SONG OF THE DEPARTING SPIRT 0,F TITHE.

BY TICE EDITOR OF CAPTAIN ROCK'S 3IEMOIRS.

" The parting Genius is with sighing sent."—Muacrif. [From the Metropolitan Magazine for September.]

It is o'er, it is o'er, my reign is o'er;

I hear a Voice, like that of yore,

Which over the earth its wailings spread, Crying aloud, " Great Pan is dead !"- Such Voice I hear, from shore to shore, From Dunfanaghy to Baltimore, And it said'', in sad, parsonic tone, " Great Tithe, and Small, are dead and gone!"

Even now, I behold your vanishing wings, Ye Tenths of all conceivable things, Which Adam first, as Doctors deem, Saw, in a sort of night-mare dream,* After the feast of fruit abhored First indigestion on record !— Ye decimate ducks, ye chosen chicks, Ye pigs which, even when Catholics, Or of Calvin's most select depraved,

In the Church must have your bacon saved;

Ye fields, where Labour counts his sheaves, And, whatsoever himself believes, Must bow to th' Established Church-belief, That the tenth is always a Protestant sheaf; Ye calves of which the Man of Heaven

• Takes Irish tithe, one calf in seven ;-1Ye tenths of rape, hemp, barley, flax, Eggs,S timber, milk, fish, and bee's-wax; All things, in short, since earth's creation, Doom'd by the Church's dispensation To suffer eternal decimation,—

Leaving the whole lay world, since then, Reduced to nine parts out of ten; Or—as we calculate thefts and arsons— Just ten per cent, the worse for Parsons!

Alas, and is all this wise device For the saving of souls thus gone in a trice ?— The whole pat down, in the simplest way, By the souls resolving not to pay ! And even the Papists, thankless race,

Who have had so much the easiest case,—

To pay for our sermons doom'd, 'tis true,

But not condemned to hear them, too,—

(Our holy business being, 'tis known, With the ears of their barley, not their own,) Even they object to let us pillage, By right divine, their tenth of tillage, And, horror of horrors, even decline To find us in sacramental wine ! § It is o'er, it is o'er, my reign is o'er; Ali never shall rosy Rector more, Like the shepherds of Israel, idly eat,

And make of his flock "a prey and meat." II No more shall be his the pastoral sport • Of suing his flock in the -Bishop's Court, Through various steps, Citation, Libel,— Scriptures all, but not the Bible,— Working the law's whole apparatus To get at a few pre-doom'd potatoes, And summoning all the powers of wig, To settle the fraction of a pig !Till, parson and all committed deep In the case of" Shepherds versus Sheep," The Law usurps the Gospel's place, And, on Sundays' meeting face to face, While plaintiff tills the preacher's station, Defendants form the congregation.

So lives he, Mammon's priest, not Heaven's,

For Tenths thus all at sixes and sevens, Seeking what parsons love no less Than tragic poets, a good distress. Instead of studying St. Augustin, Gregory Nyss., or old St. Justin, (Books fit only to hoard dust in,) His reverence stints his evening readings To learned Reports of Tithe Proceedings, Sippin"b the while that port so ruddy, Which forms his only ancient study,— Port so old, you'd swear it's tartar Was of the age of Justin Martyr ; And, had the Saint sipp'd such, no doubt His martyrdom would have been—to gout.

And is all then lost ?—Alas, too true !Ye Tenths beloved, adieu, adieu! My reign is o'er, my reign is o'er, Like Old Thumb's ghost, "I can no more."

a A reverend prebendary of Hereford, in an essay on the Revenues of the Church of England, has assigned the origin of Tithes to "some unrecorded revelation made to Adam." "The tenth calf is due to the parson of common right ; and if there are seven, he

shall have one."—Rees's Cyclopedia, Art. "Tithes."

3 Chaucer's Plowman complains of the parish rectors, that

"For the Whine' of a thick,

Or an apple, or an aye (egg), They make him swear upon a boke, Thus they foulest Christ's fay." § Among the specimens laid before Parliament of the sort of Church-rates levied upon Catholics in Ireland, was a charge of two pipes of port for sacramental wine. Ezekiel xxxiv. 8.—" Neither shall the shepherds feed themselves any more ; for I will deliver my Bock from their mouth, that they may not be meat for them."—v. 10.