LONG COMMONS AND SHORT COMMONS.
When lo! when ev’rything to hope responded,
Whether his head was turn’d by his prosperity,
Whether he had some sly intrigue, in verity,
The man absconded!
His anxious Wife in vain
Placarded Leather Lane,
And all the suburbs with descriptive bills,
Such as are issued when from homes and tills
Clerks, dogs, cats, lunatics, and children roam;
Besides advertisements in all the journals,
Or weeklies or diurnals,
Beginning “Left his Home”—
The sausage-maker, spite of white and black,
Never came back.
Never, alive!—But on the seventh night,
Just when the yawning grave its dead releases,
Filling his bedded wife with sore affright
In walk’d his grisly Sprite,
In fifty thousand pieces!
“O Mary!” so it seem’d
In hollow melancholy tone to say,
Whilst thro’ its airy shape the moonlight gleam’d
With scarcely dimmer ray—
“O Mary! let your hopes no longer flatter,
Prepare at once to drink of sorrow’s cup—
It ain’t no use to mince the matter—
The Engine’s chopp’d me up!”
TO JOSEPH HUME, ESQ., M.P.
“I lisped in numbers, for the numbers came.”
H, Mr. Hume, thy name
Is travelling post upon the road to fame,
With four fast horses and two sharp postilions;
Thy reputation
Has friends by numeration,
Units, Tens, Hundreds, Thousands, Millions.
Whenever public men together dine,
They drink to thee
With three times three—
That’s nine.
And oft a votary proposes then
To add unto the cheering one cheer more—
Nine and One are Ten;
Or somebody, for thy honour still more keen,
Insists on four times four—
Sixteen!