurtures himself on poison, dare not touch;-
All is sealed up with the broad seal of Fraud,
Who is the Devil's Lord High Chancellor,
And over it the primate of all Hell

Murmured this pious baptism :-Be thou called
The GREEN BAG: and this power and grace be thine:
That thy contents, on whomsoever poured,
Turn innocence to guilt, and gentlest looks
To savage, foul, and fierce deformity.
Let all, baptized by thy infernal dew,
Be called adulterer, drunkard, liar, wretch!
No name left out which orthodoxy loves,
Court Journal or legitimate Review!—

Be they called tyrant, beast, fool, glutton, lover
Of other wives and husbands than their own-
The heaviest sin on this side of the Alps!
Wither they to a ghastly caricature
Of what was human!-let not man nor beast
Behold their face with unaverted eyes!
Or hear their names with ears that tingle not
With blood of indignation, rage and shame!"
This is a perilous liquor;-good my Lords.

[SWELLFOOT approaches to touch the GREEN BAG.

Now, with a little common sense, my Lords,
Only undoing all that has been done,
(Yet so as it may seem we but confirm it,)
Our victory is assured. We must entice
Her Majesty from the sty, and make the pigs
Believe that the contents of the GREEN BAG
Are the true test of guilt or innocence.
And that, if she be guilty, 'twill transform her
To manifest deformity like guilt.

If innocent, she will become transfigured
Into an angel, such as they say she is;
And they will see her flying through the air,
So bright that she will dim the noonday sun;
Showering down blessings in the shape of comfits.
This, trust a priest, is just the sort of thing
Swine will believe. I'll wager you will see them
Climbing upon the thatch of their low sties;
With pieces of smoked glass, to watch her sail
Among the clouds, and some will hold the flaps
Of one another's ears between their teeth,
To catch the coming hail of comfits in.
You, Purganax, who have the gift o' the gab,
Make them a solemn speech to this effect:
I go to put in readiness the feast
Kept to the honour of our goddess Famine,
Where, for more glory, let the ceremony
Take place of the uglification of the Queen.

DAKRY (TO SWELLFOOT.)

I, as the keeper of your sacred conscience,
Humbly remind your Majesty that the care
Of your high office, as man-milliner
To red Bellona, should not be deferred.

PURGANAX.

All part, in happier plight to meet again.

[Exeunt.

SCENE I.

The Public Sty.

The Boars in full Assembly. Enter PURGANAX.

PURGANAX.

Grant me your patience, Gentlemen and Boars,
Ye, by whose patience under public burdens
The glorious constitution of these sties
Subsists, and shall subsist. The lean pig-rates
Grow with the growing populace of swine,

The taxes, that true source of piggishness,
(How can I find a more appropriate term
To include religion, morals, peace, and plenty,
And all that fits Boeotia as a nation
To teach the other nations how to live!)
Increase with piggishness itself; and still
Does the revenue, that great spring of all
The patronage, and pensions, and by-payments,
Which freeborn pigs regard with jealous eyes,
Diminish, till at length, by glorious steps,
All the land's produce will be merged in taxes,
And the revenue will amount to—nothing!

The failure of a foreign market for
Sausages, bristles, and blood-puddings,
And but such home manufactures, is but partial;
And, that the population of the pigs,
Instead of hog-wash has been fed on straw
And water, is a fact which is-you know-
That is it is a state necessity--

Temporary, of course. Those impious pigs,
Who, by frequent squeaks, have dared impugn
The settled Swellfoot system, or to make
Irreverent mockery of the genuflexions
Inculcated by the arch-priest, have been whipt
Into a loyal and an orthodox whine.

Things being in this happy state, the Queen
Iona-

[A loud cry from the Pigs. She is innocent! most innocent!

PURGANAX.

That is the very thing that I was saying,
Gentlemen Swine; the Queen Iona being
Most innocent, no doubt, returns to Thebes,
And the lean sows and boars collect about her,
Wishing to make her think that we believe
(I mean those more substantial pigs, who swill
Rich hog-wash, while the others mouth damp
straw,)

That she is guilty; thus, the lean-pig faction
Seeks to obtain that hog-wash, which has been
Your immemorial right, and which I will
Maintain you in to the last drop of—

A BOAR (interrupting him.)

What

Does any one accuse her of?

PURGANAX.

Why, no one

Makes any positive accusation;-but

In piggish souls can prepossessions reign?
Allow me to remind you, grass is green-
All flesh is grass;-no bacon but is flesh-
Ye are but bacon. This divining BAG
(Which is not green, but only bacon colour)
Is filled with liquor, which if sprinkled o'er
A woman guilty of-we all know what-
Makes her so hideous, till she finds one blind,
She never can commit the like again.
If innocent, she will turn into an angel,
And rain down blessings in the shape of comfits
As she flies up to heaven. Now, my proposal
Is to convert her sacred Majesty
Into an angel, (as I am sure we shall do,)
By pouring on her head this mystic water.
[Showing the Bag.
I know that she is innocent; I wish
Only to prove her so to all the world.

FIRST BOAR.

Conceived that it became them to advise
His majesty to investigate their truth;—
Not for his own sake! he could be content

To let his wife play any pranks she pleased,
If, by that sufferance, he could please the pigs;
But then he fears the morals of the swine,
The sows especially, and what effect

It might produce upon the purity and
Religion of the rising generation

Of sucking-pigs, if it could be suspected
That Queen Iona-

[A pause.

SECOND BOAR.

How glorious it will be to see her Majesty Flying above our heads, her petticoats Streaming like-like-like

THIRD BOAR.

Any thing.

PURGANAX.

Oh, no!

FIRST BOAR.

WeH, go on; we long

To hear what she can possibly have done.

PURGANAX.

Why, it is hinted, that a certain bull—

Thus much is known :-the milkwhite bulls that

feed

Beside Clitumnus and the crystal lakes
Of the Cisalpine mountains, in fresh dews
Of lotus-grass and blossoming asphodel,
Sleeking their silken hair, and with sweet breath
Loading the morning winds until they faint
With living fragrance, are so beautiful!—

But like a standard of an admiral's ship,
Or like the banner of a conquering host,
Or like a cloud dyed in the dying day,
Unravelled on the blast from a white mountain;
Or like a meteor, or a war-steed's mane,
Or water-fall from a dizzy precipice
Scattered upon the wind.

FIRST BOAR.

Or a cow's tail,

SECOND BOAR.

Or any thing, as the learned Boar observed.

PURGANAX.

Gentlemen Boars, I move a resolution, That her most sacred Majesty should be Invited to attend the feast of Famine,