Ye Oxford Dons that Cockneys be, Among your gardens tidy, If you would ask a maid to tea, D’ye call the girl “a lydy”? And if you’d sing of Mr. Fry, And need a rhyme to “swiper,” Are you so cruel as to try To fill the blank with “paper”? Oh, Hoxford was a pleasant plice To many a poet dear, And Saccharissa had the grice In Hoxford to appear. But Waller, if to Cytherea He prayed at any time, Did not implore “her friendly ear,” And think he had a rhyme. Now, if you ask to what are due The horrors which I mention, I think we owe them to the U- Niversity extension. From Hoxton and from Poplar come The ’Arriets and ’Arries, And so the Oxford Muse is dumb, Or, when she sings, miscarries. _Rococo_. (“My name is also named ‘Played Out.’”) _When first we heard Rossetti sing_, _We twanged the melancholy lyre_, _We sang like this_, _like anything_, _When first we heard Rossetti sing_. _And all our song was faded Spring_, _And dead delight and dark desire_, _When first we heard Rossetti sing_, _We twanged the melancholy lyre_. (_And this is how we twanged it_)— _The New Orpheus to his Eurydice_. WHY wilt thou woo, ah, strange Eurydice, A languid laurell’d Orpheus in the shades, For here is company of shadowy maids, Hero, and Helen and Psamathoë: And life is like the blossom on the tree, And never tumult of the world invades, The low light wanes and waxes, flowers and fades, And sleep is sweet, and dreams suffice for me; “Go back, and seek the sunlight,” as of old, The wise ghost-mother of Odysseus said, Here am I half content, and scarce a-cold, But one light fits the living, one the dead; Good-bye, be glad, forget! thou canst not hold In thy kind arms, alas! this powerless head. _When first we heard Rossetti sing_, _We also wrote this kind of thing_! _The Food of Fiction_. TO breakfast, dinner, or to lunch My steps are languid, once so speedy; E’en though, like the old gent in _Punch_, “Not hungry, but, thank goodness! greedy.” I gaze upon the well-spread board, And have to own—oh, contradiction! Though every dainty it afford, There’s nothing like the food of fiction. “The better half”—how good the sound! Of Scott’s or Ainsworth’s “venison pasty,” In cups of old Canary drowned, (Which probably was very nasty). The beefsteak pudding made by Ruth To cheer Tom Pinch in his affliction, Ah me, in all the world of truth, There’s nothing like the food of fiction!