Before I send this scrawl away,
I seize a moment just to say
There's some parts of the Turkish system
So vulgar 'twere as well you missed 'em.
For instance--in _Seraglio_ matters--
Your Turk whom girlish fondness flatters,
Would fill his Haram (tasteless fool!)
With tittering, red-cheekt things from school.
But _here_ (as in that fairy land,
Where Love and Age went hand in hand;[2]
Where lips, till sixty, shed no honey,
And Grandams were worth any money,)
_Our_ Sultan has much riper notions--
So, let your list of _she_-promotions
Include those only plump and sage,
Who've reached the _regulation_-age;
That is, (as near as one can fix
From Peerage dates) full fifty-six.
This rule's for _favorites_--nothing more--
For, as to _wives_, a Grand Signor,
Tho' not decidedly _without_ them,
Need never care one curse about them.
[1] "The truth indeed seems to be, that having lived so long abroad as
evidently to have lost, in a great degree, the use of his native language,
Mr. Leckie has gradually come not only to speak, but to feel, like a
foreigner."--_Edinburgh Review_.
[2] The learned Colonel must allude here to a description of the
Mysterious Isle, in the History of Abdalla, Son of Hanif, where such
inversions of the order of nature are said to have taken place.--"A score
of old women and the same number of old men played here and there in the
court, some at chuck-farthing, others at tip-cat or at cockles."--And
again, "There is nothing, believe me, more engaging than those lovely
wrinkles."--See "_Tales of the East_," vol. iii. pp. 607, 608.