SMOKE IS THE FOOD OF LOVERS.

When Cupid open'd Shop, the Trade he chose
Was just the very one you might suppose.
Love keep a shop?--his trade, Oh! quickly name!
A Dealer in tobacco--Fie for shame!
No less than true, and set aside all joke,
From oldest time he ever dealt in Smoke;
Than Smoke, no other thing he sold, or made;
Smoke all the substance of his stock in trade;
His Capital all Smoke, Smoke all his store,
'Twas nothing else; but Lovers ask no more--
And thousands enter daily at his door!
Hence it was ever, and it e'er will be
The trade most suited to his faculty:--
Fed by the vapours of their heart's desire,
No other food his Votaries require;
For, that they seek--The Favour of the Fair,
Is unsubstantial as the Smoke and air.


From these rhymes, with their home-spun philosophy, one might assume
Cats to have been merely a witty peasant. But he was a man of the
highest culture, a great jurist, twice ambassador to England, where
Charles I. laid his sword on his shoulder and bade him rise Sir Jacob,
a traveller and the friend of the best intellects. From an interesting
article on Dutch poetry in an old _Foreign Quarterly Review_ I take
an account of the aphorist: "Vondel had for his contemporary a man,
of whose popularity we can hardly give an idea, unless we say that
to speak Dutch and to have learnt Cats by heart, are almost the same