CLASSICAL CORRECTIONS.

  In a neat little cottage, some five miles from town,
  Lived a pretty young maiden, by name Daphne Brown,
    Like a butterfly, pretty and airy: 
  In a village hard by lived a medical prig,
  With a rubicund nose, and a full-bottomed wig,
    Apollo, the apothecary.

  He, being crop sick of his bachelor life,
  Resolved, in his old days, to look for a wife—­
    (Nota bene—­Thank Heaven, I’m not married): 
  He envied his neighbours their curly-poled brats,
  (All swarming, as if in a village of Pats,)
    And sighed that so long he had tarried.

  Having heard of fair Daphne, the village coquette,
  As women to splendour were never blind yet,
    He resolved with his grandeur to strike her;
  So he bought a new buggy, where, girt in a wreath,
  Were his arms, pills, and pestle—­this motto beneath—­
    "Ego opifer per orbem dicor."

  To the village he drove, sought young Daphne’s old sire,
  Counted gold by rouleaus, and bank notes by the quire,
    And promised the old buck a share in’t,
  If his daughter he’d give—­for the amorous fool
  Thought of young ladies’ hearts and affections the rule
    Apparently rests with a parent.

  Alas! his old mouth may long water in vain,
  Who tries by this method a mistress to gain—­
    A miss is the sure termination: 
  For a maiden’s delight is to plague the old boy,
  And to think sixty-five not the period for joy;
    Alas! all the sex are vexation.

  Daphne Brown had two eyes with the tenderest glances! 
  Her brain had been tickled by reading romances,
    And those compounds of nonsense called novels,
  Where Augustus and Ellen, or fair Isabel,
  With Romeo, in sweet little cottages dwell: 
   Sed meo periclo, read hovels.

  She had toiled through Clarissa; Camilla could quote;
  Knew the raptures of Werter and Charlotte by rote;
    Thought Smith and Sir Walter ecstatic;
  And as for the novels of Miss Lefanu,
  She dog’s-eared them till the whole twenty looked blue;
    And studied ‘The Monk’ in the attic.

  When her sire introduced our Apollo, he found
  The maiden in torrents of sympathy drowned—­
    “Floods of tears” is too trite and too common: 
  Her eyes were quite swelled—­her lips pouting and pale;
  For she just had been reading that heartbreaking tale,
    “Annabelle, or the Sufferings of Woman.”

  Apollo, I’ll swear, had more courage than I,
  To accost a young maid with a drop in her eye;
    I’d as soon catch a snake or a viper: 
  She, while wiping her tears, gives Apollo some wipes;
  And when a young lady has set up her pipes,
    Her lover will soon pay the piper.

  Papa locked her up—­but the very next night,
  With a cornet of horse, the young lady took flight;
    To Apollo she left this apology—­
  “That, were she to spend with an old man her life,
  She would gain, by the penance she’d bear as a wife,
    A place in the next martyrology.”