To The King's Bulldog

    Dear Brindle, -
    Possibly your name is not Brindle,
    But that is of no consequence;
    The great point, my dear Brindle, being
    That when his Majesty Edward VII.
    Landed at Flushing the other day
    He was accompanied
    By
    You.
    At least so I gather from the halfpenny papers,
    And I am free to admit
    That when I read the paragraph
    Descriptive of your landing at Flushing
    My bosom swelled with honest pride.
    I am not a doggy man myself,
    Dear Brindle,
    And no judge of points.
    Also,
    When I see a dog coming towards me
    I invariably
    Whisper
    "Bite,"
    And consequently
    My hair
    Is apt to stand on end
    Like quills upon the fretful porcupine
    At pretty well every canine approach.
    Bulldogs especially
    Affright me,
    So that I can well understand
    How the little foreign boy,
    Assembled at Flushing
    To scoff in his sleeve at the English King,
    Remained to flee as it were
    At the sight of you.
    That, in a nutshell,
    Is why my bosom swelled
    When I read the paragraph
    To which previous reference has been made.
    It was a picturesque circumstance, my dear Brindle.
    And may be taken
    As one more illustration
    Of his Majesty's determination
    (Pray excuse the rhyme)
    To do things as a king of England should.
    To have alighted at Flushing
    Accompanied by a Lion
    Would have been a little outré,
    And Unicorns, we know,
    Are not obtainable -
    What does his Majesty do?
    Why he takes, as he always has taken,
    The middle and dignified course:
    He disjects himself on Flushing
    With You by his side.
    Next to the Lion and the Unicorn
    The Bulldog may be reckoned
    The truest
    Exemplar and symbol
    Of our great nation.
    It is like this:
    The Bulldog is not too beautiful,
    Neither is our great nation;
    But he frightens people -
    So do we;
    He is tenacious
    And magnanimous -
    Which is just our game;
    He fears no foe in shining armour,
    Or any other sort of armour -
    That is precisely our case;
    And he is kept by Lord Charles Beresford,
    The Duke of Manchester,
    And Mr. G. R. Sims -
    Three eminently typical Britons.
    In short,
    The genius of the British nation,
    My dear Brindle,
    Is not a policeman
    But a Bulldog.