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9

ON DONNE'S POEM 'TO A FLEA'

Be proud as Spaniards! Leap for pride ye Fleas! Henceforth in Nature's mimic World grandees. In Phœbus' archives registered are ye, And this your patent of Nobility. No skip-Jacks now, nor civiller skip-Johns, Dread Anthropophagi! specks of living bronze, I hail you one and all, sans Pros or Cons, Descendants from a noble race of Dons. What tho' that great ancestral Flea be gone, Immortal with immortalising Donne, His earthly spots bleached off a Papist's gloze, In purgatory fire on Bardolph's nose.

1811.

Now first published from an MS.