Following the spontaneous outburst of village enthusiasm that greeted our recent posting of contemporary topographic verse (Shepherd & Doggerel), a weightier piece by William Hamper dating back to the early nineteenth century has been added to the local history section. Nothing that includes words such as adown, cruciform, lightsome, luminary, wyght, and yclept, and a gratuitous line of Latin, employed for the rhyme, can be all bad. But it isn’t Coleridge. Rather, it is the kind of piece that a Victorian gentleman could commit to memory and then reproduce at Sussex wedding parties and other social occasions, with ribaldry and acclaim from a bibulous audience already well familiar with the plot (compare Rocky Horror sing-a-longs for a contemporary analogue). Read in that spirit, one can detect its merits.