Among the changes produced by the new importation of passengers, it was my fate to be placed beside the Authoress; who did me the honour of thinking me worthy of her notice, and who rapidly admitted me into the most unbounded confidence, respecting the merits of her own performances, and the demerits of all the world of authorship besides. I listened with the most profound submission; only filling up the pauses, when she stopped to take breath; by a gesture of acquiescence, or that most valuable of all words, “Yes.” She “had met me,” in a hundred places, where I was not conscious of having ever been; and “recognised my style” in a hundred volumes which I had never read. In short, she was charmed with me; and confessed, after half an hour of the most uninterrupted eloquence on her side; that “though evidently cautious of giving an opinion,” I should thenceforth be ranked by her, among the most brilliant conversationalists of the day.
Must I acknowledge, that I forgot as expeditiously as I learned, and, excepting one recollection, all was a blank by dinner time.
But we had met once before, in a scene, which, on afterwards casually turning over some papers, I found recorded on those scraps of foolscap, and in those snatches of rhyme, which argue, I am afraid, a desultory mind. So be it. I disdain to plead “not guilty” to the charge of perfection. I make no attempt to exonerate myself of the cardinal virtues. I write poetry, because it is “better behaved” than prose; and in this feeling I give the history to a sympathizing world.
THE POET’S AUCTION.
As I stroll’d down St. James’s, I heard a voice cry,
“The auction’s beginning, come buy, sir, come buy.”
On a door was a crape, on a wall a placard,
Proclaiming to earth, it had lost its last bard.
In I rambled, and, climbing a dark pair of stairs,
Found all the blue-stockings, all giggling in pairs;
The crooked of tongue, and the crooked of spine,
All ugly as Hecate, and old as the Nine.
Tol de rol.
There were A, B, C, D,’s—all your “ladies of letters,”
Well known for a trick of abusing their betters;
With their beaus! the old snuffling and spectacled throng,
Who haunt their “soirees” for liqueurs and souchong;
There was “dear Mrs. Blunder,” who scribbles Astronomy—
Miss Babble, who “owns” the “sweet” Tales on Gastronomy;
Miss Claptrap, who writes the “Tractarian Apologies,”
With a host of old virgins, all stiff in the ologies.
Tol de rol.
There sat, grim as a ghoul, the sublime Mrs. Tomb,
With rouged Mrs. Lamp, like a corpse in full bloom,
And the hackney-coach tourist, old Mrs. Bazaar,
Who lauds every ass with a ribbon and star;
Describes every tumble-down Schloss, brick by brick,
And quotes her flirtations with “dear Metternich;”
With those frolicsome ladies who visit harāms,
And swallow, like old Lady Mary, their qualms.
Tol de rol.
There was, dress’d à la Chickasaw, Miss Chesapeak,
Who makes novels as naked as “nymphs from the Greek;”
Mrs. Myth, with a chin like a Jew’s upon Hermon;
Mrs. Puff, who reviewed the archbishop’s last sermon;
Miss Scamper, who runs up the Rhine twice a-year,
To tell us how Germans smoke pipes and swill beer.
All the breakfasting set: for the bard “drew a line,”
And ask’d the Magnificoes only, to dine.
Tol de rol.
There stood old Viscount Bungalow, hiding the fire,
As blind as a beetle, the great picture-buyer;
With Earl Dilettante, stone-deaf in both ears,
An opera-fixture these last fifty years;
Little Dr. de Rougemont, the famous Mesmeric,
Who cures all the girls by a touch of hysteric;
And Dean Dismal, court-chaplain, whose pathos and prose
Would beat Mesmer himself at producing a doze.
Tol de rol.
And there, with their eyes starting out of their sockets,
A tribe, whose light fingers I keep from my pockets,
Messieurs les Attaches, all grin and moustache,
With their souls in full scent for our heiresses’ cash.
Four eminent lawyers, with first-rate intentions
Of living the rest of their lives on their pensions,
With six heads of colleges, hurried to town,
To know if Sir Bob, or Lord John, would go down.
Tol de rol.