The Bab Ballads - William Schwenck Gilbert

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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 croquêt, 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 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 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

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