To maids and matrons, peers and peasants;
He won the sympathies of all
By making puns, and making presents.
Though all the parish were at strife,
He kept his counsel, and his carriage,
And laughed, and loved a quiet life,
And shrank from Chancery suits--and marriage.
Sound was his claret--and his head;
Warm was his double ale--and feelings;
His partner at the whist club said
That he was faultless in his dealings:
He went to church but once a week;
Yet Dr. Poundtext always found him
An upright man, who studied Greek,
And liked to see his friends around him.
Asylums, hospitals, and schools,
He used to swear, were made to cozen;
All who subscribed to them were fools,--
And he subscribed to half-a-dozen:
It was his doctrine that the poor
Were always able, never willing;
And so the beggar at his door
Had first abuse, and then--a shilling.
Some public principles he had,
But was no flatterer, nor fretter;
He rapped his box when things were bad,
And said, “I cannot make them better!”
And much he loathed the patriot’s snort,
And much he scorned the placeman’s snuffle;
And cut the fiercest quarrels short
With--“Patience, gentlemen--and shuffle!”
For full ten years his pointer Speed
Had couched beneath her master’s table;
For twice ten years his old white steed
Had fattened in his master’s stable;
Old Quince averred, upon his troth,
They were the ugliest beasts in Devon;
And none knew why he fed them both,
With his own hands, six days in seven.
Whene’er they heard his ring or knock,
Quicker than thought, the village slatterns
Flung down the novel, smoothed the frock,
And took up Mrs. Glasse, and patterns;
Adine was studying baker’s bills;
Louisa looked the queen of knitters;
Jane happened to be hemming frills;
And Bell, by chance, was making fritters.
But all was vain; and while decay
Came, like a tranquil moonlight, o’er him,
And found him gouty still, and gay,
With no fair nurse to bless or bore him,
His rugged smile and easy chair,
His dread of matrimonial lectures,
His wig, his stick, his powdered hair,
Were themes for very strange conjectures.
Some sages thought the stars above
Had crazed him with excess of knowledge;
Some heard he had been crost in love
Before he came away from college;
Some darkly hinted that his Grace
Did nothing, great or small, without him;
Some whispered, with a solemn face,
That there was “something odd about him!”
I found him, at three score and ten,
A single man, but bent quite double;
Sickness was coming on him then
To take him from a world of trouble:
He prosed of slipping down the hill,
Discovered he grew older daily;
One frosty day he made his will,--
The next, he sent for Doctor Bailey.
And so he lived,--and so he died!--
When last I sat beside his pillow
He shook my hand, and “Ah!” he cried,
“Penelope must wear the willow.
Tell her I hugged her rosy chain
While life was flickering in the socket;
And say, that when I call again,
I’ll bring a licence in my pocket.
“I’ve left my house and grounds to Fag,--
I hope his master’s shoes will suit him;
And I’ve bequeathed to you my nag,
To feed him for my sake,--or shoot him.
The Vicar’s wife will take old Fox,--
She’ll find him an uncommon mouser,--
And let her husband have my box,
My bible, and my Assmanshauser.
“Whether I ought to die or not,
My doctor cannot quite determine;
It’s only clear that I shall rot,
And be, like Priam, food for vermin.
My debts are paid:--but Nature’s debt
Almost escaped my recollection:
Tom!--we shall meet again;--and yet
I cannot leave you my direction!”
III.
THE BELLE OF THE BALL-ROOM.
“Il faut juger des femmes depuis la chaussure jusqu’ à la coiffure
exclusivement, á peu pres comme on mesure le poisson entre queue et
tête.”--La BRUYERE.
Years--years ago,--ere yet my dreams
Had been of being wise or witty,--
Ere I had done with writing themes,
Or yawned o’er this infernal Chitty;--
Years--years ago,--while all my joy
Was in my fowling-piece and filly,--
In short, while I was yet a boy,
I fell in love with Laura Lily.
I saw her at the County Ball:
There, when the sound of flute and fiddle
Gave signal sweet in that old hall
Of hands across and down the middle,
Her’s was the subtlest spell by far
Of all that set young hearts romancing;
She was our queen, our rose, our star;
And then she danced--O Heaven, her dancing!
Dark was her hair, her hand was white;
Her voice was exquisitely tender;
Her eyes were full of liquid light;
I never saw a waist so slender!
Her every look, her every smile,
Shot right and left a score of arrows;
I thought ’twas Venus from her isle,
And wondered where she’d left her sparrows.
She talked,--of politics or prayers,--
Of Southey’s prose or Wordsworth’s sonnets,--
Of danglers--or of dancing bears,
Of battles,--or the last new bonnets,
By candlelight, at twelve o’clock,
To me it mattered not a tittle;
If those bright lips had quoted Locke,
I might have thought they murmured Little.
Through sunny May, through sultry June,
I loved her with a love eternal;
I spoke her praises to the moon,
I wrote them to the _Sunday Journal_:
My mother laughed; I soon found out
That ancient ladies have no feeling:
My father frowned; but how should gout
See any happiness in kneeling?
She was the daughter of a Dean,
Rich, fat, and rather apoplectic;
She had one brother, just thirteen,
Whose colour was extremely hectic;
Her grandmother for many a year
Had fed the parish with her bounty;
Her second cousin was a peer,
And Lord Lieutenant of the county.
But titles, and the three per cents,
And mortgages, and great relations,
And India bonds, and tithes, and rents,
Oh what are they to love’s sensations?
Black eyes, fair forehead, clustering locks--
Such wealth, such honours, Cupid chooses;
He cares as little for the stocks
As Baron Rothschild for the Muses.
She sketched; the vale, the wood, the beach,
Grew lovelier from her pencil’s shading:
She botanised; I envied each
Young blossom in her boudoir fading:
She warbled Handel; it was grand;
She made the Catalani jealous:
She touched the organ; I could stand
For hours and hours to blow the bellows.
She kept an album, too, at home,
Well filled with all an album’s glories;
Paintings of butterflies, and Rome,
Patterns for trimmings, Persian stories;
Soft songs to Julia’s cockatoo,
Fierce odes to Famine and to Slaughter,
And autographs of Prince Leboo,
And recipes for elder water.
And she was flattered, worshipped, bored;
Her steps were watched, her dress was noted;
Her poodle dog was quite adored,
Her sayings were extremely quoted;
She laughed, and every heart was glad,
As if the taxes were abolished;
She frowned, and every look was sad,
As if the opera were demolished.
She smiled on many, just for fun--
I knew that there was nothing in it;
I was the first--the only one,
Her heart had thought of for a minute.
I knew it, for she told me so,
In phrase which was divinely moulded;
She wrote a charming hand--and oh!
How sweetly all her notes were folded!
Our love was like most other loves;--
A little glow, a little shiver,
A rose-bud, and a pair of gloves,
And “Fly not yet”--upon the river;
Some jealousy of some one’s heir,
Some hope of dying broken-hearted,
A miniature, a lock of hair,
The usual vows,--and then we parted.
We parted; months and years rolled by;
We met again four summers after:
Our parting was all sob and sigh;
Our meeting was all mirth and laughter:
For in my heart’s most secret cell
There had been many other lodgers;
And she was not the ball-room’s Belle,
But only--Mrs. Something Rogers!
IV.
MY PARTNER.
“There is, perhaps, no subject of more universal interest in the
whole range of natural knowledge, than that of the increasing
fluctuations which take place in the atmosphere in which we are
immersed.”--_British Almanac._
At Cheltenham, where one drinks one’s fill
Of folly and cold water,
I danced last year my first quadrille
With old Sir Geoffrey’s daughter.
Her cheek with summer’s rose might vie,
When summer’s rose is newest;
Her eyes were blue as autumn’s sky,
When autumn’s sky is bluest;
And well my heart might deem her one
Of life’s most precious flowers,
For half her thoughts were of its sun,
And half were of its showers.
I spoke of novels:--_Vivian Grey_
Was positively charming,
And _Almack’s_ infinitely gay,
And _Frankenstein_ alarming;
I said _De Vere_ was chastely told,
Thought well of _Herbert Lacy_,
Called Mr. Banim’s sketches “bold,”
And Lady Morgan’s “racy.”
I vowed that last new thing of Hook’s
Was vastly entertaining;
And Laura said,--“I doat on books,
Because its always raining!”
I talked of Music’s gorgeous fane;
I raved about Rossini,
Hoped Renzi would come back again,
And criticised Pacini;
I wished the chorus-singers dumb,
The trumpets more pacific,
And eulogised Brocard’s _aplomb_,
And voted Paul “terrific!”
What cared she for Medea’s pride,
Or Desdemona’s sorrow?
“Alas!” my beauteous listener sighed,
“We must have rain to-morrow!”
I told her tales of other lands;
Of ever-boiling fountains,
Of poisonous lakes and barren sands,
Vast forests, trackless mountains:
I painted bright Italian skies,
I lauded Persian roses,
Coined similes for Spanish eyes,
And jests for Indian noses;
I laughed at Lisbon’s love of mass,
Vienna’s dread of treason:
And Laura asked me--where the glass
Stood, at Madrid, last season?
I broached whate’er had gone its rounds,
The week before, of scandal;
What made Sir Luke lay down his hounds,
And Jane take up her Handel;
Why Julia walked upon the heath,
With the pale moon above her;
Where Flora lost her false front teeth,
And Anne her falser lover;
How Lord de B. and Mrs. L.
Had crossed the sea together:
My shuddering partner cried, “O Ciel!
How _could_ they,--in such weather?”
Was she a Blue?--I put my trust
In strata, petals, gases;
A boudoir-pedant? I discussed
The toga and the fasces;
A Cockney-Muse? I mouthed a deal
Of folly from “Endymion;”
A saint? I praised the pious zeal
Of Messrs. Way & Simeon;
A politician?--it was vain
To quote the morning paper;
The horrid phantoms came again,
Rain, Hail, and Snow, and Vapour.
Flat flattery was my only chance;
I acted deep devotion,
Found magic in her every glance,
Grace in her every motion;
I wasted all a stripling’s lore,
Prayer, passion, folly, feeling;
And wildly looked upon the floor,
And mildly on the ceiling.
I envied gloves upon her arm
And shawls upon her shoulder;
And, when my worship was most warm,
She--“never found it colder.”
I don’t object to wealth or land;
And she will have the giving
Of an extremely pretty hand,
Some thousands, and a living.
She makes silk purses, broiders stools,
Sings sweetly, dances finely,
Paints screens, subscribes to Sunday-schools,
And sits a horse divinely.
But to be linked in life to her!--
The desperate man who tried it
Might marry a Barometer
And hang himself beside it!
[Illustration]
V.
PORTRAIT OF A LADY
IN THE EXHIBITION OF THE ROYAL ACADEMY, 1831.
What are you, lady?--naught is here
To tell us of your name or story,
To claim the gazer’s smile or tear,
To dub you Whig or damn you Tory;
It is beyond a poet’s skill
To form the slightest notion whether
We e’er shall walk through one quadrille,
Or look upon one moon together.
You’re very pretty!--all the world
Is talking of your bright brow’s splendour.
And of your locks, so softly curled,
And of your hands, so white and slender;
Some think you’re blooming in Bengal;
Some say you’re blowing in the City;
Some know you’re nobody at all:
I only feel--you’re very pretty.
But bless my heart! it’s very wrong;
You’re making all our belles ferocious;
Anne “never saw a chin so long;”
And Laura thinks your dress “atrocious:”
And Lady Jane, who now and then
Is taken for the village steeple,
Is sure you can’t be four feet ten,
And “wonders at the taste of people.”
Soon pass the praises of a face;
Swift fades the very best vermilion;
Fame rides a most prodigious pace;
Oblivion follows on the pillion;
And all who in these sultry rooms
To-day have stared, and pushed, and fainted,
Will soon forget your pearls and plumes,
As if they never had been painted.
You’ll be forgotten--as old debts
By persons who are used to borrow;
Forgotten as the sun that sets,
When shines a new one on the morrow;
Forgotten--like the luscious peach
That blessed the schoolboy last September;
Forgotten like a maiden speech,
Which all men praise, but none remember.
Yet, ere you sink into the stream
That whelms alike sage, saint, and martyr,
And soldier’s sword, and minstrel’s theme,
And Canning’s wit, and Gatton’s charter,
Here, of the fortunes of your youth,
My fancy weaves her dim conjectures,
Which have, perhaps, as much of truth
As passion’s vows, or Cobbett’s lectures.
Was’t in the north, or in the south
That summer breezes rocked your cradle?
And had you in your baby mouth
A wooden or a silver ladle?
And was your first unconscious sleep
By Brownie banned, or blessed by Fairy?
And did you wake to laugh or weep?
And were you christened Maud or Mary?
And was your father called “Your Grace?”
And did he bet at Ascot races?
And did he chat of commonplace?
And did he fill a score of places?
And did your lady-mother’s charms
Consist in picklings, broilings, bastings?
Or did she prate about the arms
Her brave forefathers wore at Hastings?
Where were you _finished_? tell me where?
Was it at Chelsea or at Chiswick?
Had you the ordinary share
Of books and backboard, harp and physic?
And did they bid you banish pride,
And mind your Oriental tinting?
And did you learn how Dido died?
And who found out the art of printing?
And are you fond of lanes and brooks--
A votary of the sylvan Muses?
Or do you con the little books
Which Baron Brougham and Vaux diffuses?
Or do you love to knit and sow--
The fashionable world’s Arachne?
Or do you canter down the Row
Upon a very long-tailed hackney?
And do you love your brother James?
And do you pet his mares and setters?
And have your friends romantic names?
And do you write them long, long letters?
And are you--since the world began
All women are--a little spiteful?
And don’t you dote on Malibran?
And don’t you think Tom Moore delightful?
I see they’ve brought you flowers to-day;
Delicious food for eyes and noses;
But carelessly you turn away
From all the pinks and all the roses;
Say, is that fond look sent in search
Of one whose look as fondly answers?
And is he, fairest, in the Church?
Or is he--ain’t he--in the Lancers?
And is your love a motley page
Of black and white, half joy, half sorrow?
Are you to wait till you’re of age?
Or are you to be his to-morrow?
Or do they bid you, in their scorn,
Your pure and sinless flame to smother?
Is he so very meanly born?
Or are you married to another?
Whate’er you are, at last, adieu!
I think it is your bounden duty
To let the rhymes I coin for you
Be prized by all who prize your beauty.
From you I seek nor gold nor fame;
From you I fear no cruel strictures;
I wish some girls that I could name
Were half as silent as their pictures!
APRIL FOOLS.
----“passim
Palantes error certo de tramite pellit;
Ill sinistrorsum, hic dextrorsum abit.”
--HORACE.
This day, beyond all contradiction,
This day is all thine own, Queen Fiction!
And thou art building castles boundless
Of groundless joys, and griefs as groundless;
Assuring Beauties that the border
Of their new dress is out of order,
And schoolboys that their shoes want tying,
And babies that their dolls are dying.
Lend me--lend me some disguise;
I will tell prodigious lies;
All who care for what I say
Shall be April Fools to-day!
First, I relate how all the nation
Is ruined by Emancipation;
How honest men are sadly thwarted,
How beads and faggots are imported,
How every parish church looks thinner,
How Peel has asked the Pope to dinner;
And how the Duke who fought the duel,
Keeps good King George on water gruel.
Thus I waken doubts and fears
In the Commons and the Peers;
If they care for what I say,
They are April Fools to-day!
Next, I announce to hall and hovel
Lord Asterisk’s unwritten novel;
It’s full of wit, and full of fashion,
And full of taste, and full of passion;
It tells some very curious histories,
Elucidates some charming mysteries,
And mingles sketches of society
With precepts of the soundest piety.
Thus I babble to the host
Who adore the _Morning Post_;
If they care for what I say,
They are April Fools to-day!
Then to the artist of my raiment
I hint his bankers have stopped payment;
And just suggest to Lady Locket
That somebody has picked her pocket;
And scare Sir Thomas from the City
By murmuring, in a tone of pity,
That I am sure I saw my Lady
Drive through the Park with Captain Grady.
Off my troubled victims go,
Very pale and very low;
If they care for what I say,
They are April Fools to-day!
I’ve sent the learned Doctor Trepan
To feel Sir Hubert’s broken knee-pan;
’Twill rout the Doctor’s seven senses
To find Sir Hubert charging fences!
I’ve sent a sallow parchment-scraper
To put Miss Tim’s last will on paper;
He’ll see her, silent as a mummy,
At whist, with her two maids and dummy.
Man of brief, and man of pill,
They will take it very ill;
If they care for what I say,
They are April Fools to-day!
And then to her whose smile shed light on
My weary lot last year at Brighton
I talk of happiness and marriage,
St. George’s, and a travelling carriage;
I trifle with my rosy fetters,
I rave about her witching letters,
And swear my heart shall do no treason
Before the closing of the season.
Thus I whisper in the ear
Of Louisa Windermere;
If she cares for what I say,
She’s an April Fool to-day!
And to the world I publish gaily,
That all things are improving daily;
That suns grow warmer, streamlets clearer,
And faith more warm, and love sincerer;
That children grow extremely clever,
That sin is seldom known, or never;
That gas, and steam, and education,
Are killing sorrow and starvation!
Pleasant visions!--but alas,
How those pleasant visions pass!
If you care for what I say,
You’re an April Fool to-day!
Last, to myself, when night comes round me,
And the soft chain of thought has bound me,
I whisper “Sir, your eyes are killing;
You owe no mortal man a shilling;
You never cringe for Star or Garter;
You’re much too wise to be a martyr;
And, since you must be food for vermin,
You don’t feel much desire for ermine!”
Wisdom is a mine, no doubt,
If one can but find it out;
But, whate’er I think or say,
I’m an April Fool to-day!
SCHOOL AND SCHOOLFELLOWS.
FLOREAT ETONA.
Twelve years ago I made a mock
Of filthy trades and traffics:
I wondered what they meant by stock;
I wrote delightful sapphics;
I knew the streets of Rome and Troy,
I supped with Fates and Furies,--
Twelve years ago I was a boy,
A happy boy, at Drury’s.
Twelve years ago!--how many a thought
Of faded pains and pleasures
Those whispered syllables have brought
From Memory’s hoarded treasures!
The fields, the farms, the bats, the books,
The glories and disgraces,
The voices of dear friends, the looks
Of all familiar faces!
Kind _Mater_ smiles again to me,
As bright as when we parted;
I seem again the frank, the free,
Stout-limbed, and simple-hearted!
Pursuing every idle dream,
And shunning every warning;
With no hard work but Bovney stream,
No chill except Long Morning:
Now stopping Harry Vernon’s ball
That rattled like a rocket;
Now hearing Wentworth’s “Fourteen all!”
And striking for the pocket;
Now feasting on a cheese and flitch,--
Now drinking from the pewter;
Now leaping over Chalvey ditch,
Now laughing at my tutor.
Where are my friends? I am alone;
No playmate shares my beaker:
Some lie beneath the churchyard stone,
And some--before the Speaker;
And some compose a tragedy,
And some compose a rondeau;
And some draw sword for Liberty,
And some draw pleas for John Doe.
Tom Mill was used to blacken eyes
Without the fear of sessions;
Charles Medlar loathed false quantities
As much as false professions;
Now Mill keeps order in the land,
A magistrate pedantic;
And Medlar’s feet repose unscanned
Beneath the wide Atlantic.
Wild Nick, whose oaths made such a din,
Does Dr. Martext’s duty;
And Mullion, with that monstrous chin,
Is married to a Beauty;
And Darrell studies, week by week,
His Mant, and not his Manton;
And Ball, who was but poor in Greek,
Is very rich at Canton.
And I am eight-and-twenty now;--
The world’s cold chains have bound me;
And darker shades are on my brow,
And sadder scenes around me;
In Parliament I fill my seat,
With many other noodles;
And lay my head in Jermyn Street
And sip my hock at Boodle’s.
But often when the cares of life
Have sent my temples aching,
When visions haunt me of a wife,
When duns await my waking,
When Lady Jane is in a pet,
Or Hoby in a hurry,
When Captain Hazard wins a bet,
Or Beaulieu spoils a curry,--
For hours and hours I think and talk
Of each remembered hobby;
I long to lounge in Poet’s walk,
To shiver in the Lobby;
I wish that I could run away
From House, and Court, and Levée,
Where bearded men appear to-day
Just Eton boys grown heavy,--
That I could bask in childhood’s sun,
And dance o’er childhood’s roses,
And find huge wealth in one pound one,
Vast wit in broken roses,
And play Sir Giles at Datchet Lane,
And call the milk-maids Houris,--
That I could be a boy again,--
A happy boy,--at Drury’s.
ARRIVALS AT A WATERING-PLACE.
“I play a spade.--Such strange new faces
Are flocking in from near and far;
Such frights!--(Miss Dobbs holds all the aces)--
One can’t imagine who they are:
The lodgings at enormous prices,--
New donkeys, and another fly;
And Madame Bonbon out of ices,
Although we’re scarcely in July:
We’re quite as sociable as any,
But one old horse can scarcely crawl;
And really, where there are so many
We can’t tell where we ought to call.
“Pray who has seen the odd old fellow
Who took the Doctor’s house last week?--
A pretty chariot,--livery yellow,
Almost as yellow as his cheek;
A widower, sixty-five, and surly,
And stiffer than a poplar tree;
Drinks rum and water, gets up early
To dip his carcass in the sea;
He’s always in a monstrous hurry,
And always talking of Bengal;
They say his cook makes noble curry;
I think, Louisa, we should call.
“And so Miss Jones, the mantua-maker,
Has let her cottage on the hill!--
The drollest man,--a sugar baker
Last year imported from the till;
Prates of his _’orses_ and his _’oney_,
Is quite in love with fields and farms;
A horrid Vandal,--but his money
Will buy a glorious coat of arms;
Old Clyster makes him take the waters;
Some say he means to give a ball;
And after all, with thirteen daughters,
I think, Sir Thomas, you might call.
“That poor young man!--I’m sure and certain
Despair is making up his shroud;
He walks all night beneath the curtain
Of the dim sky and murky cloud:
Draws landscapes,--throws such mournful glances;
Writes verses,--has such splendid eyes;
An ugly name,--but Laura fancies
He’s some great person in disguise!--
And since his dress is all the fashion,
And since he’s very dark and tall,
I think that out of pure compassion,
I’ll get Papa to go and call.
“So Lord St. Ives is occupying
The whole of Mr. Ford’s hotel!
Last Saturday his man was trying
A little nag I want to sell.
He brought a lady in the carriage;
Blue eyes,--eighteen, or thereabouts;--
Of course, you know, we _hope_ it’s marriage,
But yet the _femme de chambre_ doubts.
She looked so pensive when we met her,
Poor thing!--and such a charming shawl!--
Well! till we understand it better,
It’s quite impossible to call!
“Old Mr. Fund, the London Banker,
Arrived to-day at Premium Court;
I would not, for the world, cast anchor
In such a horrid dangerous port;
Such dust and rubbish, lath and plaster,--
(Contractors play the meanest tricks),--
The roofs as crazy as its master,
And he was born in fifty-six;
Stairs creaking--cracks in every landing--
The colonnade is sure to fall;
We shan’t find post or pillar standing
Unless we make great haste to call.
“Who was that sweetest of sweet creatures
Last Sunday in the Rector’s seat?
The finest shape,--the loveliest features,--
I never saw such tiny feet!
My brother,--(this is quite between us)
Poor Arthur,--’twas a sad affair;
Love at first sight!--she’s quite a Venus,
But then she’s poorer far than fair;
And so my father and my mother
Agreed it would not do at all;
And so, I’m sorry for my brother!--
It’s settled that we’re not to call.