“I’ll give him this one chance— If he’ll more gaily bear him, Play croquêt, smoke, and dance, I willingly will spare him.” They went, those minions true, To Assesmilk-cum-Worter, And told their errand to The REVEREND HOPLEY PORTER. “What?” said that reverend gent, “Dance through my hours of leisure? Smoke?—bathe myself with scent?— Play croquêt? Oh, with pleasure! “Wear all my hair in curl? Stand at my door and wink—so— At every passing girl? My brothers, I should think so! “For years I’ve longed for some Excuse for this revulsion: Now that excuse has come— I do it on compulsion!!!” He smoked and winked away— This REVEREND HOPLEY PORTER— The deuce there was to pay At Assesmilk-cum-Worter. And HOOPER holds his ground, In mildness daily growing— They think him, all around, The mildest curate going. ONLY A DANCING GIRL. ONLY a dancing girl, With an unromantic style, With borrowed colour and curl, With fixed mechanical smile, With many a hackneyed wile, With ungrammatical lips, And corns that mar her trips. Hung from the “flies” in air, She acts a palpable lie, She’s as little a fairy there As unpoetical I! I hear you asking, Why— Why in the world I sing This tawdry, tinselled thing? No airy fairy she, As she hangs in arsenic green From a highly impossible tree In a highly impossible scene (Herself not over-clean). For fays don’t suffer, I’m told, From bunions, coughs, or cold. And stately dames that bring Their daughters there to see, Pronounce the “dancing thing” No better than she should be, With her skirt at her shameful knee, And her painted, tainted phiz: Ah, matron, which of us is? (And, in sooth, it oft occurs That while these matrons sigh, Their dresses are lower than hers, And sometimes half as high; And their hair is hair they buy, And they use their glasses, too, In a way she’d blush to do.) But change her gold and green For a coarse merino gown, And see her upon the scene Of her home, when coaxing down Her drunken father’s frown, In his squalid cheerless den: She’s a fairy truly, then! TO A LITTLE MAID BY A POLICEMAN. COME with me, little maid, Nay, shrink not, thus afraid— I’ll harm thee not! Fly not, my love, from me— I have a home for thee— A fairy grot, Where mortal eye Can rarely pry, There shall thy dwelling be! List to me, while I tell The pleasures of that cell, Oh, little maid! What though its couch be rude, Homely the only food Within its shade? No thought of care Can enter there, No vulgar swain intrude!