The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1839-09-27 00:00:00

V cettp.

THE PLEASURES OF FARMING.

(From the Manx Liberal.
Please read the pleasures of a farmer's life,
Arrang'd and clasted in this sage
.document
Dead sheep, daft bargains, a tea-drinking wife,
Dull markets, partial paymetit!, a long rent,
Debts, and a purse (but here begins a strife
'Tween my twa keepers, which shall most lament
Their owner's fortune,)—avell, I say a purse
Smit with consumption, weak, and getting worse.
Four or five horses leaning 'gainst their stalls ;
Eight calvers, high of hone and large of skin ;
Some twenty porkers, makint hideous squalls,
Through lack of murphies, pitifully thin:
With savage snouts they undermine the walls ;
Soon shall the half-rotten rooftree, tunable in,
And crack their rig-bones, pound their hams and flitches,
And put a finisher upea the wretches.
These are the outlines: but of each disaster
That haps the farmer, the particulars
Would puzzle a much abler poetaster,
So many evils take' him unawares;
So many, go he slow, or travel faster,
He can't get quit of. These malicious stars,
They seem to take the management of fortune,
Deem him, in -short, a subject to make sport on.
Ye happy few! ye owners of the soil!
Who feed upon the fat and drink the sweet,
Just look and see how your poor tenants toil,
And atter all have hardly bread to cat :
Let down your rents; " live and let lire the while,"
And we will be your servants, as 'tis meet ;
We'll gang and buy oursels new coats and breeks,
And never speak a word on politics.
And you, my friends, be " aisy." In old time
There filed philosophers, wise men, no doubt,
Who met both good and ill with a sublime
Indifference : " For since we can dispute
With fate, 'tie better cheerfully to chime
In with her freaks, than stubbornly stand out."
So said the school of Zeuo, so say I ;
It may be hard to practice, but we'll try.

THE IRISH CANADIAN BOARD.
(From the Standard.)
We have only had time to bestow a very cursory
glance at the parliamentary return of the sums of mo-
ney which have been paid to the Irish National Board
of Education, which has just fallen under our notice ;
but we have seen enough to satisfy us of the degree of
candour and good faith which is to be expected from
the commission. _ _

Notwithstanding the order of the House of Com-
mons, which direct: that an account of the number of
Protestant and Roman Catholic children respectively
educated out of the funds of the Irish National Board
of Education shall be supplied, the commissioners have
taken upon themselves the responsibility of withhold-
ing that information -; although it might easily have
been obtained by a letter of inquiry, addressed by them
to every school undtr their inspection. The object of
this Jesuitical omission cannot be mistaken. They are
naturally anxious to avoid furnishing data which would
enable the public to estimate as it deserves their rigid
and Catholic notions of fairness and impartiality. Their
cue is; of course, to keep out of view how very small
a proportion of the children belonging to the Esta-
bliished Church have been allowed to derive the slight-
est benefit from the system of national education now
adopted by the government in Ireland. They know
well enough that the suppression of truth is often as
serviceable to their cause, as the bolder and more manly
expedient of " enormous lying ;" perhaps even more
propitious to their interests than the assertion of the
Chronicle, this morning, in an article on the subject of
the pro-Popery scheme of education, that the conser-
vatives of Great Britain meant national education to
be " like the Protestant religion, mere humbug !" We
have certainly arrived at an extraordinary era in the
history of the Protestant Church, when the govern-
ment can only he retained in office by Popish votes,
which they art constrained to pay for by appointing
.Popish privy councillors to advise with a youthful and
apparently unsuspicious female Protestant Sovereign,
on the most momentous affairs of that large majority
of her subjects whose " faith" she stands pledged by
the niost solemn of all earthly obligations to " de-
fend ;" nay, to the owners of which they are compelled
to pander by consigning to the enemies of that faith
the direction of the national education !