There are some fragments of an Epilogue apparently intended to be spoken in the character of a woman of fashion, which give a lively notion of what the poem would have been, when complete. The high carriages, that had just then come into fashion, are thus adverted to:—
"My carriage stared at!—none so high or fine—
Palmer's mail-coach shall be a sledge to mine.
* * * * *
No longer now the youths beside us stand,
And talking lean, and leaning press the hand;
But ogling upward, as aloft we sit,
Straining, poor things, their ankles and their wit,
And, much too short the inside to explore,
Hang like supporters, half way up the door."
The approach of a "veteran husband," to disturb these flirtations and chase away the lovers, is then hinted at:—
"To persecuted virtue yield assistance,
And for one hour teach younger men their distance,
Make them, in very spite, appear discreet,
And mar the public mysteries of the street."
The affectation of appearing to make love, while talking on different matters, is illustrated by the following simile:
"So when dramatic statesmen talk apart,
With practis'd gesture and heroic start,
The plot's their theme, the gaping galleries guess,
While Hull and Fearon think of nothing less."
The following lines seem to belong to the same Epilogue:—
"The Campus Martius of St. James's Street,
Where the beau's cavalry pace to and fro,
Before they take the field in Rotten Row;
Where Brooks' Blues and Weltze's Light Dragoons
Dismount in files and ogle in platoons."
He had also begun another Epilogue, directed against female gamesters, of which he himself repeated a couplet or two to Mr. Rogers a short time before his death, and of which there remain some few scattered traces among his papers:—
"A night of fretful passion may consume
All that thou hast of beauty's gentle bloom,
And one distemper'd hour of sordid fear
Print on thy brow the wrinkles of a year.
[Footnote: These four lines, as I have already remarked, are taken—with
little change of the words, but a total alteration of the sentiment—from
the verses which he addressed to Mrs. Sheridan in the year 1773. See page
83.]