The Bon Gaultier Ballads
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William Edmonstoune Aytoun >> The Bon Gaultier Ballads
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"Mary, thou angel of my life,
Thou ever good and kind;
'Tis not, believe me, my dear wife,
The anguish of the mind!
"It is not in my bosom, dear,
No, nor my brain, in sooth;
But Mary, oh, I feel it here,
Here in my wisdom tooth!
"Then give,--oh, first best antidote,--
Sweet partner of my bed!
Give me thy flannel petticoat
To wrap around my head!"
The Invocation.
"Brother, thou art very weary,
And thine eye is sunk and dim,
And thy neckcloth's tie is crumpled,
And thy collar out of trim;
There is dust upon thy visage,--
Think not, Charles, I would hurt ye,
When I say, that altogether
You appear extremely dirty.
"Frown not, brother, now, but hie thee
To thy chamber's distant room;
Drown the odours of the ledger
With the lavender's perfume.
Brush the mud from off thy trousers,
O'er the china basin kneel,
Lave thy brows in water softened
With the soap of Old Castile.
"Smooth the locks that o'er thy forehead
Now in loose disorder stray;
Pare thy nails, and from thy whiskers
Cut those ragged points away;
Let no more thy calculations
Thy bewildered brain beset;
Life has other hopes than Cocker's,
Other joys than tare and tret.
"Haste thee, for I ordered dinner,
Waiting to the very last,
Twenty minutes after seven,
And 'tis now the quarter past.
'Tis a dinner which Lucullus
Would have wept with joy to see,
One, might wake the soul of Curtis
From death's drowsy atrophy.
"There is soup of real turtle,
Turbot, and the dainty sole;
And the mottled roe of lobsters
Blushes through the butter-bowl.
There the lordly haunch of mutton,
Tender as the mountain grass,
Waits to mix its ruddy juices
With the girdling caper-sauce.
"There a stag, whose branching forehead
Spoke him monarch of the herds,
He whose flight was o'er the heather
Swift as through the air the bird's,
Yields for thee a dish of cutlets;
And the haunch that wont to dash
O'er the roaring mountain-torrent,
Smokes in most delicious hash.
"There, besides, are amber jellies
Floating like a golden dream;
Ginger from the far Bermudas,
Dishes of Italian cream;
And a princely apple-dumpling,
Which my own fair fingers wrought,
Shall unfold its nectared treasures
To thy lips all smoking hot.
"Ha! I see thy brow is clearing,
Lustre flashes from thine eyes;
To thy lips I see the moisture
Of anticipation rise.
Hark! the dinner-bell is sounding!"
"Only wait one moment, Jane:
I'll be dressed, and down, before you
Can get up the iced champagne!"
The Husband's Petition.
Come hither, my heart's darling,
Come, sit upon my knee,
And listen, while I whisper
A boon I ask of thee.
You need not pull my whiskers
So amorously, my dove;
'Tis something quite apart from
The gentle cares of love.
I feel a bitter craving--
A dark and deep desire,
That glows beneath my bosom
Like coals of kindled fire.
The passion of the nightingale,
When singing to the rose,
Is feebler than the agony
That murders my repose!
Nay, dearest! do not doubt me,
Though madly thus I speak--
I feel thy arms about me,
Thy tresses on my cheek:
I know the sweet devotion
That links thy heart with mine,--
I know my soul's emotion
Is doubly felt by thine:
And deem not that a shadow
Hath fallen across my love:
No, sweet, my love is shadowless,
As yonder heaven above:
These little taper fingers--
Ah, Jane! how white they be!--
Can well supply the cruel want
That almost maddens me.
Thou wilt not sure deny me
My first and fond request;
I pray thee, by the memory
Of all we cherish best--
By all the dear remembrance
Of those delicious days,
When, hand in hand, we wandered
Along the summer braes;
By all we felt, unspoken,
When 'neath the early moon,
We sat beside the rivulet,
In the leafy month of June;
And by the broken whisper
That fell upon my ear,
More sweet than angel music,
When first I wooed thee, dear!
By thy great vow which bound thee
For ever to my side,
And by the ring that made thee
My darling and my bride!
Thou wilt not fail nor falter,
But bend thee to the task--
A BOILED SHEEP'S-HEAD ON SUNDAY
Is all the boon I ask!
Sonnet to Britain.
BY THE D--- OF W---
Halt! Shoulder arms! Recover! As you were!
Right wheel! Eyes left! Attention! Stand at ease!
O Britain! O my country! Words like these
Have made thy name a terror and a fear
To all the nations. Witness Ebro's banks,
Assaye, Toulouse, Nivelle, and Waterloo,
Where the grim despot muttered--_Sauve qui peut_!
And Ney fled darkling.--Silence in the ranks!
Inspired by these, amidst the iron crash
Of armies, in the centre of his troop
The soldier stands--unmoveable, not rash--
Until the forces of the foeman droop;
Then knocks the Frenchmen to eternal smash,
Pounding them into mummy. Shoulder, hoop!
THE END.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS.
NOTES.
{vii} Prologue de premiere livre.
{ix} A fact. That such a subject for cathedral chimes, and in Scotland,
too, could ever have been chosen, will scarcely be believed. But my
astonished ears often heard it.
{7} W. Gomersal, for many years a leading actor and rider at Astley's
Amphitheatre.
{8} John Esdaile Widdicomb, from 1819 to 1852 riding-master and
conductor of the ring at Astley's Amphitheatre.
{11} Stickney, a very dashing and graceful rider at Astley's.
{12} A not uncommon tribute from the gallery at Astley's to the dash and
daring of the heroes of the ring was half-eaten oranges or fragments of
orange-peel. Either oranges are less in vogue, or manners are better in
the galleries of theatres and circuses in the present day.
{18} The allusion here is to one of Ducrow's remarkable feats. Entering
the ring with the reins in his hands of five horses abreast, and standing
on the back of the centre horse, he worked them round the ring at high
speed, changing now and then with marvellous dexterity their relative
positions, and with his feet always on more than one of them, ending with
a foot on each of the extreme two, so that, as described, "the outer and
the inner felt the pressure of his toes."
{44} The value of these Bonds at the time this poem was written was
precisely nil.
{49} A fact.
{64} The Yankee substitute for the _chapeau de soie_.
{97} The Marquis of Waterford,
{99} The fashionable abbreviation for a thousand pounds.
{117} The reference here and in a subsequent verse is to a song very
popular at the time:--
"All round my hat I vears a green villow,
All round my hat for a twelvemonth and a day,
And if any van should arsk you the reason vy I vears it,
Say, all for my true love that's far, far away.
'Twas agoin of my rounds on the streets I first did meet her,
'Twas agoin of my rounds that first she met my heye,
And I never heard a voice more louder nor more sweeter,
As she cried, 'Who'll buy my cabbages, my cabbages who'll buy?'"
There were several more verses, and being set to a very taking air, it
was a reigning favourite with the "Social Chucksters" of the day. Even
scholars thought it worth turning into Latin verse. I remember reading
in some short-lived journal a very clever version of it, the first verse
of which ran thus--
"Omne circa petusum sertum gero viridem
Per annum circa petasum et unum diem plus.
Si quis te rogaret, cur tale sertum gererem,
Dic, 'Omne propter corculum qui est inpartibus.'"
Allusions to the willow, as an emblem of grief, are of a very old date.
"Sing all, a green willow must be my garland," is the refrain of the song
which haunted Desdemona on the eve of her death (Othello, act iv. sc. 3).
That exquisite scene, and the beautiful air to which some contemporary of
Shakespeare wedded it, will make "The Willow Song" immortal.
{119a} {119b} Madame Laffarge and Daniel Good were the two most talked
about criminals of the time when these lines were written. Madame
Laffarge was convicted of poisoning her husband under extenuating
circumstances, and was imprisoned for life, but many believed in her
protestations of innocence--this, of course, she being a woman and
unhappily married. Daniel Good died on the scaffold on the 23rd of May
1842, protesting his innocence to the last, and asserting that his
victim, Jane Sparks, had killed herself, an assertion which a judge and
jury naturally could not reconcile with the fact that her head, arms, and
legs had been cut off and hidden with her body in a stable. He, too,
found people to maintain that his sentence was unjust.
{121} The two papers here glanced at were 'The Age' and 'The Satirist,'
long since dead.
{122a} The colonnaded portion of Regent Street, immediately above the
Regent Circus, was then called the Quadrant. Being sheltered from the
weather, it was a favourite promenade, but became so favourite a resort
of the "larking" population--male and female--that the Colonnade was
removed in the interests of social order and decorum.
{122b} The expression of contemptuous defiance, signified by the
application of the thumb of one hand to the nose, spreading out the
fingers, and attaching to the little finger the stretched-out fingers of
the other hand, and working them in a circle. Among the graffiti in
Pompeii are examples of the same subtle symbolism.
{122c} Well known to readers of Thackeray's 'Newcomes' as "The Cave of
Harmony."
{123} Sir Peter Laurie, Lord Mayor; afterwards Alderman, and notable for
his sagacity and severity as a magistrate in dealing with evil-doers.
{157} Sir James Graham was then, and had been for some years, Secretary
Of State under Sir Robert Peel.
{160} Moxon was Tennyson's publisher.
{162} Edward Fitzball, besides being the prolific author of the most
sulphurous and sanguinary melodramas, flirted also with the Muses. His
triumph in this line was the ballad, "My Jane, my Jane, my pretty Jane,"
who was for many long years implored in the delightful tenor notes of
Sims Reeves "never to look so shy, and to meet him, meet him in the
evening when the bloom was on the rye." Fitzball, I have heard, was the
meekest and least bellicose of men, and this was probably the reason why
he was dubbed by Bon Gaultier "the terrible Fitzball."
{168} Two less poetically-disposed men than Goulburn and Knatchbull
could not well be imagined.
{177} The most highly reputed oysters of the day.
{200} Lord John Russell's vehement letter on Papal Aggression in
November 1850 to the Bishop of Durham, provoked by the Papal Bull
creating Catholic bishops in England, and the angry controversy to which
it led, were followed by the passing of the Ecclesiastic Titles Bill in
1857. Aytoun was not alone in thinking that Cardinal Wiseman, the first
to act upon the mandate from Rome, was more than a match for Lord John,
and that the Bill would become a dead letter, as it did. The controversy
was at its hottest when Aytoun expressed his view of the probable result
of the conflict in the preceding ballad.
{269} This poem appeared in a review by Bon Gaultier of an imaginary
volume, 'The Poets of the Day,' and was in ridicule of the numerous
verses of the time, to which the use of Turkish words was supposed to
impart a poetical flavour. His reviewer's comment upon it was as
follows:--
"Had Byron been alive, or Moore not ceased to write, we should have
bidden them look to their laurels. 'Nonsense,' says Dryden, 'shall
be eloquent in love,' and here we find the axiom aptly illustrated,
for in this Eastern Serenade are comprised nonsense and eloquence in
perfection. But, apart from its erotic and poetical merits, it is a
great curiosity, as exhibiting in a very marked manner the singular
changes which the stride of civilisation and the bow-string of the
Sultan Mahmoud have made in the Turkish language and customs within a
very few years. Thus we learn from the writer that a 'musnud,' which
in Byron's day was a sofa, now signifies a nightingale. A 'tophaik,'
which once fired away in Moore's octosyllabics as a musket, is
metamorphosed into a bank of flowers. 'Zemzem,' the sacred well, now
makes shift as a chemise; while the rallying-cry of 'Allah-hu' closes
in a stanza as a military cloak. Even 'Gehenna,' the place of
torment, is mitigated into a valley, rich in unctuous spices. But
the most singular of all these transmutations of the Turkish
vocabulary is that of the word 'Effendi,' which used to be a
respectful epithet applied to a Christian gentleman, but is now the
denomination of a dog. Most of these changes are certainly highly
poetical, and, while we admire their ingenuity, we do not impugn
their correctness. But with all respect for the author, the
Honourable Sinjin Muff, we think that, in one or two instances, he
has sacrificed propriety at the shrine of imagination. We do not
allude to such little incongruities as the waving of a minaret, or
the watching of a mosque. These may be accounted for; but who--who,
we ask with some earnestness, ever heard of cheroots growing
ready-made among the grass, or of a young lady keeping an appointment
in a scarf trimmed with mutton cutlets? We say nothing to the bold
idea of a dragoman, who snaps Eblis in twain, as a gardener might
snap a frosted carrot; but we will not give up our own interpretation
of 'kiebaubs,' seeing that we dined upon them not two months ago at
the best chop-house in Constantinople."
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