A LAMENT FOR THE DECADENCE OF CHIVALRY.
Well hast thou said, departed Burke,
All chivalrous romantic work
Is ended now and past!
That iron age, which some have thought
Of metal overwrought,
Ay! where are those heroic knights
Of old-those armadillo wights
Who wore the plated vest?
Great Charlemagne and all his Peers.
Are cold-enjoying, with their spears,
An everlasting rest.
The bold King Arthur sleepeth sound;
So sleep his Knights who gave that Round
Old Table such éclât!
Oh! Time has plucked that plumy brow;
And none engage at tourneys now
But those that go to law.
Where are those old and feudal clans,
Their pikes, and bills, and partisans,
Their hauberks, jerkins, buffs?
A battle was a battle then,
A breathing piece of work; but men
Fight now with powder puffs!
The curtal-axe is out of date!
The good old cross-bow bends to Fate;
'Tis gone the archer's craft;
No tough arm bends the springing yew,
And jolly draymen ride-in lieu
Of Death-upon the shaft.
In cavils when will cavaliers
Set ringing helmets by the ears,
And scatter plumes about?
Or blood-if they are in the vein?
That tap will never run again :
Alas! the casque is out!
No iron crackling now is scored,
By dint of battle-axe and sword,
To find a vital place:
Though certain doctors still pretend,
Awhile before they kill a friend,
To labor through his case!
Farewell, then, ancient men of might-
Crusader, errant squire, and knight !
Our coats and customs, soften.
To rise would only make you weep:
Sleep on in rusty iron, sleep
As in a safety coffin !
MISS KILMANSEGG'S ADVEnt.
To trace the Kilmansegg pedigree,
To the very root of the family tree,
Were a task as rash as ridiculous:
Though antediluvian mists as thick
As a London fog such a line to pick
Were enough, in truth, to puzzle Old Nick,
Not to name Sir Harris Nicholas.
It wouldn't require much verbal strain
To trace the Kil-man, perchance to Cain;
But waiving all such digressions,
Suffice it, according to family lore,
A Patriarch Kilmansegg lived of yore
Who was famed for his great possessions.
Gold! and gold! and gold without end!
He had gold to lay by, and gold to spend,
Gold to give and gold to lend,
And reversions of gold in futuro.
In wealth the family revelled and rolled,
Himself and wife and sons so bold;
And his daughters sang to their harps of gold,
O bella era del' oro!
What different dooms our birthdays bring!
For instance, one little manikin thing!
Survives to wear many a wrinkle ;
While death forbids another to wake,
And a son that took nine moons to make
Expires without even a twinkle.
One is littered under a roof-
Neither wind nor water-proof—
That's the prose of Love in a Cottage-
A puny, naked, shivering wretch,
The whole of whose birthright would not fetch,
Though Robbins himself drew up the sketch,
The bid of a "mess of pottage."
Born of Fortunatus's kin,
Another comes tenderly ushered in
To a prospect all bright and burnished:
No tenant he for life's back slums,
He comes to the world as a gentleman comes
To a lodging ready furnished.
And the other sex-the tender-the fair-
What wide reverses of fate are there!
Whilst Margaret, charmed by the Bulbul rare,
In a garden of Gul reposes,
Poor Peggy hawks nosegays from street to street-
She hates the smell of roses!
Not so with the infant Kilmansegg!
She was not born to steal or beg,
Or gather cresses in ditches;
To plait the straw, or bind the shoe,
Or sit all day to hem and sew,
As females must, and not a few,
To fill their insides with stitches.
She was one of those who by Fortune's boon
Are born, as they say, with a silver spoon
In her mouth, not a wooden ladle:
To speak according to poet's wont,
Plutus as sponsor stood at her font,
And Midas rocked the cradle.
At her début she found her head
On a pillow of down, in a downy bed,
With a damask canopy over;
For although by the vulgar popular saw,
All mothers are said to be "in the straw,"
Some children are born in clover.
Like other babes, at her birth she cried;
Which made a sensation far and wide,
Ay, for twenty miles around her ;
For though to the ear 'twas nothing more
Than an infant's squall, it was really the roar
Of a fifty thousand pounder;
It shook the next heir
In his library chair,
And made him cry, "Confound her!"
O, happy hope of the Kilmanseggs!
Thrice happy in head, and body, and legs,
That her parents had such full pockets!
For had she been born of want and thrift
For care and nursing all adrift,
It is ten to one she had had to make shift
With rickets instead of rockets!
And when she took to squall and kick—
For pain will wring and pins will prick
Even the wealthiest nabob's daughter-
They gave her no vulgar Dally or gin,
But liquor with leaf of gold therein,
Videlicet-Dantzic Water.
In short, she was born, and bred, and nurst,
And drest in the best from the very first,
To please the genteelest censor;
And then, as soon as strength would allow,
Was vaccinated, as babies are now,
With virus ta'en from the best-bred cow
Of Lord Althorpe's-now Earl Spenser.
AN IDEAL HONEYMOON.
The moon--the moon, so silver and cold-
Her fickle temper has oft been told,
Now shady, now bright and sunny;
But, of all the lunar things that change,
The one that shows most fickle and strange
And takes the most eccentric range,
Is the moon-so called-of honey!
To some a full-grown orb revealed,
As big and as round as Norval's shield,
And as bright as a burner Bude-lighted;
To others as dull, and dingy, and damp
As any oleaginous lamp,
Of the regular old parochial stamp,
In a London fog benighted.
To the loving, a bright and constant sphere,
That makes earth's commonest things appear
All poetic, romantic, and tender;
Hanging with jewels a cabbage-stump,
And investing a common post or a pump,
A currant-bush or gooseberry-clump,
With a halo of dreamlike splendor.
For all is bright, and beauteous, and clear,
And the meanest thing most precious and dear
When the magic of love is present:
Love that lends a sweetness and grace
To the humblest spot and the plainest face;
That turns Wilderness Row into Paradise Place,
And Garlic Hill to Mount Pleasant.
Love that sweetens sugarless tea,
And makes contentment and joy agree
With the coarsest boarding and bedding;
Love, that no golden ties can attach,
But nestles under the humblest thatch,
And will fly away from an emperor's match
To dance at a penny wedding!
O, happy, happy, thrice happy state,
When such a bright planet governs the fate
Of a pair of united lovers!
'Tis theirs in spite of the serpent's hiss,
To enjoy the pure primeval kiss
With as much of the old original bliss
As mortality ever recovers.
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