To wed or not to wed—that is the question
Which weighs me down like midnight indigestion.
Whether it is nobler in a man to bear
The stings and taunts of an outrageous fair,
Or to take arms against a married life,
And, by opposing, shun it? To wed a wife—
No more; for by a wife we say we end
The undarned stockings laundresses won't mend,
The buttonless shirts and all the botheration
That single flesh is heir to—a consummation
Devoutly to be wished—forswear the club
And wed, perchance, a flirt,—ay, there's the rub;
For in our married lives what rows there would be,
If all were not precisely as it should be!
And who would bear a scolding vixen's tongue,
Backed by a mother-in-law, not over young;
The cook, who, when annoyed, the dinner burns,
The insolence of Buttons, and the spurns
That patient masters from their servants take,
When one a quiet house might always make
By keeping single? I'll not change my lot,
But rather bear the ills that I have got
Than fly to others that I yet know not.
In another passage, the "spiritualistic" craze is satirised in a so-called "chant":—
Abracadabra, mystic word, come down to us from the cosmogony,
'Tis the spell that binds the spirits beneath Mr. Home's mahogany;
You've been to a séance, of course, when darkness baffles the searcher,
And a spectral hand rises quivering—sceptics hint that it's gutta-percha.
When ghostly fingers are tickling some foolish old fellow's fat dumpy knee,
And the medium floats as easily as a modern bubble company;
'Tis then that the spirits are working—to asses the men they transmogrify
By spells that have nothing in common with the generally received orthography.
Two of the burlesques on "Arabian Nights" topics are from the pen of Francis Talfourd. First came—in 1852, at the Olympic—"Ganem, the Slave of Love" (with Miss Fanny Maskell as Fetnah, the caliph's favourite); and later—in 1854, at the St. James's—"Abon Hassan, or the Hunt after Happiness" (with Mr. Toole as Haroun-al-Raschid). In the former piece the wealth of felicitous punning is remarkable. Thus, in his very, first speech, Ganem, coming in intoxicated, says:—
All things around me seem involved in doubt,
I only know that I've been, dining out.
I've made some blunder, sure—but how I've made it
Is from my dizzy pate quite dissipated.
A light upon my understanding breaks—
I must be drunk! Or what is it thus makes
My head to stoop and butt the ground incline,
Unless the butt of beer or stoop of wine?
Now, to go on—so—Ganem, my boy, steady—
I can't go far—I'm too far gone already.
Ah! could I swarm this lime, I might, sans doute,
Learn from its friendly branch my proper route.
In other places we read:—
A needlewoman's life's, at best, but sew-sew
(which is as true as it is witty);
Alkalomb. He had the freedom, sir, to squeeze me.
Giaffar. Yes,
You wouldn't check the freedom of the press.