(After The Traveller, by Oliver Goldsmith).
“Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,
A single horseman passes Rotten row;
In Brookes’s sits one quidnunc to peruse
The broad dull sheet which tells the lack of news.
At White’s a lonely Brummell lifts his glass
To see two empty Hackney Coaches pass;
The timid housemaid, issuing forth, can dare
To take her lover’s arm in Grosvenor square.
From shop deserted hastes the prentice dandy,