The Humourous Poetry of the English Language

436
Ah! who can paint that first great awful night,
Big with a blessing or a blight,
When the poor dramatist, all fume and fret,
Fuss, fidget, fancy, fever, funking, fright,
Ferment, fault-fearing, faintness--more f's yet:
Flushed, frigid, flurried, flinching, fitful, flat,
Add famished, fuddled, and fatigued, to that,
Funeral, fate-foreboding--sits in doubt,
Or rather doubt with hope, a wretched marriage
To see his play upon the stage come out;
No stage to him! it is Thalia's carriage,
And he is sitting on the spikes behind it,
Striving to look as if he didn't mind it!
Witness how Beazley vents upon his hat
His nervousness, meanwhile his fate is dealt
He kneads, molds, pummels it, and sits it flat,
Squeezes and twists it up, until the felt,
That went a beaver in, comes out a rat!
Miss Mitford had mis-givings, and in fright,
Upon Rienzi's night,
Gnawed up one long kid glove, and all her bag,
Quite to a rag.
Knowles has confessed he trembled as for life,
Afraid of his own "Wife;"
Poole told me that he felt a monstrous pail
Of water backing him, all down his spine--
"The ice-brook's temper"--pleasant to the chine!
For fear that Simpson and his Co. should fail.
Did Lord Glengall not frame a mental prayer,
Wishing devoutly he was Lord knows where?
Nay, did not Jerrold, in enormous drouth,
While doubtful of Nell Gwynne's eventful luck,
Squeeze out and suck
More oranges with his one fevered mouth
Than Nelly had to hawk from north to south?
Yea, Buckstone, changing color like a mullet,
Refused, on an occasion, once, twice, thrice,
From his best friend, an ice,
Lest it should hiss in his own red-hot gullet.