The Banquet served, the brilliant throng Proceed their seats to take; The plate was grand, yet every eye Was fixed upon the Cake! The thistle, rose, and shamrock twined The Prince’s arms and crest; The Prussian Eagle, raised on high, To please the Royal Guest. In matchless beauty stood the cake, The glory of the day; And now each lady hoped to take A little bit away. Prince Albert raised a knife and fork, Victoria looked a frown! So, with a disappointed air, He laid the weapons down. She rose――and the distinguished guests Their last obeisance make! All murmuring, as they left the room, “She never cut the Cake!” The Queen and Prince, like other folks, Their party gone away, Sat for five minutes, chatting o’er The pleasures of the day. “When I’ve enjoyed a _fete_ so much I really cannot tell; From early morn till now midnight, All things went off so well!” “Nay, dear Victoria, pardon me, You make a slight mistake; For every thing _did not go off_.” (He glanced towards the cake.) “Consider our expenses, love; Outgoings are so great, Receiving foreign Potentates With all this form and state. Our family increases fast, And cakes are _very_ dear; The Prussian Eagle laid aside, We’ll keep it for next year!” This ballad shows that the Queen had a reputation for parsimony as long ago as 1842, the moral it enforces is similar to that contained in the old Nursery Rhyme the ballad parodies, concerning the famous plum Pudding of King Arthur:―― “The King and Queen ate of the same, And all the Court beside; And what they could not eat that night, The Queen next morning _fried_.” It is somewhat curious that Poets should so often select incidents in the lives of Royal personages as topics for their poems, considering how ephemeral is the interest they excite. The above ballad was, of course, only a burlesque, and had no claim to longevity, but of all the _serious_ adulatory poems written about the Queen, and her family, during the last fifty years how many have survived? With the exception of some few lines in Tennyson’s Dedications and Odes, the present generation knows nothing of them. Where is Leigh Hunt’s poem on the birth of the Princess Royal? Where is Professor Aytoun’s Ode on the Marriage of the Prince of Wales? Where, oh, where is Mr. _Lewis_ Morris’s Ode for the Opening of the Imperial Institute? Forgotten, all forgotten, and nearly as obsolete as the Birthday Odes of the Poets-Laureate Eusden, Warton, and Pye. Who reads or remembers Martin F. Tupper’s Welcome to the Princess Alexandra? “And thus they warbled, in the style of Tupper, Whose ode to our Princess is thought a fine Sample of metre _Alexandra_-ine―― A poet arithmetical in fame, Who lisp’d in numbers, for the numbers came:” THE JOY BIRDS’ ODE.