‘From now until we go in June
I shall hear nothing but this tune:
Whether I like Long’s “Vashti,” or
Like Leslie’s “Naughty Kitty” more;
With all that critics, right or wrong,
Have said of Leslie or of Long.’
Among the events of every season are the fashionable marriages, one of which is described for us by Mr. Frederick Locker in his ‘St. George’s, Hanover Square.’ On the subject of the belles of the season I need not dwell. Praed’s ‘Belle of the Ballroom’ was a provincial beauty; but not so, assuredly, was Pope’s and Lord Peterborough’s Mrs. Howard, Congreve’s Miss Temple, Lord Chesterfield’s Duchess of Richmond, Fox’s Mrs. Crewe, Lord Lytton’s La Marquise, Mr. Aïdè’s Beauty Clare, or Mr. Austin Dobson’s Avice. Of London balls and routs the poets have been many, including Edward Fitzgerald, C. S. Calverley, and Mr. Dobson again. The opera, so far as I know, has had very few celebrants in rhyme. The ‘Monday Pops’ figure in ‘Patience’ with the Grosvenor Gallery, but have not otherwise, I fancy, been distinguished in song. On the whole, however, the Season has received poetic tributes at once numerous and interesting.
THE ‘RECESS’ IN RHYME.
f the Season has had its laureates, so has the Recess. Why not? Of the two, the latter has the more numerous elements of poetry. Town has its charms for the versifier; there is much to say about its streets, its parks, its belles, its balls, its many diversions. But there is even more, surely, to say about the country, with its ancestral halls, its watering-places, and its shootings, as well as about the seaside and the various attractions outre-mer. Surely, of the two, life out of town has even more delights, for the poet, at any rate, than life in town. Sylvester is reported to have said that people, after tiring in town, go to re-tire in the country. But the saying, if epigrammatic, is not strictly true. No doubt some of us feel bored, wherever we may go, or whatever we may do. But to most people, I imagine, the Recess, if spent out of London, is a time of genuine enjoyment, and certainly it is a time which deserves to be distinguished in song.
The Recess, as spent in London, has been drawn by the rhymers in depressing tints. The picture painted by Haynes Bayly remains—for the fashionable world, at least—almost as true as it ever was. As he said: