News, Info, and Opinion from the Spawn of Satan (DLC-PPI)

Justin Schwartz jkschw at hotmail.com
Sun Mar 3 12:39:06 PST 2002


Chris almost certainly has it right, but my version (from memory) is better and more concise, more Bellocian. jks


>Justin writes:
>>Remember the old Hillaire Belloc jibe:
>>
>>You cannot bribe or twist, thank God!
>>The British journalist
>>But given what he'll unbribed do
>>There isn't any reason to.
>
>A pedant comments:
>
>Usually it reads like this:
>
>You cannot hope
>to bribe or twist,
>thank God! the
>British journalist.
>
>But, seeing what
>the man can do
>unbribed, there's
>no occasion to.
>
>And it's usually assigned to Humbert Wolfe, from "The Uncelestial
>City, Book I", though I haven't read it there myself.
>
>(Were you confusing it with this verse of Belloc's, a favourite of
>Christopher Hitchens, from his poem on Lord Lundy: "The stocks were
>sold; the Press was squared / The Middle Class was quite prepared"?)
>
>Chris
>--
>
>Phone: +44 (0) 1865-286793
>Email: <chris.brooke at magd.ox.ac.uk>
>Web: http://users.ox.ac.uk/~magd1368
>

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