“

“Man’s a strange animal, and makes strange use
Of his own nature, and the various arts,
And likes particularly to produce
Some new experiment to show his parts;
This is the age of oddities let loose,
Where different talents find their different marts;
You’d best begin with truth, and when you’ve lost your
Labour, there’s a sure market for imposture.

What opposite discoveries we have seen!
(Signs of true genius, and of empty pockets.)
One makes new noses, one a guillotine,
One breaks your bones, one sets them in their sockets;
But vaccination certainly has been
A kind antithesis to Congreve’s rockets,
With which the Doctor paid off an old pox,
By borrowing a new one from an ox.

Bread has been made (indifferent) from potatoes;
And galvanism has set some corpses grinning,
But has not answer’d like the apparatus
Of the Humane Society’s beginning
By which men are unsuffocated gratis:
What wondrous new machines have late been spinning!
I said the small-pox has gone out of late;
Perhaps it may be follow’d by the great.

‘Tis said the great came from America;
Perhaps it may set out on its return,-
The population there so spreads, they say
‘Tis grown high time to thin it in its turn,
With war, or plague, or famine, any way,
So that civilization they may learn;
And which in ravage the more loathsome evil is-
Their real lues, or our pseudo-syphilis?…..

Man’s a phenomenon, one knows not what,
And wonderful beyond all wondrous measure’
‘Tis pity though, in this sublime world, that
Pleasure’s a sin, and sometimes sin’s a pleasure’…..”

Byron.

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