Is it a party in a parlour?
Cramm’d just as they on earth were cramm’d—
Some sipping punch, some sipping tea,
But, as you by their faces see,
All silent and all damn’d.
But this he no doubt wrote quite seriously and without any idea that the verse was humorous. Shelley placed this verse at the head of his parody of Peter Bell, and Wordsworth omitted it from the poem after 1819.
And, were I not, as a man may say, cautious
How I trench, more than needs, on the nauseous,