That girl, who’s up to every game,
Knows more than you can teach her;
With Cupid’s bow it’s vain to aim,
His arrows rarely reach her.
The only words to touch her heart
Are “Coutts” or “Barclay Bevan;”
Gold-tipped must be the Blind God’s dart
For girls of forty-seven.
Don’t think by gazing in her eyes
With simulated rapture,
Don’t think by sentimental sighs
Her seasoned heart to capture;
Just show your banker’s book, my son,
And if the will of Heaven
Has blessed your balance, you have won
The girl of forty-seven.
Conventional Malgré Lui.
ONVENTION is a thing I hate,
Convention is a thing I scorn;
And yet, alas! I grieve to state
I was conventionally born.
My father and my mother were
(A curse be on Convention’s head!)
Two sweethearts—youth and maiden—ere
They were conventionally wed.
Then came my vaccination, and,
Convention though I cannot brook,
I’m given now to understand
It quite conventionally “took.”
I cut my teeth—convention! Bah!
A tear stood in my baby eye;
Oh, why did I not learn from ma
That teething babies always cry?
I was an infant, then a child,
And then a boy, and then a youth;
Ah! even now it makes me wild—
But I must tell the bitter truth.
And then I came to man’s estate;
You see that I no single jot
Did from convention deviate,
And yet I think convention “rot.”
I fell in love! Ah, he who sits
In judgment on the modern stage
And tears the common play to bits
Will understand my frenzied rage.
I fell in love! Convention’s slave
To dull convention bowed the knee;
And in return the maiden gave
Her love (conventional) to me.
And now I have some girls and boys
Who grow, and play, and go to school;
Conventional are all my joys—
I’m just like any other fool.
I give off Ibsen to my wife,
And quote the notes of W. A.;
But still I lead a common life—
Convention won’t be kept at bay.
The end, of course, will come at last.
Oh, may I, like Elijah, rise
In something safe upon the blast,
And living pass beyond the skies!
When quitting earth I’d keep my breath—
I hope sincerely that I shall—
I loathe the bare idea of death,
It is so damn’d conventional.