Captain Reece

Of all the ships upon the blue,

No ship contained a better crew

Than that of worthy Captain Reece,

Commanding of The Mantelpiece.

He was adored by all his men,

For worthy Captain Reece, R.N.,

Did all that lay within him to

Promote the comfort of his crew.

If ever they were dull or sad,

Their captain danced to them like mad,

Or told, to make the time pass by,

Droll legends of his infancy.

A feather bed had every man,

Warm slippers and hot-water can,

Brown windsor from the captain's store,

A valet, too, to every four.

Did they with thirst in summer burn,

Lo, seltzogenes at every turn,

And on all very sultry days

Cream ices handed round on trays.

Then currant wine and ginger pops

Stood handily on all the "tops;"

And also, with amusement rife,

A "Zoetrope, or Wheel of Life."

New volumes came across the sea

From Mister Mudie's libraree;

The Times and Saturday Review

Beguiled the leisure of the crew.

Kind-hearted Captain Reece, R.N.,

Was quite devoted to his men;

In point of fact, good Captain Reece

Beatified The Mantelpiece.

One summer eve, at half-past ten,

He said (addressing all his men):

"Come, tell me, please, what I can do

To please and gratify my crew.

"By any reasonable plan

I'll make you happy if I can;

My own convenience count as NIL:

It is my duty, and I will."

Then up and answered William Lee

(The kindly captain's coxswain he,

A nervous, shy, low-spoken man),

He cleared his throat and thus began:

"You have a daughter, Captain Reece,

Ten female cousins and a niece,

A Ma, if what I'm told is true,

Six sisters, and an aunt or two.

"Now, somehow, sir, it seems to me,

More friendly-like we all should be,

If you united of 'em to

Unmarried members of the crew.

"If you'd ameliorate our life,

Let each select from them a wife;

And as for nervous me, old pal,

Give me your own enchanting gal!"

Good Captain Reece, that worthy man,

Debated on his coxswain's plan:

"I quite agree," he said, "O BILL;

It is my duty, and I will.

"My daughter, that enchanting gurl,

Has just been promised to an Earl,

And all my other familee

To peers of various degree.

"But what are dukes and viscounts to

The happiness of all my crew?

The word I gave you I'll fulfil;

It is my duty, and I will.

"As you desire it shall befall,

I'll settle thousands on you all,

And I shall be, despite my hoard,

The only bachelor on board."

The boatswain of The Mantelpiece,

He blushed and spoke to Captain Reece:

"I beg your honour's leave," he said;

"If you would wish to go and wed,

"I have a widowed mother who

Would be the very thing for you --

She long has loved you from afar:

She washes for you, Captain R."

The Captain saw the dame that day --

Addressed her in his playful way --

"And did it want a wedding ring?

It was a tempting ickle sing!

"Well, well, the chaplain I will seek,

We'll all be married this day week

At yonder church upon the hill;

It is my duty, and I will!"

The sisters, cousins, aunts, and niece,

And widowed Ma of Captain Reece,

Attended there as they were bid;

It was their duty, and they did.

The Rival Curates

List while the poet trolls

Of Mr. Clayton Hooper,

Who had a cure of souls

At Spiffton-extra-Sooper.

He lived on curds and whey,

And daily sang their praises,

And then he'd go and play

With buttercups and daisies.

Wild crôquet Hooper banned,

And all the sports of Mammon,

He warred with cribbage, and

He exorcised backgammon.

His helmet was a glance

That spoke of holy gladness;

A saintly smile his lance;

His shield a tear of sadness.

His Vicar smiled to see

This armour on him buckled:

With pardonable glee

He blessed himself and chuckled.

"In mildness to abound

My curate's sole design is;

In all the country round

There's none so mild as mine is!"

And Hooper, disinclined

His trumpet to be blowing,

Yet didn't think you'd find

A milder curate going.

A friend arrived one day

At Spiffton-extra-Sooper,

And in this shameful way

He spoke to Mr. Hooper:

"You think your famous name

For mildness can't be shaken,

That none can blot your fame --

But, Hooper, you're mistaken!

"Your mind is not as blank

As that of Hopley Porter,

Who holds a curate's rank

At Assesmilk-cum-Worter.

"He plays the airy flute,

And looks depressed and blighted,

Doves round about him 'toot,'

And lambkins dance delighted.

"He labours more than you

At worsted work, and frames it;

In old maids' albums, too,

Sticks seaweed -- yes, and names it!"

The tempter said his say,

Which pierced him like a needle --

He summoned straight away

His sexton and his beadle.

(These men were men who could

Hold liberal opinions:

On Sundays they were good --

On week-days they were minions.)

"To Hopley Porter go,

Your fare I will afford you --

      Deal him a deadly blow,

And blessings shall reward you.

"But stay -- I do not like

Undue assassination,

And so before you strike,

Make this communication:

"I'll give him this one chance --

If he'll more gaily bear him,

Play crôquet, smoke, and dance,

I willingly will spare him."

They went, those minions true,

To Assesmilk-cum-Worter,

And told their errand to

The Reverend Hopley Porter.

"What?" said that reverend gent,

"Dance through my hours of leisure?

Smoke? -- bathe myself with scent? --

Play crôquet? Oh, with pleasure!

"Wear all my hair in curl?

Stand at my door and wink -- so --

At every passing girl?

My brothers, I should think so!

"For years I've longed for some

      Excuse for this revulsion:

Now that excuse has come --

I do it on compulsion!!!"

He smoked and winked away --

This Reverend Hopley Porter --

The deuce there was to pay

At Assesmilk-cum-Worter.

And Hooper holds his ground,

In mildness daily growing --

They think him, all around,

The mildest curate going.

Only A Dancing Girl

Only a dancing girl,

With an unromantic style,

With borrowed colour and curl,

With fixed mechanical smile,

With many a hackneyed wile,

With ungrammatical lips,

And corns that mar her trips!

Hung from the "flies" in air,

She acts a palpable lie,

She's as little a fairy there

As unpoetical I!

I hear you asking, Why --

Why in the world I sing

This tawdry, tinselled thing?

No airy fairy she,

As she hangs in arsenic green

From a highly impossible tree

In a highly impossible scene

(Herself not over-clean).

For fays don't suffer, I'm told,

From bunions, coughs, or cold.

And stately dames that bring

Their daughters there to see,

Pronounce the "dancing thing"

No better than she should be,

With her skirt at her shameful knee,

And her painted, tainted phiz:

Ah, matron, which of us is?

(And, in sooth, it oft occurs

That while these matrons sigh,

Their dresses are lower than hers,

And sometimes half as high;

And their hair is hair they buy,

And they use their glasses, too,

In a way she'd blush to do.)

But change her gold and green

For a coarse merino gown,

And see her upon the scene

Of her home, when coaxing down

Her drunken father's frown,

In his squalid cheerless den:

She's a fairy truly, then!

General John

The bravest names for fire and flames

And all that mortal durst,

Were General John and Private James,

Of the Sixty-seventy-first.

General John was a soldier tried,

A chief of warlike dons;

A haughty stride and a withering pride

Were Major-General John's.

A sneer would play on his martial phiz,

Superior birth to show;

"Pish!" was a favourite word of his,

And he often said "Ho! ho!"

Full-Private James described might be,

As a man of a mournful mind;

No characteristic trait had he

Of any distinctive kind.

From the ranks, one day, cried Private James,

"Oh! Major-General John,

I've doubts of our respective names,

My mournful mind upon.

"A glimmering thought occurs to me

(Its source I can't unearth),

But I've a kind of a notion we

Were cruelly changed at birth.

"I've a strange idea that each other's names

We've each of us here got on.

Such things have been," said Private James.

"They have!" sneered General John.

"My General John, I swear upon

My oath I think 'tis so -- "

"Pish!" proudly sneered his General John,

And he also said "Ho! ho!"

"My General John! my General John!

My General John!" quoth he,

"This aristocratical sneer upon

Your face I blush to see!

"No truly great or generous cove

Deserving of them names,

Would sneer at a fixed idea that's drove

In the mind of a Private James!"

Said General John, "Upon your claims

No need your breath to waste;

If this is a joke, Full-Private James,

It's a joke of doubtful taste.

"But, being a man of doubtless worth,

If you feel certain quite

That we were probably changed at birth,

I'll venture to say you're right."

So General John as Private James

Fell in, parade upon;

And Private James, by change of names,

Was Major-General John.

To A Little Maid

Come with me, little maid,

Nay, shrink not, thus afraid --

I'll harm thee not!

Fly not, my love, from me --

I have a home for thee --

A fairy grot,

      Where mortal eye

      Can rarely pry,

There shall thy dwelling be!

List to me, while I tell

The pleasures of that cell,

Oh, little maid!

What though its couch be rude,

Homely the only food

Within its shade?

      No thought of care

      Can enter there,

No vulgar swain intrude!

Come with me, little maid,

Come to the rocky shade

I love to sing;

Live with us, maiden rare --

Come, for we "want" thee there,

Thou elfin thing,

      To work thy spell,

      In some cool cell

In stately Pentonville!

John And Freddy

John courted lovely Mary Ann,

So likewise did his brother, Freddy.

Fred was a very soft young man,

While John, though quick, was most unsteady.

Fred was a graceful kind of youth,

But John was very much the strongest.

"Oh, dance away," said she, "in truth,

I'll marry him who dances longest."

John tries the maiden's taste to strike

With gay, grotesque, outrageous dresses,

And dances comically, like

Clodoche and Co., at the Princess's.

But Freddy tries another style,

He knows some graceful steps and does 'em --

A breathing Poem -- Woman's smile --

A man all poesy and buzzem.

Now Freddy's operatic pas --

Now Johnny;s hornpipe seems entrapping:

Now Freddy's graceful entrechats --

Now Johnny's skilful "cellar-flapping."

For many hours -- for many days --

For many weeks performed each brother,

For each was active in his ways,

And neither would give in to t'other.

After a month of this, they say

(The maid was getting bored and moody)

A wandering curate passed that way

And talked a lot of goody-goody.

"Oh my," said he, with solemn frown,

"I tremble for each dancing frater,

Like unregenerated clown

And harlequin at some the-ayter."

He showed that men, in dancing, do

Both impiously and absurdly,

And proved his proposition true,

With Firstly, Secondly, and Thirdly.

For months both John and Freddy danced,

The curate's protests little heeding;

For months the curate's words enhanced

The sinfulness of their proceeding.

At length they bowed to Nature's rule --

Their steps grew feeble and unsteady,

Till Freddy fainted on a stool,

And Johnny on the top of Freddy.

"Decide!" quoth they, "let him be named,

Who henceforth as his wife may rank you."

"I've changed my views," the maiden said,

"I only marry curates, thank you!"

Says Freddy, "Here is goings on!

To bust myself with rage I'm ready."

"I'll be a curate!" whispers John --

"And I," exclaimed poetic Freddy.

But while they read for it, these chaps,

The curate booked the maiden bonny --

And when she's buried him, perhaps,

She'll marry Frederick or Johnny.

Sir Guy The Crusader

Sir Guy was a doughty crusader,

A muscular knight,

Ever ready to fight,

A very determined invader,

     And Dickey de Lion's delight.

Lenore was a Saracen maiden,

Brunette, statuesque,

The reverse of grotesque,

Her pa was a bagman from Aden,

     Her mother she played in burlesque.

A Coryphée, pretty and loyal,

In amber and red

The ballet she led;

Her mother performed at the Royal,

     Lenore at the Saracen's Head.

Of face and of figure majestic,

She dazzled the cits --

Ecstaticised pits; --

Her troubles were only domestic,

     But drove her half out of her wits.

Her father incessantly lashed her,

On water and bread

She was grudgingly fed;

Whenever her father he thrashed her

     Her mother sat down on her head.

Guy saw her, and loved her, with reason,

For beauty so bright

Sent him mad with delight;

He purchased a stall for the season,

     And sat in it every night.

His views were exceedingly proper,

He wanted to wed,

So he called at her shed

And saw her progenitor whop her --

     Her mother sit down on her head.

"So pretty," said he, "and so trusting!

You brute of a dad,

You unprincipled cad,

Your conduct is really disgusting,

     Come, come, now admit it's too bad!

"You're a turbaned old Turk, and malignant --

Your daughter Lenore

I intensely adore,

And I cannot help feeling indignant,

     A fact that I hinted before;

"To see a fond father employing

A deuce of a knout

For to bang her about,

To a sensitive lover's annoying."

     Said the bagman, "Crusader, get out."

Says Guy, "Shall a warrior laden

With a big spiky knob,

Sit in peace on his cob

While a beautiful Saracen maiden

     Is whipped by a Saracen snob?

"To London I'll go from my charmer."

Which he did, with his loot

(Seven hats and a flute),

And was nabbed for his Sydenham armour

     At Mr. Ben-Samuel's suit.

Sir Guy he was lodged in the Compter,

Her pa, in a rage,

Died (don't know his age),

His daughter, she married the prompter,

     Grew bulky and quitted the stage.

Haunted

Haunted? Ay, in a social way

By a body of ghosts in dread array;

But no conventional spectres they --

Appalling, grim, and tricky:

I quail at mine as I'd never quail

At a fine traditional spectre pale,

With a turnip head and a ghostly wail,

And a splash of blood on the dickey!

Mine are horrible, social ghosts, --

Speeches and women and guests and hosts,

Weddings and morning calls and toasts,

In every bad variety:

Ghosts who hover about the grave

Of all that's manly, free, and brave:

You'll find their names on the architrave

Of that charnel-house, Society.

Black Monday -- black as its school-room ink --

With its dismal boys that snivel and think

Of its nauseous messes to eat and drink,

And its frozen tank to wash in.

That was the first that brought me grief,

And made me weep, till I sought relief

In an emblematical handkerchief,

To choke such baby bosh in.

First and worst in the grim array-

Ghosts of ghosts that have gone their way,

Which I wouldn't revive for a single day

For all the wealth of Plutus --

Are the horrible ghosts that school-days scared:

If the classical ghost that Brutus dared

Was the ghost of his "Cæsar" unprepared,

I'm sure I pity Brutus.

I pass to critical seventeen;

The ghost of that terrible wedding scene,

When an elderly Colonel stole my Queen,

And woke my dream of heaven.

No schoolgirl decked in her nurse-room curls

Was my gushing innocent Queen of Pearls;

If she wasn't a girl of a thousand girls,

She was one of forty-seven!

I see the ghost of my first cigar,

Of the thence-arising family jar --

Of my maiden brief (I was at the Bar,

And I called the Judge "Your wushup!")

Of reckless days and reckless nights,

With wrenched-off knockers, extinguished lights,

Unholy songs and tipsy fights,

Which I strove in vain to hush up.

Ghosts of fraudulent joint-stock banks,

Ghosts of "copy, declined with thanks,"

Of novels returned in endless ranks,

And thousands more, I suffer.

The only line to fitly grace

My humble tomb, when I've run my race,

Is, "Reader, this is the resting-place

Of an unsuccessful duffer."

I've fought them all, these ghosts of mine,

But the weapons I've used are sighs and brine,

And now that I'm nearly forty-nine,

Old age is my chiefest bogy;

For my hair is thinning away at the crown,

And the silver fights with the worn-out brown;

And a general verdict sets me down

As an irreclaimable fogy.

The Bishop And The 'Busman

It was a Bishop bold,

And London was his see,

He was short and stout and round about

And zealous as could be.

It also was a Jew,

Who drove a Putney 'bus --

For flesh of swine however fine

He did not care a cuss.

His name was Hash Baz Ben,

And Jedediah too,

And Solomon and Zabulon --

This 'bus-directing Jew.

The Bishop said, said he,

"I'll see what I can do

To Christianise and make you wise,

You poor benighted Jew."

So every blessed day

That 'bus he rode outside,

From Fulham town, both up and down,

And loudly thus he cried:

"His name is Hash Baz Ben,

And Jedediah too,

And Solomon and Zabulon --

This 'bus-directing Jew."

At first the 'busman smiled,

And rather liked the fun --

He merely smiled, that Hebrew child,

And said, "Eccentric one!"

And gay young dogs would wait

To see the 'bus go by

(These gay young dogs, in striking togs),

To hear the Bishop cry:

"Observe his grisly beard,

His race it clearly shows,

He sticks no fork in ham or pork --

Observe, my friends, his nose.

"His name is Hash Baz Ben,

And Jedediah too,

And Solomon and Zabulon --

This 'bus-directing Jew."

But though at first amused,

Yet after seven years,

This Hebrew child got rather riled,

And melted into tears.

He really almost feared

To leave his poor abode,

His nose, and name, and beard became

A byword on that road.

At length he swore an oath,

The reason he would know --

"I'll call and see why ever he

Does persecute me so!"

The good old Bishop sat

On his ancestral chair,

The 'busman came, sent up his name,

And laid his grievance bare.

"Benighted Jew," he said

(The good old Bishop did),

"Be Christian, you, instead of Jew --

Become a Christian kid!

"I'll ne'er annoy you more."

"Indeed?" replied the Jew;

"Shall I be freed?" "You will, indeed!"

Then "Done!" said he, "with you!"

The organ which, in man,

Between the eyebrows grows,

Fell from his face, and in its place

He found a Christian nose.

His tangled Hebrew beard,

Which to his waist came down,

Was now a pair of whiskers fair --

His name Adolphus Brown!

He wedded in a year

That prelate's daughter Jane,

He's grown quite fair -- has auburn hair --

His wife is far from plain.