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New year’s custom.

(For the Mirror.)

Bromley PAGETS, Staffordshire, is 129 miles from London, and is a pretty town on the skirts of Derbyshire.  This place is remarkable, or was lately, for a sport on New Year’s Day and Twelfth Day, called The Hobby-Horse Dance, from a person who rode upon the image of a horse, with a bow and arrow in his hands, with which he made a snapping noise, and kept time to the music, while six men danced the hay and other country dances, with as many deer’s heads on their shoulders.  To this hobby-horse belonged a pot, which the reeves of the town kept filled with cakes and ale, towards which the spectators contributed a penny, and with the remainder they maintained their poor and repaired the church.

Halbert H.

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The baron’s trumpet.

(For the Mirror.)

Thou blowest for Hector. 
Troilus and Cressida.

Sound, sound the charge, when the wassel bowl
Is lifted with songs, let the trumpets shrill blast
Awaken like fire in the warrior’s soul,
The bright recollections of chivalry past;
Let the lute or the lyre the soft stripling rejoice,
No music on earth is so sweet as thy voice.

Sound, sound the charge when the foe is before us,
When the visors are closed and the lances are down,
If we fall, let the banner of victory o’er us
Dance time to thy clarion that sings our renown: 
To the souls of the valiant no requiem is given,
So fit as thine echoes, to soothe them in heaven.

Leon.

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THE NEW YEAR

(For the Mirror.)

  Twenty-nine, Father Janus! and can it be true,
  That your double-fac’d sconce is again in our view? 
  Take a chair, my old boy—­while our glasses we fill,
  And tell us, “what news”—­for you can if you will.

  Shall we have any war? or will there be peace? 
  Will swindlers, as usual, the credulous fleece? 
  Will the season produce us a deluge of rain? 
  Did the comet bring coughs and catarrhs in his train?

  Will gas, so delicious, perfume our abodes? 
  Will McAdam continue “Colossus of roads?”
  Will Venus’s boy be abroad with his bow,
  And make the dear girls over bachelors crow?

  Will quid-nuncs from scandalous whispers refrain? 
  Will poets the pent of Parnassus attain? 
  Will travellers’ tomes touch the truth to a T? 
  Will critics from caustic coercion be free?

  Shall we check crafty care in his cunning career? 
  In short—­shall we welcome a happy new year? 
  What, mum, Father Janus?—­egad I suppose,
  Not one of our queries you mean to disclose.