Robert Louis Stevenson

In college, I had an English Lit professor who first introduced me to this poem:

I am a kind of farthing dip,
Unfriendly to the nose and eyes;
A blue-behinded ape, I skip
Upon the trees of Paradise.

At mankind's feast, I take my place
In solemn, sanctimonious state,
And have the air of saying grace
While I defile the dinner plate.

I am the "smiler with the knife,"
The battener upon garbage, I --
Dear Heaven, with such a rancid life,
Were it not better far to die?

Yet still, about the human pale,
I love to scamper, love to race,
To swing by my irreverent tail
All over the most holy place;

And when at length, some golden day,
The unfailing sportsman, aiming at
Shall bag, me -- all the world shall say
Thank God, and there's an end of that!

As a class, we suggested every sort of person under the sun, by my finger was on a politician. Our professor never told us of whom this was written, but now I think it was a person posing as a Holy Man. Though, with things mixed up as they are today, I'd bet it could be applied to some other more hidden enemy of mankind.