“Alas! I feel I am no actor here!” ’Tis real hangmen real scourges bear! Prepare Maria, for a horrid tale Will turn thy very rouge to deadly pale; Will make thy hair, tho’ erst from gipsy poll’d, By barber woven, and by barber sold, Though twisted smooth with Harry’s nicest care, Like hoary bristles to erect and stare. The hero of the mimic scene, no more I start in Hamlet, in Othello roar; Or, haughty Chieftain, ’mid the din of arms In Highland Bonnet, woo Malvina’s charms; While sans-culottes stoop up the mountain high, And steal from me Maria’s prying eye. Blest Highland bonnet! once my proudest dress, Now prouder still, Maria’s temples press; I see her wave thy towering plumes afar, And call each coxcomb to the wordy war: I see her face the first of Ireland’s sons, And even out-Irish his Hibernian bronze; The crafty Colonel leaves the tartan’d lines, For other wars, where he a hero shines: The hopeful youth, in Scottish senate bred, Who owns a Bushby’s heart without the head, Comes ’mid a string of coxcombs, to display That veni, vidi, vici, is his way: The shrinking Bard adown the alley skulks, And dreads a meeting worse than Woolwich hulks: Though there, his heresies in Church and State Might well award him Muir and Palmer’s fate: Still she undaunted reels and rattles on, And dares the public like a noontide sun. What scandal called Maria’s jaunty stagger The ricket reeling of a crooked swagger? Whose spleen (e’en worse than Burns’ venom, when He dips in gall unmix’d his eager pen, And pours his vengeance in the burning line,)— Who christen’d thus Maria’s lyre-divine The idiot strum of Vanity bemus’d, And even the abuse of Poesy abus’d?— Who called her verse a Parish Workhouse, made For motley foundling Fancies, stolen or strayed? A Workhouse! ah, that sound awakes my woes, And pillows on the thorn my rack’d repose! In durance vile here must I wake and weep, And all my frowsy couch in sorrow steep; That straw where many a rogue has lain of yore, And vermin’d gipsies litter’d heretofore. Why, Lonsdale, thus thy wrath on vagrants pour? Must earth no rascal save thyself endure? Must thou alone in guilt immortal swell, And make a vast monopoly of hell? Thou know’st the Virtues cannot hate thee worse; The Vices also, must they club their curse? Or must no tiny sin to others fall, Because thy guilt’s supreme enough for all?