Once who were so gay as we trumps of the team? Now our glory hath vanish’d away, like a dream; Doom’d to suffer adversity’s punishing lash, For the villainous Railroads have settled our hash. Patricians no more of our craft will be backers, And our elegant cattle must go to the knackers; Guards, porters, and stablemen now on a level, And all the road innkeepers book’d for the devil. We four-in-hand worthies, however desarving, Will have nothing in hand to prevent us from starving, Compell’d by hard treatment our colours to strike, We may shortly turn Chartists and handle the pike. Our beavers broad-brimm’d, and our togs out and out, Must, the needful to raise, be soon shov’d up the spout; Our fine, portly forms will be meagre as spectres,-- So much for these steam and these railroad projectors. By Heavens! ’tis a cruel affair, and the nation In justice are bound to afford compensation; And, as on the shelf we must shortly be laid, To found an asylum for Dragsmen decay’d. There, taking our pint in all brotherly love, We may chaff at the swells and the prads as we druv, While spectators, admiring, exclaim’d with a shout, “We’re bless’d if that ’ere ain’t a spicy turn-out!” And how, as we tied round our necks the silk fogle, The rosy-cheek’d barmaids would tip us the ogle; And when all was ready the ribbons to seize, How slyly the darlings would give us a squeeze. A plague upon Railways! the system be blowed! Grim engineers now are the lords of the road; And passengers now are conveyed to their goal, Not by steaming of cattle, but steaming of coal. ’Tis a black, burning shame! Must our glory be crush’d, And the guard’s lively bugle to silence be hush’d? Oh! ’tis fit that our wrongs we should freely declare, For we always look’d out for the thing that was _fare_. Let mourning as gloomy as midnight be spread O’er the _Swan with Two Necks_ and the _Saracen’s Head_; Let the _Black Bull_, in Holborn, be cow’d, and the knell Of glory departed be heard from the _Bell_. The _Blossoms_ must speedily fade from the bough, And cross’d are the hopes of the _Golden Cross_ now; The _White Horse_ must founder, the _Mountain_ fall down, The _Gloster_ be clos’d, and the _Bear_ be done _Brown_. The _Eclipse_ is eclips’d, and the _Sovereign_ is dead, And the _Red Rover_ now never roves from its shed; The _Times_ are disjointed, the _Blucher_ at peace, And the _Telegraph_ shortly from working must cease. The _Victory_ now must submit to defeat, And the _Wellington_ own he is cruelly beat; The sport is all up with the fam’d _Tally-Ho_, And the old _Regulator_ no longer will go.