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[begin page 108]
A PARODY ON “THE BURIAL OF SIR JOHN MOORE.”
“Not a drum was heard, nor a funeral note,
As his corse to the ramparts we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot,
O'er the grave where our hero we buried.”
—[Burial of Sir John Moore.
[begin page 109] Not a sound was heard, nor a funeral note,
As his carcass through town we hurried;
Not e'en an obituary we wrote,
In respect for the rascal we buried.
We buried him darkly, at dead of night—
The dirt with our pitchforks turning;
By the moonbeams' grim and ghastly light,
And our candles dimly burning.
No useless coffin confined his breast,
Nor in sheet nor in shirt we bound him;
But he lay like an Editor taking his rest,
With a Hannibal Journal around him.
Few and very shortⒶemendationwere the prayers we said,
And we felt not a pang of sorrow;
But we mused, as we gazed on the wretch now defunct—
Oh! where will he be to-morrow!
The “Iron Horse” will snort o'er his head,
And the notes of its whistle upbraid him;
But nothing he'll care if they let him sleep on,
In the grave where his nonsense hath laid him.
Slowly, but gladly we laid him down,
From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
We carved not a line, we raised not a stone,
To mark where we buried a tory.
The Burial of Sir Abner Gilstrap, Editor of the Bloomington “Republican”
☞ We have pondered long and well over the BloomingtonⒶemendationRepublican's mysterious rhymes in that paper of the 11th, but can't discover what the editor was driving at, or what he intended to mean, and don't suppose he knows himself. We could guess better at the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics than his verses. HoweverⒶemendation, we'll reply with a random shot of the same sort:
The Burial of Sir Abner Gilstrap, Editor of the Bloomington “Republican.”
A PARODY ON “THE BURIAL OF SIR JOHN MOORE.”
“Not a drum was heard, nor a funeral note,
As his corse to the ramparts we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot,
O'er the grave where our hero we buried.”
—[Burial of Sir John Moore.
[begin page 109] Not a sound was heard, nor a funeral note,
As his carcass through town we hurried;
Not e'en an obituary we wrote,
In respect for the rascal we buried.
We buried him darkly, at dead of night—
The dirt with our pitchforks turning;
By the moonbeams' grim and ghastly light,
And our candles dimly burning.
No useless coffin confined his breast,
Nor in sheet nor in shirt we bound him;
But he lay like an Editor taking his rest,
With a Hannibal Journal around him.
Few and very shortⒶemendationwere the prayers we said,
And we felt not a pang of sorrow;
But we mused, as we gazed on the wretch now defunct—
Oh! where will he be to-morrow!
The “Iron Horse” will snort o'er his head,
And the notes of its whistle upbraid him;
But nothing he'll care if they let him sleep on,
In the grave where his nonsense hath laid him.
Slowly, but gladly we laid him down,
From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
We carved not a line, we raised not a stone,
To mark where we buried a tory.
The first printing appeared in the Hannibal Daily Journal for 23 May 1853 (p. 3). This was followed three days later by a reprinting, evidently from the Daily's standing type, in the Hannibal Weekly Journal for 26 May 1853 (p. 2). Although collation disclosed no textual variants between the Daily and the Weekly printings, slight defects in inking do occur in the copies examined. The copy-text is therefore defined as embracing both printings, the only known copies of which are in MoHist, and the defects in inking are silently corrected whenever one printing is defective and the other is clear. Since the parody was part of Clemens' own “Our Assistant's Column,” he may well have typeset and proofread the sketch. There are no textual notes.