By Lambda Minus

A rumour and rumbling volcanic
Is heard in the Radical Press,
And Presidents tremble in panic
And Wardens their terrors confess:
How each with anxiety shivers,
The Dean with his fines and his gates,
The ruffian who ragged me in Divvers,
The pedant who ploughed me in Greats!

The doctrines degrading they taught, and
The Progress they nipped in the bud:
The things that they did when they oughtn’t
And failed to perform when they should:
The Questions prevented from burning,
The Movements forbidden to move,
Recoil on their centres of learning,
Their Parks and the System thereof!

Afar will Democracy chase it,
That gang of impenitent Dons
Who drowned the occasional Placet
By bawling their truculent Nons:
No idle and opulent College
Will feed that obstructionist clique,
Those scoffers at Practical Knowledge
Who vote for compulsory Greek.

And now when the Party of Labour,
Asserting its virtuous sway,
Annexes the wealth of its neighbour
In Labour’s traditional way,—
When purged of its various abuses
By Birrell’s beneficent rule,
This haunt of the obsolete Muses
Is changed to a charity school,—

When Fellows and bloated Professors
Their stipends are forced to disgorge,
(Obeying the fiat of Messrs.
Keir Hardie and Burns and Lloyd George)
Deprived by the wrath of the Nation
Of all their unmerited aids,
Perhaps to escape from starvation
They’ll take to respectable trades!

O wholly delectable vision!
I view with excusable glee
The fate of the shallow precisian
Who failed to appreciate Me;—
I fancy I see myself tossing
With blandly contemptuous mien
A penny for sweeping a crossing
To him who was formerly Dean!