[30] These authors were happy in having Miss Ellen Farren to represent their hero, Miss Henrietta Lindley being the Badoura, W. H. Stephens and Mrs. Stephens the King and Queen, and Mr. Soutar the Skidamalink (King of the Isle of Ebony) (Olympic, 1865). 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:--