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National Portrait Gallery, London
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David Barton
Mar 1, 1995, 2:12:48 PM3/1/95
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A puffball with muddy puddles for eyes,
dead of an elarged scrotum: Gibbon
whose childhood was scarred by quacks,
stares past us now in a bluff brown coat,
as critical of Sallust as he was of Caesar.
A self-convert to popery, pried free
by patience and his father's purse strings,
he grew to be a gouty, marmorial bachelor
too cold-blooded in Rouseau's view
to father the future Madame de Stael.
I like Walton's oval portrait of the man;
gross and pigmy alike, he smirks slightly,
as if the orotund grace of her periods
would appear only when Roman subjects did.
"Another damned thick square book!
Always scribble, scribble, scribble!
Eh, Mr. Gibbon?" the Duke of Glocester
famously but falsely remakred. To judge
the past for what it has no part in passing on
is half the job. The other half is elegy.
dead of an elarged scrotum: Gibbon
whose childhood was scarred by quacks,
stares past us now in a bluff brown coat,
as critical of Sallust as he was of Caesar.
A self-convert to popery, pried free
by patience and his father's purse strings,
he grew to be a gouty, marmorial bachelor
too cold-blooded in Rouseau's view
to father the future Madame de Stael.
I like Walton's oval portrait of the man;
gross and pigmy alike, he smirks slightly,
as if the orotund grace of her periods
would appear only when Roman subjects did.
"Another damned thick square book!
Always scribble, scribble, scribble!
Eh, Mr. Gibbon?" the Duke of Glocester
famously but falsely remakred. To judge
the past for what it has no part in passing on
is half the job. The other half is elegy.
c and c
--
David Barton
Simon Hardy Butler
Mar 2, 1995, 2:32:37 AM3/2/95
to
Nice one, David. The ending is nasty! Good work. :-)
- Simon
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