[Michael Juster]

Thanks Max!

[Kevin Rainbow]

I am not sure if I read/heard it before. If I did, it obviously fled my memory.

[Terese Coe]

Heard it in song on a folkie record, and mainly was impressed with the last two lines.

[Julie Steiner]

Oh. The lecturer didn't say that Sargent was the author--just that the Sargents were one of the Boston Brahmin families (like the Cabots and Lowells).

I didn't see what Max posted above before he pulled it...but according to a 1927 Boston Post article, the poem's author insisted that the definitive version was the one Mike originally posted. Consider me gobsmacked.

[Martin Rocek]

It sounds familiar, though I can't quite place it.

Martin (I haven't read any of the responses yet).

[Douglas G. Brown]

I first heard this while I was in 5th or 6th grade, which is 1961- 1962. My grandmother would occasionally recite it, as well as the Lizzie Borden quatrain. I heard it numerous times in school until I graduated. Always with L3 as Jerome stated.

State of Mainers like to mildly dump on the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, which this state seperated from in 1820, as the other half of the Missouri Compromise.

In my county (Waldo), probably half of the natives have some Mayflower ancestry. In Primary school, we learned that most of the Boston Brahmins were Johnnie come latelys, who came over in the great Puritan migration of the 1630's. I think the Cabots were in the paint business, and the Lowells were in textiles, but they were both old money by 1900 or so. So, this verse got drilled into our little heads early on. I don't recall it as a song lyric, mainly because I paid little attention to folk songs,

But, by the time I was in junior high school, I realized that Mayflower ancestry and ten cents would buy a person a cup of coffee. Plenty of the poor relatives of the Brahmins have been packed off to Maine over the centuries, too. Delanos who live in trailers, Coffins who are carpenters, and the like.

I've seen it in numerous anthologies over the years; but most anthologies I look at were published prior to 1970. I'm surprised that it is known by so many of the respondents here. I always thought it merely New England thing.

Another nice New England poem is the "Wants of Man", by President John Quincy Adams ( I think ... perhaps it was his father).

Anyway, it will be fun to see a treatment of the Cabot-Lowell verse in Light

[Douglas G. Brown]

I just looked it up in my 1941 edition of Carolyn Wells' The Book of Humorous Verse (which I regard as sort of the mother of anthologies of comic verse.)

It's on page 947, under the title of ON THE ARISTOCRACY OF HARVARD, anthored by Dr. Samuel G Bushnell.

I come from good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod;
Where the Cabots speak only to Lowells,
And the Lowells speak only to God!

I suspect there are several variations out there.

I think it was also in a thick high school history book, The American Pageant, by Thomas Bailey, used in the late 1960s. And, undoubtedly, in back issues of American Heritage magazine

[R. S. Gwynn]

Heard it for years, Mike, but I think the "the" in the third line is superfluous.

[R. S. Gwynn]

And it seems to me that I heard "speak" instead of "talked."

[Julie Kane]

My mother quoted those lines to me when I was a small child, with a dose of attitude because my family was Boston Irish Catholic (with a big chip on their shoulders against rich British Protestants).