Betsy the nurse, who never
From largest beetle ran,
And—conscious p’raps of pleasing caps—
The housemaids, formed the van:
And Bibulus the Butler,
His calm brows slightly arched;
(No mortal wight had ere that night
Seen him with shirt unstarched;)
And Bob, the shockhaired knifeboy,
Wielding two Sheffield blades,
And James Plush of the sinewy legs,
The love of lady’s maids:
And charwoman and chaplain
Stood mingled in a mass,
And “Things,” thought he of Houndsditch,
“Is come to a pretty pass.”
Beyond all things a Baby
Is to the schoolgirl dear;
Next to herself the nursemaid loves
Her dashing grenadier;
Only with life the sailor
Parts from the British flag;
While one hope lingers, the cracksman’s fingers
Drop not his hard-earned ‘swag.’
But, as hares do my second
Thro’ green Calabria’s copses,
As females vanish at the sight
Of short-horns and of wopses;
So, dropping forks and teaspoons,
The pride of Houndsditch fled,
Dumbfoundered by the hue and cry
He’d raised up overhead.
* * * *
They gave him—did the Judges—
As much as was his due.
And, Saxon, should’st thou e’er be led
To deem this tale untrue;
Then—any night in winter,
When the cold north wind blows,
And bairns are told to keep out cold
By tallowing the nose:
When round the fire the elders
Are gathered in a bunch,
And the girls are doing crochet,
And the boys are reading Punch:—
Go thou and look in Leech’s book;
There haply shalt thou spy
A stout man on a staircase stand,
With aspect anything but bland,
And rub his right shin with his hand,
To witness if I lie.
PROVERBIAL PHILOSOPHY.
Introductory.
Art thou beautiful, O my daughter, as the budding rose of April?
Are all thy motions music, and is poetry throned in thine eye?
Then hearken unto me; and I will make the bud a fair flower,
I will plant it upon the bank of Elegance, and water it with the water of Cologne;
And in the season it shall “come out,” yea bloom, the pride of the parterre;
Ladies shall marvel at its beauty, and a Lord shall pluck it at the last.
Of Propriety.
Study first Propriety: for she is indeed the Polestar
Which shall guide the artless maiden through the mazes of Vanity Fair;
Nay, she is the golden chain which holdeth together Society;
The lamp by whose light young Psyche shall approach unblamed her Eros.
Verily Truth is as Eve, which was ashamed being naked;
Wherefore doth Propriety dress her with the fair foliage of artifice:
And when she is drest, behold! she knoweth not herself again.—
I walked in the Forest; and above me stood the Yew,
Stood like a slumbering giant, shrouded in impenetrable shade;
Then I pass’d into the citizen’s garden, and marked a tree clipt into shape,
(The giant’s locks had been shorn by the Dalilahshears of Decorum;)
And I said, “Surely nature is goodly; but how much goodlier is Art!”
I heard the wild notes of the lark floating far over the blue sky,
And my foolish heart went after him, and lo! I blessed him as he rose;
Foolish! for far better is the trained boudoir bulfinch,
Which pipeth the semblance of a tune, and mechanically draweth up water:
And the reinless steed of the desert, though his neck be clothed with thunder,
Must yield to him that danceth and ‘moveth in the circles’ at Astley’s.
For verily, O my daughter, the world is a masquerade,
And God made thee one thing, that thou mightest make thyself another:
A maiden’s heart is as champagne, ever aspiring and struggling upwards,
And it needeth that its motions be checked by the silvered cork of Propriety:
He that can afford the price, his be the precious treasure,
Let him drink deeply of its sweetness, nor grumble if it tasteth of the cork.