"O Patty Head, O Patty Head, You're come to my last kissing, Before I'm set in the Gazette
As wounded, dead, and missing!
"Alas! a splinter of a shell
Right in my stomach sticks; French mortars don't agree so well With stomachs as French bricks.
"This very night a merry dance
At Brussels was to be ;-
Instead of opening a ball,
A ball has opened me.
"Its billet every bullet has,
And well it does fulfil it ;-
I wish mine hadn't come so straight,
But been a 'crooked billet.'
"And then there came a cuirassier And cut me on the chest ;
He had no pity in his heart,
For he had steel'd his breast.
"Next thing a lancer, with his lance,
Began to thrust away;
I call'd for quarter, but, alas!
It was not Quarter-day.
"He ran his spear right through my arm,
Just here above the joint :
O Patty dear, it was no joke,
Although it had a point.
"With loss of blood I fainted off,
As dead as women do-
But soon by charging over me,
The Coldstream brought me to.
With kicks and cuts, and baris and blows,
I throb and ache all over;
I'm quite convinc'd the field of Mars
Is not a field of clover!
"O why did I a soldier turn
For any royal Guelph ?
I might have been a butcher, and
In business for myself!
"O why did I the bounty take
(And here he gasp'd for breath)
My shillingsworth of 'list is nail'd
Upon the door of death!
"Without a coffin I shall lie
And sleep my sleep eternal: Not ev❜n a shell-my only chance Of being made a Kernel!
"O Patty dear, our wedding bells
Will never ring at Chester !
Here I must lie in Honour's bed,
That isn't worth a tester!
"Farewell, my regimental mates,
With whom I used to dress!
My corps is changed, and I am now,
In quite another mess.
"Farewell, my Patty dear, I have
No dying consolations,
Except, when I am dead, you'll go
And see th' Illuminations."
THOSE WHO much read advertisements and bills Must have seen puffs of Cockle's Pills,
Which some Physicians sneer at, supercilicus,
But which we are assured, if timely taken,
May save your liver and bacon;
Whether or not they really give one ease,
I, who have never tried,
But no two things in union go like these-
Viz.-Quacks and Pills-save Ducks and Pease.
Now Mrs. W. was getting sallow,
Her lilies not of the white kind, but yellow,
And friends portended was preparing for
A human Pâté Périgord;
She was, indeed, so very far from well,
Her Son, in filial fear, procured a box
Of those said pellets to resist Bile's shocks,
And-tho' upon the ear it strangely knocks-
To save her by a Cockle from a shell !
But Mrs. W., just like Macbeth,
Who very vehemently bids us "throw
Bark to the Bow-wows," hated physic so,
It seem'd to share "the bitterness of Death: "
Rhubarb-Magnesia-Jalap, and the kind—
Senna-Steel-Assa-fœtida, and Squills-
Powder or Draught—but least her throat inclined
To give a course to Boluses or Pills;
No-not to save her life, in lung or lobe,
For all her lights' or all her liver's sake,
Would her convulsive thorax undertake,
Only one little uncelestial globe!
'Tis not to wonder at, in such a case,
If she put by the pill-box in a place
For linen rather than for drugs intended-
Yet for the credit of the pills let's say
After they thus were stow'd away,
Some of the linen mended;
But Mrs. W. by disease's dint,
Kept getting still more yellow in her tint,
When lo! her second son, like elder brother,
Marking the hue on the parental gills,
Brought a new charge of Anti-tumeric Pills,
To bleach the jaundiced visage of his Mother-
Who took them—in her cupboard-like the other.
and deeper, still," of course,
The fatal colour daily grew in force;
Till daughter W. newly come from Rome,
Acting the self-same filial, pillial, part,
To cure Mamma, another dose brought home
Of Cockles ;-not the Cockles of her heart!
These going where the others went before,
Of course she had a very pretty store,
And then some hue of health her cheek adorning,
The Medicine so good must be,
They brought her dose on dose, when she
Gave to the up-stairs cupboard, "night and morning."
Till wanting room at last, for other stocks,
Out of the window one fine day she pitch'd
The pillage of each box, and quite enrich'd
The feed of Mister Burrell's hens and cocks,~~
A little Barber of a by-gone day,
Over the way
Whose stock in trade, to keep the least of shops,
Was one great head of Kemble,—that is, John,
Staring in plaster, with a Brutus on,
And twenty little Bantam fowls-with crops.
Little Dame W. thought when through the sash
She gave the physic wings,
To find the very things
So good for bile, so bad for chicken rash,
For thoughtless cock, and unreflecting pullet!
But while they gather'd up the nauseous nubbles,
Each peck'd itself into a peck of troubles,
And brought the hand of Death upon its gullet.
They might as well have addled been, or ratted,
For long before the night—ah woe betide
The Pills! each suicidal Bantam died
Unfatted!
Think of poor Burrell's shock,
Of Nature's debt to see his hens all payers,
And laid in death as Everlasting Layers,
With Bantam's small Ex-Emperor, the Cock,
In ruffled plumage and funereal hackle,
Giving, undone by Cockle, a last Cackle!
To see as stiff as stone, his un'live stock,
It really was enough to move his block.
Down on the floor he dash'd, with horror big,
Mr. Beh's third wife's mother's coachman's wig ;
And with a tragic stare like his own Kemble,
Burst out with natural emphasis enough,
And voice that grief made tremble,
Into that very speech of sad Macduff—
"What!-all my pretty chickens and their dam,
At one fell swoop!-
Just when I'd bought a coop
To see the poor lamented creatures cram!
After a little of this mood,
And brooding over the departed brood,
With razor he began to ope each craw,
Already turning black, as black as coals ;
When lo! the undigested cause he saw-
"Pison'd by goles !"
To Mrs. W.'s luck a contradiction,
Her window still stood open to conviction;
And by short course of circumstantial labour,
He fixed the guilt upon his adverse neighbour ;—
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