Prologue

I never soused my lips in the Nag’s Spring; never, that I can remember, did I dream on the two-topped Parnasus, that I should thus come forth suddenly as a poet. The maidens of Mount Helicon, and the blanching waters of Pirene, I give up to the gentlemen round whose busts the clinging ivy twines; it is but as a half-member of the community that I bring my lay to the holy feast of the bards. Who made it so easy for the parrot to chirp his “good morrow”? Who taught the magpie to ape the language of man? It was that master of the arts, that dispenser of genius, the Belly, who has a rare skill in getting at words which are not his own. If only the enticing hope of money were to flash upon them, you would believe that raven poets and magpie poetesses were singing the pure nectar of the muses.