Irish Jesuit Province

Clavis Acrostica. A Key to "Dublin Acrostics". No. 38Source: The Irish Monthly, Vol. 26, No. 304 (Oct., 1898), pp. 552-553Published by: Irish Jesuit ProvinceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20499347 .

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( 552 )

CLAVIS ACItOSTICA.

A KEY TO " I)UBIAN ACROSTICS."

No. 38.

"0," that is, the late Judge O'Hagan, is the author of the following very clever bit of playful verse:

Thus he said, but said it sotto

Foce (for he feared mamma),

" I have taken for my motto,

GlCsez mats n'appzcyez pas." Pleasant transitory fancies,

Pic-xnic, Croquet, Boat and Ball,

Interchange of hands atid glances,

Lips, perhaps-but that is all.

So his heart against the charmer

Deemed itself securely steeled.

Such resolves are feeble armour

When our fate is in the field.

Need I tell you how it ended?

How the fish was brought agrounld,

'Twas my first that he intended,

'Twas my second that he found.

1. Shriek ! I didn't; no one heard it,

Though a rhyming Scot averred it.

2. Home from carnage on the water

For a little private slaughter.

3. I've forgotten Wordsworth's poem, 'Tis from Walter Scott I know him.

4. I suspect that Hebrews covet, And I know that Christians love it.

5. Water in a trifling hurry,

Foam and Iris-Byron-Murray.

6. If he left her for another.

Pray does that make me her mother e

7. Not a hunter nor a racer,

What I want's a steady pacor.

8. On a two-fold board I flourish,

Now I smooth, and now I nourisb.

0.

Two words of eight letters each; evidently what was meant at first to be a mere bit of platonic flirting ended at last in marriage. The first of eight " lights " begins of course with f and ends with

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Clavis Acrostica. 553

m. The brilliant Acrostician chose the word Frceedorn and thought of the couplet in Thomas Campbell's Pleasures of Hope

IHope for a season bade the world farewell,

And Freedom shrieked as Kosciusko fell.

These lines were familiar as the commonest proverb to a school boy of taste in my young days; but I fear that the contemporary schoolboy has very little poetry of any kind off by heart. Campbell is not one of the supreme poets of the century, but some of his pieces are very good for storing up in a boy's memory to rhyme over in vacant moments as a substitute for whistling or worse. The second light is an allusion to another poem less familiar now than then-Lord Byron's Lara. Another literary allusion is to " Ivor "-familiar to the readers of Sir Walter Scott who was then read by everybody. The fourth light is less refined-a "r asher " and then Terni and Ita (an allusion to

Oenone and Tennyson's " Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die "). Finally nag, and goose, both the tailor's and the cook's.

A WRITER OF FICTION.

LORD) I have made my heart a market-place

Of venal thought to lure the crowd's desire;

Yea, I have laughed anid wept therein for hire, For pence have jo3 ed and sorrowed-O disgrace I

Compassionate, of old with angered face, With knotted lash, and word of blazing ire,

Thou dravest trafficker and foolish buyer

From forth Thy Temple's consecrated space.

Take now in hand a scourge of triple cord

Of Wisdom, Truth, and Reverence entwined;

Drive the intruders from my heart, 0 Lord!

Unto its noisy vestibule, the mind; There while they strut an hour for brief reward,

Stay Thou within my inmost heart enshrined!

J0HN HANNON,

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