h, and Broad Church, and No Church, and especially
of the Romanizers amongst our Established clergy. Sundry religious
newspapers and other periodicals, whose names I will not blazon by
recording, have systematically attacked and slandered me from early
manhood to this hour, and have diligently kept up my notoriety or fame
(it was stupid enough of them from their point of view) by quips and
cranks, as well as by more serious onslaughts, about which I am very
pachydermatous, albeit there are pasted down in my archive-books all the
paragraphs that have reached me. But, even as in hydraulics, the harder
you screw the greater the force, so with my combative nature, the more I
am attacked the more obstinately I resist. Hence the multitude and
variety of my polemical lucubrations,--mostly of a fragmentary character
as Sibylline leaves: some, however, appear in my "Ballads and Poems"
(among them a famous "Down with foreign priestcraft," circulated by
thousands in the Midlands by an unknown enthusiast),--and Ridgeway of
Piccadilly has published in pamphlet form my "Fifty Protestant Ballads
and Directorium," which originally appeared in the _Daily News_, and
_The Rock_: I have certainly written as many more, and among these one
which I will here reproduce as now very scarce, and lately of some
national importance: seeing that it was sent by my friend Admiral
Bedford Pim to every member of the two Houses of Legislature on the
Bradlaugh occasion, and was stated to have turned the tide of battle in
that celebrated case.

_"So Help Me, God!"_

"'So help me, God!' my heart at every turn
Of life's wide wilderness implores Thee still
To give all good, to rescue from all ill,
And grant me grace Thy presence to discern.

"'So help me, God!' I would not move a yard
Without my hand in Thine to be my guide,
Thy love to bless, Thy bounty to provide,
Thy fostering wing spread over me to guard.

"'So help me, God!' the motto of my life,
In every varied phase of chance and change,
So that nought happens here of sad or strange
But 'peace' is written on each frown of strife.

"For Thou dost help the man that honoureth Thee!
Ay, and Thy Christian-Israel of this land
That hitherto hath recognised Thy hand,
How blest above the nations still are we!

"Yet now our Senate schemes to spurn aside
(On false pretence of liberal brotherhood)
The Hea