(_NEW STYLE._)
In healthier times, when friends would meet
Their friends in chamber, park, or street,
Each, as hereunder, each would greet.
Tour level hand went forth; you clasped
Your crony's; each his comrade's grasped--
If roughly, neither friend was rasped.
Such was the good old-fashioned one
Of honest British "How d'ye do?"
I think it manly still--don't you?
But _now_, when smug acquaintance hails
A set that would be "smart," but fails,
Another principle prevails.
The arm, in lifted curve displayed,
Droops limply o'er the shoulder-blade,
As needing some chirurgeon's aid:
The wrist is wrenched of JONES and BROWN,
Those ornaments of London Town;
Their listless fingers dribble down:
BROWN reaches to the knuckle-bones
Of thus-excruciated JONES;
BROWN's hand the same affliction owns.
At length his finger-tips have pressed
The fingers of his JONES distressed:
Both curvatures then sink to rest.
A sort of anguish lisped proceeds
Prom either's mouth, but neither heeds
The other's half-heroic deeds.
Exhausted, neither much can say;
Complacent, each pursues his way;
And JONES and BBOWN have lived to-day.
For both have sought by strenuous strain
To demonstrate, in face of pain,
That friends they were, and friends remain.
Ah, wonderful! Can Poets deem
Self-sacrifice a fading dream?
Are salutations what they seem?
Is BROWN some Altruist in disguise,
And JONES an Ibsenite likewise,
That thus they flop and agonise?--
Or are the pair affected fools,
Who catch by rote the silly rules
Of third-rate fashionable schools?
* * * * *