COCKLE v. CACKLE.
THOSE who much read advertisements and bills,
Must have seen puffs of Cockle’s Pills,
Call’d Anti-bilious—
Which some Physicians sneer at, supercilious,
But which we are assured, if timely taken,
May save your liver and bacon;
Whether or not they really give one ease,
I, who have never tried,
Will not decide;
But no two things in union go like these—
Viz.—Quacks and Pills—save Ducks and Pease.
Now Mrs. W. was getting sallow,
Her lilies not of the white kind, but yellow,
And friends portended was preparing for
A human Pâté Périgord;
She was, indeed, so very far from well,
Her Son, in filial fear, procured a box
Of those said pellets to resist Bile’s shocks,
And—tho’ upon the ear it strangely knocks—
To save her by a Cockle from a shell!
But Mrs. W., just like Macbeth,
Who very vehemently bids us “throw
Bark to the Bow-wows,” hated physic so,
It seem’d to share “the bitterness of Death:”
[Pg 158]
Rhubarb—Magnesia—Jalap, and the kind—
Senna—Steel—Assa-fœtida, and Squills—
Powder or Draught—but least her throat inclined
To give a course to Boluses or Pills:
No—not to save her life, in lung or lobe,
For all her lights or all her liver’s sake,
Would her convulsive thorax undertake,
Only one little uncelestial globe!
’Tis not to wonder at, in such a case,
If she put by the pill-box in a place
For linen rather than for drugs intended—
Yet for the credit of the pills let’s say
After they thus were stow’d away,
Some of the linen mended;
But Mrs. W. by disease’s dint,
Kept getting still more yellow in her tint,
When lo! her second son, like elder brother,
Marking the hue on the parental gills,
Brought a new charge of Anti-tumeric Pills,
To bleach the jaundiced visage of his Mother—
Who took them—in her cupboard—like the other.
“Deeper and deeper, still,” of course,
The fatal colour daily grew in force;
Till daughter W. newly come from Rome,
Acting the self-same filial, pillial, part,
To cure Mamma, another dose brought home
Of Cockles;—not the Cockles of her heart!
These going where the others went before,
Of course she had a very pretty store;
[Pg 159]
And then—some hue of health her cheek adorning,
The Medicine so good must be,
They brought her dose on dose, which she
Gave to the upstairs cupboard, “night and morning.”
Till wanting room at last, for other stocks,
Out of the window one fine day she pitch’d
The pillage of each box, and quite enrich’d
The feed of Mister Burrell’s hens and cocks,—
A little Barber of a by-gone day,
Over the way
Whose stock in trade, to keep the least of shops,