XII
How beauteous are rouleaus! how charming chests
Containing ingots, bags of dollars, coins
(Not of old victors, all whose heads and crests
Weigh not the thin ore where their visage shines,937
But) of fine unclipped gold, where dully rests
Some likeness, which the glittering cirque confines,
Of modern, reigning, sterling, stupid stamp!—
Yes! ready money is Aladdin’s lamp.938
XIII
“Love rules the Camp, the Court, the Grove—for Love
Is Heaven, and Heaven is Love:”939—so sings the bard;
Which it were rather difficult to prove
(A thing with poetry in general hard).
Perhaps there may be something in “the Grove,”
At least it rhymes to “Love:” but I’m prepared
To doubt (no less than landlords of their rental)
If “Courts” and “Camps” be quite so sentimental.
XIV
But if Love don’t, Cash does, and Cash alone:
Cash rules the Grove, and fells it too besides;
Without cash, camps were thin, and courts were none;
Without cash, Malthus tells you—“take no brides.”940
So Cash rules Love the ruler, on his own
High ground, as virgin Cynthia sways the tides:
And as for “Heaven being Love,” why not say honey
Is wax? Heaven is not Love, ’tis Matrimony.
XV
Is not all Love prohibited whatever,
Excepting Marriage? which is Love, no doubt,
After a sort; but somehow people never
With the same thought the two words have helped out.
Love may exist with Marriage, and should ever,
And Marriage also may exist without;
But Love sans banns is both a sin and shame,
And ought to go by quite another name.
XVI
Now if the “Court,” and “Camp,” and “Grove,” be not
Recruited all with constant married men,
Who never coveted their neighbour’s lot,
I say that line’s a lapsus of the pen;—
Strange too in my buon camerado Scott,
So celebrated for his morals, when
My Jeffrey held him up as an example941
To me;—of whom these morals are a sample.942
XVII
Well, if I don’t succeed, I have succeeded,
And that’s enough; succeeded in my youth,
The only time when much success is needed:
And my success produced what I, in sooth,
Cared most about; it need not now be pleaded—
Whate’er it was, ’twas mine; I’ve paid, in truth,
Of late, the penalty of such success,
But have not learned to wish it any less.
XVIII
That suit in Chancery,943—which some persons plead
In an appeal to the unborn, whom they,
In the faith of their procreative creed,
Baptize Posterity, or future clay—
To me seems but a dubious kind of reed
To lean on for support in any way;
Since odds are that Posterity will know
No more of them, than they of her, I trow.
XIX944
Why, I’m Posterity—and so are you;
And whom do we remember? Not a hundred.
Were every memory written down all true,
The tenth or twentieth name would be but blundered;
Even Plutarch’s Lives have but picked out a few,
And ’gainst those few your annalists have thundered;
And Mitford945 in the nineteenth century
Gives, with Greek truth, the good old Greek the lie.
XX
Good people all, of every degree,
Ye gentle readers and ungentle writers,
In this twelfth Canto ’tis my wish to be
As serious as if I had for inditers
Malthus and Wilberforce:—the last set free
The Negroes, and is worth a million fighters;
While Wellington has but enslaved the Whites,
And Malthus946 does the thing ’gainst which he writes.
XXI
I’m serious—so are all men upon paper;
And why should I not form my speculation,
And hold up to the Sun my little taper?947
Mankind just now seem wrapped in meditation
On constitutions and steam-boats of vapour;
While sages write against all procreation,
Unless a man can calculate his means
Of feeding brats the moment his wife weans.
XXII
That’s noble! That’s romantic! For my part,
I think that “Philo-genitiveness” is—
(Now here’s a word quite after my own heart,
Though there’s a shorter a good deal than this,
If that politeness set it not apart;
But I’m resolved to say nought that’s amiss)—
I say, methinks that “Philo-genitiveness”948
Might meet from men a little more forgiveness.
XXIII
And now to business.—O my gentle Juan!
Thou art in London—in that pleasant place,
Where every kind of mischief’s daily brewing,
Which can await warm Youth in its wild race.
’Tis true, that thy career is not a new one;
Thou art no novice in the headlong chase
Of early life; but this is a new land,
Which foreigners can never understand.
XXIV
What with a small diversity of climate,
Of hot or cold, mercurial or sedate,
I could send forth my mandate like a Primate
Upon the rest of Europe’s social state;
But thou art the most difficult to rhyme at,
Great Britain, which the Muse may penetrate.
All countries have their “Lions,” but in thee
There is but one superb menagerie.
XXV
But I am sick of politics. Begin—
“Paulo Majora.” Juan, undecided
Amongst the paths of being “taken in,”
Above the ice had like a skater glided:949
When tired of play, he flirted without sin
With some of those fair creatures who have prided
Themselves on innocent tantalisation,950
And hate all vice except its reputation.
XXVI
But these are few, and in the end they make
Some devilish escapade or stir, which shows
That even the purest people may mistake
Their way through Virtue’s primrose paths of snows;
And then men stare, as if a new ass spake
To Balaam, and from tongue to ear o’erflows
Quicksilver small talk, ending (if you note it)
With the kind World’s Amen—“Who would have thought it?”
XXVII
The little Leila, with her Orient eyes,
And taciturn Asiatic disposition,
(Which saw all Western things with small surprise,
To the surprise of people of condition,
Who think that novelties are butterflies
To be pursued as food for inanition,)
Her charming figure and romantic history
Became a kind of fashionable mystery.
XXVIII
The women much divided—as is
