“There Stands a City.”
Ingoldsby.
Year by year do Beauty’s daughters,
In the sweetest gloves and shawls,
Troop to taste the Chattenham waters,
And adorn the Chattenham balls.
‘Nulla non donanda lauru’
Is that city: you could not,
Placing England’s map before you,
Light on a more favoured spot.
If no clear translucent river
Winds ’neath willow-shaded paths,
“Children and adults” may shiver
All day in “Chalybeate baths:”
If “the inimitable Fechter”
Never brings the gallery down,
Constantly “the Great Protector”
There “rejects the British crown:”
And on every side the painter
Looks on wooded vale and plain
And on fair hills, faint and fainter
Outlined as they near the main.
There I met with him, my chosen
Friend—the ‘long’ but not ‘stern swell,’ [15a]
Faultless in his hats and hosen,
Whom the Johnian lawns know well:—
Oh my comrade, ever valued!
Still I see your festive face;
Hear you humming of “the gal you’d
Left behind” in massive bass:
See you sit with that composure
On the eeliest of hacks,
That the novice would suppose your
Manly limbs encased in wax: