HANDS AS THEY ARE SHOOK.
(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?