shots exchanged,
But every shot so told on the foe
The Greeks were obliged to draw it mild:
Diomedes--"A fix," Ulysses--"No go"
Declared it, the "king of men" cried like a child;
Whilst the Specials, no more than a fine black Tom
I keep to serenade Mary from
The tiles, where he lounges every night,
Knew nor cared what they did, and were perfectly right.

But the fact was thus: one Helenus,
A man much faster than any of us,
More fast than a gent at the top of a "bus,"
More fast than the coming of "Per col. sus."
Which Shakespeare says comes galloping,
(I take his word for anything)
This Helenus had a cure of souls--
He had cured the souls of several Greeks,
Achilles sole or heel,--the rolls
Of fame (not French) say Paris:--speaks
Anatomist Quain thereof. Who seeks
May read the story from z to a;
He has handled and argued it every way;--
A subject on which there's a good deal to say.
His work was ever the best, and still is,
Because of this note on the Tendo Achillis.

This Helenus was a man well bred,
He was _up_ in Electricity,
Fortification, Theology,
aesthetics and Pugilicity;
Celsus and Gregory he'd read;
Knew every "dodge" of _glove and fist;_
Was a capital curate, (I think I've said)
And Transcendental Anatomist:
_Well up_ in Materia Medica,
_Right up_ in Toxicology,
And Medical Jurisprudence, that sell!
And the _dead sell_ Physiology:
Knew what and how much of any potation
Would get him through any examination:
With credit not small, had passed the Hall
And the College----and they couldn't _pluck_ him at all.
He'd written on Rail-roads, delivered a lecture
Upon the Electric Telegraph,
Had played at single-stick with Hector,
And written a paper on half-and-half.

With those and other works of note
He was not at all a "_people's man_,"
Though public, for the works he wrote
Were not that sort the people can
Admire or read; they were Mathematic
The most part, some were Hydrostatic;
But Algebraic, in the main,
And full of a, b, c, and n--
And other letters which perplex--
The last was full of double x!
In fact, such stuff as one may easily
Imagine, didn't go down greasily,
Nor calculated to produce
Such heat as "cooks the public goose,"
And does it of so brown a hue
Men wonder while they relish too.

It therefore was that much alone
He stud