To The King's Bulldog
By Thomas William Hodgson Crosland
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 outr,
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.