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 croquêt? 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 PORTERThe 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.

ON

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!