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301

III. [JOHNNY UNDER THE SEA]

OR CHI SEI TU?

Ten thousand thousand fathoms down
Beneath the sea he popped:
At last a coral cracked his crown,
And Johnny Raw was stopped.
Sir Proteus came, and picked him up,
With grim and ghastly smile;
And asked him to walk in and sup,
And fiddled all the while.
So up he got, and felt his head,
And feared his brain was diddled;
While still the ocean o'er him spread,
And still Sir Proteus fiddled.
And much surprised he was to be
Beneath the ocean's root;
Which then he found was one great tree,
Where grew odd fish for fruit.
302

And there were fish both young and old,
And fish both great and small;
And some of them had heads of gold,
And some no heads at all.
And now they came, where Neptune sate,
With beard like any Jew,
With all his Tritons round in state,
And all his Nereids too:
And when poor Johnny's bleeding sconce
The moody king did view,
He stoutly bellowed, all at once:
“Pray who the deuce are you?
“That thus dare stalk, and walk, and talk,
Beneath my tree, the sea, sir,
And break your head on coral bed,
Without the leave of me, sir?”
 
“Ten thousand thousand fathoms down he dropped;
Till in an ice-rift, 'mid the eternal snow,
Foul Arvalan is stopped.”

Southey's Curse of Kehama.

Sir Proteus, having fixed himself in the shape most peculiarly remote from taste and nature, that of a minstrel of the Scottish border, continues to act up to the full spirit of the character he has assumed, by fiddling with indefatigable pertinacity to the fall of the curtain.

For a particular description of the roots of the ocean, see Mr. Southey's Thalaba.

“Up starts the moody Elfin King,”
&c. &c. &c.

Lady of the Lake.

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