In times bygone, when each man cut his quill, With little Perryan skill, What horrid, awkward, bungling tools of trade Appeared the writing implements home-made! What Pens were sliced, hewed, hacked, and haggled out, Slit or unslit, with many a various snout, Aquiline, Roman, crooked, square, and snubby. Stumpy and stubby; Some capable of ladye-billets neat, Some only fit for ledger-keeping clerk, And some to grub down Peter Stubbs his mark, Or smudge through some illegible receipt; Others in florid caligraphic plans, Equal to ships, and wiggy heads, and swans! To try in any common inkstands, then, With all their miscellaneous stocks, To find a decent pen, Was like a dip into a lucky box: You drew--and got one very curly, And split like endive in some hurly-burly; The next unslit, and square at end, a spade, The third, incipient pop-gun, not yet made; The fourth a broom; the fifth of no avail, Turned upward, like a rabbit's tail; And last, not least, by way of a relief, A stump that Master Richard, James or John, Had tried his candle-cookery upon, Making "roast-beef!" Not so thy Perryan Pens! True to their M's and N's, They do not with a whizzing zig-zag split, Straddle, turn up their noses, sulk, and spit, Or drop large dots, Hugh full-stop blots, Where even semicolons were unfit. They will not frizzle up, or, broom-like, drudge In sable sludge-- Nay, bought at proper "Patent Perryan" shops, They write good grammar, sense, and mind their stops Compose both prose and verse, the sad and merry-- For when the editor, whose pains compile The grown-up Annual, or the Juvenile, Vaunteth his articles, not women's, men's, But lays "by the most celebrated Pens," What means he but thy Patent Pens, my Perry? Pleasant they are to feel! So firm! so flexible! composed of steel So finely tempered--fit for tenderest Miss To give her passion breath, Or kings to sign the warrant stern of death-- But their supremest merit still is this, Write with them all your days, Tragedy, Comedy, all kinds of plays-- (No dramatist should ever be without 'em)-- And, just conceive the bliss-- There is so little of the goose about 'em, One's safe from any hiss! Ah! who can paint that first great awful night, Big with a blessing or a blight, When the poor dramatist, all fume and fret, Fuss, fidget, fancy, fever, funking, fright, Ferment, fault-fearing, faintness--more f's yet: Flushed, frigid, flurried, flinching, fitful, flat, Add famished, fuddled, and fatigued, to that, Funeral, fate-foreboding--sits in doubt, Or rather doubt with hope, a wretched marriage To see his play upon the stage come out; No stage to him! it is Thalia's carriage, And he is sitting on the spikes behind it, Striving to look as if he didn't mind it!