THE STAGE-STRUCK HERO.
‘It must be. So Plato?—Thou reasonest?—Well.”
—School Cato.
T’S very hard! oh, Dick, my boy,
It’s very hard one can’t enjoy
A little private spouting;
But sure as Lear or Hamlet lives,
Up comes our master, bounce! and gives
The tragic muse a routing!
Ay, there he comes again! be quick!
And hide the book—a playbook, Dick,
He must not set his eyes on!
It’s very hard, the churlish elf
Will never let one stab one’s self
Or take a bowl of p’ison!
It’s very hard, but when I want
To die—as Cato did—I can’t,
Or go non compos mentis—
But up he comes, all fire and flame;—
No doubt he’d do the very same
With Kemble for a ‘prentice!
Oh, Dick! Oh, Dick! it was not so
Some half a dozen years ago!
Melpomene was no sneaker,
When, under Reverend Mister Poole,
Each little boy at Enfield School
Became an Enfield speaker!
No cruel master-tailor’s cane
Then thwarted the theatric vein;
The tragic soil had tillage.
O dear dramatic days gone by!
You, Dick, were Richard then—and I
Play’d Hamlet to the village,
Or, as Macbeth, the dagger clutch’d,
Till all the servant-maids were touch’d—
Macbeth, I think, my pet is;
Lord, how we spouted Shakespeare’s works—
Dick, we had twenty little Burkes,
And fifty Master Betties!
Why, there was Julius Cæsar Dunn,
And Norval, Sandy Philip,—one
Of Elocution’s champions—
Genteelly taught by his mamma
To say, not father, but papa,
Kept sheep upon the Grampians!