Pale crafty eyes beneath his ginger crop,
A fox’s snout with spectacles on top—
Eye to the keyhole, kneeling on the stair,
We often found this latter saint at prayer,
“For your own sake,” he’d tell you with a sigh
(He always did his kindness on the sly).
He paid mere friendship with his good advice
And swarmed with counsels as a cur with lice:
For his friends’ actions, with unerring snout,
He’d always fox his own low motives out,
And having found them, trot them out to view,
Saying it hurt him so much more than you!
Sober, astute, and modest in his mien,
Between extremes he always chose the mean,
For Epsom mounted quickly to his head
And he saw brown where other men see red.
Walking Locarno between friend and friend
He soured the quarrels he so loved to mend.
In him the ‘friend’ concealed the jealous ‘tante’
Who slandered women he could not supplant,
Whose faults he would invent and then reveal
On the pretext of trying to conceal.
He’d blurt a secret (none so sure as he)
By hiding it so hard that all could see.
He’d make men black in everybody’s eye—
Taking their part, so stoutly to deny
Things they had never done, nor none suspected …
Until his stout defence was interjected!
No dun with more reluctance or regret
Ever came knocking to present a debt,
Than he so mildly, sadly would reproach
A friend—or any painful subject broach.
His martyred look no mortal could resist
More than a gossamer to Dempsey’s fist,
It had the power to put you in the wrong
And suck excuses from a rawhide thong.
When of apologies your heart was poor
You always seemed to owe him more and more,
The star of Tartuffe by his own grew dim
And Pecksniff was a nincompoop to him!
He was the guy to censure or expunge
The folk on whom he’d condescend to sponge,
And when he ate you out of hearth and home,
On independence lecture you a tome.
A counter-jumper born of base degree
In all the world no greater snob than he,
Though he descended from some anglo-parson
Who had committed (something else than) arson,
And looked it—had you made his collar shunt
To tally with its owner, back-to-front!
So satisfied his smirk, so smug his snigger,
You’d take him for a deacon or a vicar;
His pale blue smile was full of deany dope
And in his hand a cake of Monkey Soap.
If we put up with him—’twas as a bug
In his own talent (an expensive rug),
But he abused its lovely silken floss,
One tiny insect spoiled the whole kaross:
The leather’s perished, moulted all the hair,
But the old bug is still established there!