Where are my friends? I am alone;
No playmate shares my beaker:
Some lie beneath the churchyard stone,
And some—before the Speaker;
And some compose a tragedy,
And some compose a rondeau;
And some draw sword for Liberty,
And some draw pleas for John Doe.
Tom Mill was used to blacken eyes
Without the fear of sessions;
Charles Medlar loathed false quantities
As much as false professions;
Now Mill keeps order in the land,
A magistrate pedantic;
And Medlar’s feet repose unscanned
Beneath the wide Atlantic.
Wild Nick, whose oaths made such a din,
Does Dr. Martext’s duty;
And Mullion, with that monstrous chin,
Is married to a Beauty;
And Darrell studies, week by week,
His Mant, and not his Manton;
And Ball, who was but poor in Greek,
Is very rich at Canton.
And I am eight-and-twenty now;—
The world’s cold chains have bound me;
And darker shades are on my brow,
And sadder scenes around me;
In Parliament I fill my seat,
With many other noodles;
And lay my head in Jermyn Street
And sip my hock at Boodle’s.
But often when the cares of life
Have sent my temples aching,
When visions haunt me of a wife,
When duns await my waking,
When Lady Jane is in a pet,
Or Hoby in a hurry,
When Captain Hazard wins a bet,
Or Beaulieu spoils a curry,—
For hours and hours I think and talk
Of each remembered hobby;
I long to lounge in Poet’s walk,
To shiver in the Lobby;
I wish that I could run away
From House, and Court, and Levée,
Where bearded men appear to-day
Just Eton boys grown heavy,—
That I could bask in childhood’s sun,
And dance o’er childhood’s roses,
And find huge wealth in one pound one,
Vast wit in broken roses,
And play Sir Giles at Datchet Lane,
And call the milk-maids Houris,—
That I could be a boy again,—
A happy boy,—at Drury’s.
ARRIVALS AT A WATERING-PLACE.
“I play a spade.—Such strange new faces
Are flocking in from near and far;
Such frights!—(Miss Dobbs holds all the aces)—
One can’t imagine who they are:
The lodgings at enormous prices,—
New donkeys, and another fly;
And Madame Bonbon out of ices,
Although we’re scarcely in July:
We’re quite as sociable as any,
But one old horse can scarcely crawl;
And really, where there are so many
We can’t tell where we ought to call.
“Pray who has seen the odd old fellow
Who took the Doctor’s house last week?—
A pretty chariot,—livery yellow,
Almost as yellow as his cheek;
A widower, sixty-five, and surly,
And stiffer than a poplar tree;
Drinks rum and water, gets up early
To dip his carcass in the sea;
He’s always in a monstrous hurry,
And always talking of Bengal;
They say his cook makes noble curry;
I think, Louisa, we should call.