ODE TO BLACKWALL.
Let me sing thy praise, Blackwall!
Paradise of court and city,
Gathering in thy banquet-hall
Lords and cockneys—dull, and witty.
Spot, where ministers of state,
Lay aside their humbug all;
Water-souchy, and white-bait,
Tempting mankind to Blackwall.
Come, ye Muses, tuneful Nine,
Whom no Civil List can bribe,
Tell me, who come here, to dine,
All the great and little tribe,
Who, as summer takes its rounds,
O’er Whitechapel, or Whitehall,
From five shillings to five pounds,
Club for dinner at Blackwall.
There the ministerial Outs,
There the ministerial Ins,
One an emblem of the pouts,
T’other emblem of the grins;
All, beneath thy roof, are gay,
Each forgetting rise or fall,
Come to spend one honest day,——
All good fellows, at Blackwall.
There I see an old Premier,
Very like a “Lord at nurse,”
Rather near, rather near,
Dangling a diminish’d purse.
Grieving for the days gone by,
When he had a “house of call,”
Every day his fish and pie,
Gratis—not like thine, Blackwall.
There I see an Irish brow,
Bronzed with blarney, hot with wine,
Mark’d by nature for the plough,
Practising the “Superfine.”
Mumbling o’er a courtly speech,
Dreaming of a palace Ball,
Things not quite within his reach,
Though quite asy at Blackwall.
There the prince of Exquisites!
O’er his claret looking sloppy,
(All the ladies know, “he writes,”
Bringing down the price of poppy,
Spoiling much his scented paper,
Making books for many a stall,)
Sits, with languid smile, Lord Vapour,
Yawning through thy feast, Blackwall.
By him yawning sits, Earl Patron,
Well to artists (too well) known.
Generous as a workhouse matron,
Tender-hearted as a stone:
Laughing at the pair, Lord Scoffer
Whispers faction to F—x M—le.
Asking an “official offer,”
Ainsi va le monde Blackwall.
But, whence comes that storm of gabble,
Piercing casement, wall, and door,
All the screaming tongues of Babel?
’Tis the “Diplomatic corps,”
Hating us with all their souls,
If the knaves have souls at all.
I’d soon teach them other roles,
Were I Monarch of Blackwall.
Then, I hear a roar uproarious!
——“There a Corporation dine,”
Some are tipsy, some are “glorious,”
Some are bellowing for wine;
Some for all their sins are pouting,
Some beneath the table fall;
Some lie singing, some lie shouting,—
Now, farewell to thee, Blackwall.
——Stopped for five minutes at the handsome pier, waiting for the arrival of the railway passengers from London. The scene was animated; the pier crowded with porters, pie-men, wandering minstrels, and that ingenious race, who read “moral lessons” to country gentlemen with their breeches’ pockets open, and negligent of their handkerchiefs.
——Stepped on shore, and, tempted by the attractions of one of the taverns, ordered a bottle of claret, on the principle of the parliamentary machines for cleansing the smoke-conveying orifices of our drawing-rooms. The inconceivable quantity of fuliginous material, which I had swallowed in my transit down the river, would have stifled the voice of a prima donna. The claret gave me the sense of a recovered faculty, and as I inhaled, with that cool feeling of enjoyment which salutes the man of London with a consciousness that sea-breezes are in existence, I had leisure to glance along a vista of superb saloons, which would have better suited a Pasha of Bagdad, than the payers of the income tax in the dingiest and mightiest city of the known world.
Yet all was not devoted to the selfish principle. In a recess at the end of the vista was a small bust—a sort of votive offering to the “memory of Samuel Simpson, formerly a waiter in this tavern for the space of fifty years,” this bust having been “here placed by his grateful master, Thomas Hammersley.”
I am proud to have seen, and shall be prouder to rescue, the names of both those Blackwall worthies from oblivion. They have long slept without their fame; for the bust is dated A.D. 1714, the year which closed the existence of that illustrious queen, Anna, whose name, as Swift rather saucily observed, like her friendships, Both backward and forward was always the same.
An honour shared in succeeding ages only by the amiable Lord Glenelg.
But inscribed on the pedestal was an epitaph, which I transferred to my memoranda.