The girls (just like them!) all agree
To praise J. Jones, Esquire:
I ask them what on earth they see
About him to admire?
They cry “He is so sleek and slim,
It’s quite a treat to look at him!”
They vanish in tobacco smoke,
Those visionary maids—
I feel a sharp and sudden poke
Between the shoulder-blades—
“Why, Brown, my boy! Your growing stout!”
(I told you he would find me out!)
“My growth is not your business, Sir!”
“No more it is, my boy!
But if it’s yours, as I infer,
Why, Brown, I give you joy!
A man, whose business prospers so,
Is just the sort of man to know!
“It’s hardly safe, though, talking here—
I’d best get out of reach:
For such a weight as yours, I fear,
Must shortly sink the beach!”—
Insult me thus because I’m stout!
I vow I’ll go and call him out!
ATALANTA IN CAMDEN-TOWN
Ay, ’twas here, on this spot,
In that summer of yore,
Atalanta did not
Vote my presence a bore,
Nor reply to my tenderest talk “She had
heard all that nonsense before.”
She’d the brooch I had bought
And the necklace and sash on,
And her heart, as I thought,
Was alive to my passion;
And she’d done up her hair in the style that
the Empress had brought into fashion.
I had been to the play
With my pearl of a Peri—
But, for all I could say,
She declared she was weary,
That “the place was so crowded and hot, and
she couldn’t abide that Dundreary.”