The Court, however, expressed an opinion, that the Goddess of Wisdom, by making an unprovoked sortie on so respectable a baboon, had not acted with her usual discretion, and directed Minerva to be nonsuited.
Look at the gay caps and bonnets in yonder balcony; and hark to the fifes and fiddles, accelerating the sharp trot to a full gallop! And now the volunteer vocalist, having frowned into nothingness a St. Cecilian on the salt-box, demands silence for this seasonable chant.
Don't you remember the third of September?
With ranters and roysters we push'd thro' the cloisters,
I treated my Hebe with brandy, not (B. B!)
And sausages smoking, and gingerbread hot.
She whisper'd, "How nice is fried bacon in slices,
And eggs"--What a crisis!--Love egg'd me on--
If we don't have a fry to-night at the Swan."
Saw Master and Miss romp and reel on the rope--
And it was our faults if we didn't both waltz,
My eye! with old Guy, Old Nick and the Pope.
Rigging's rife again, fun's come to life again,
Punch and his wife again, frolicksome pair,
Footing it, crikey! like Cupid and Psyche,
His compliments sends, inviting his friends
"Now my little lads and lasses! Shut one eye, and don't breathe on the glasses! Here's Nero a-fiddling while Rome was a-burning--and Cin-cinnatus a-digging potatoes. Here's Sampson and the Phillis-tines--Cain and Abel, and the Tower of Babel." This was sounded by a gaunt fellow (a stronger man than Sampson, for he lugged him in by the head and shoulders!) with a gin-and-fog voice and a bristly beard. His neighbour, a portly ogress with a Cyclopical physiognomy (her drum "most tragically run through!"), advertised a grunting giant, (a Pygmalion to his relations!) and backed his stupendous flitches against Smith-field and the world.
"Ladies and gentlemen," squeaked a little mountebank through an asthmatic trumpet, "walk in and see a tragical, comical, operatical, pantomimical Olla Podrida of Smiles, Tears, Broad Grins, and Horselaughs, called The Hobgoblin, or My Lady go-Nimble's Ghost; the Humours of Becky Burton and Doctor Diddleum; a Prologue by Lucifer and his imps; capering on his pericranium by _Signor Franchinello_; and dancing in a dark lantern by _Mynheer Von Trompingtonverbruggenhausentiraliravontamen!_"