OYSTERLESS.
(By an Impecunious Gourmet.)
[Oysters are very dear, and are likely, as the season advances, to be still higher in price.]
Oh, Oyster mine! Oh, Oyster mine!
You're still as exquisitely nice;
With perfect pearly tints you shine,
But you are such an awful price.
The lemon and the fresh cayenne,
Brown bread and butter and the stout
Are here, and just the same, but then
What if I have to leave you out?
What wonder that my spirits droop,
That life can bring me no delight,
When I must give up oyster soup,
So softly delicately white.
The curry powder stands anear,
The scallop shells, but what care I—
You're so abominably dear,
O Oyster! that I cannot buy.
With sad imaginative flights,
I think upon the days of yore;
Like TICKLER, on Ambrosian nights,
I have consumed them by the score.
And still, whenever you appeared,
My pride it was to use you well;
I let the juice play round your beard,
And always on the hollow shell.
I placed you in the fair lark-pie.
With steak and kidneys too, of course;
Your ancestors were glad to die,
So well I made the oyster sauce.
I had you stewed and featly fried,
And dipped in batter—think of that;
And, as a pleasant change, I've tried
You, skewered in rows, with bacon-fat.
"Where art thou, ALICE?" cried the bard.
"Where art thou, Oyster?" I exclaim.
It really is extremely hard,
To know thee nothing but a name.
For this is surely torment worse
Than DANTE heaped upon his dead;—
To find thee quite beyond my purse,
And so go oysterless to bed.
À PROPOS OF THE SECRETARY FOR WAR'S ROSEATE AFTER—DINNER SPEECH (on the entirely satisfactory state of the Army generally).—(STAN-)"HOPE told a flattering tale."
UNIVERSITY MEM.—The Dean of Christ Church will keep his seat till Christmas, and just a LIDDELL longer.