The Choice Humorous Works, Ludicrous Adventures 36
DISAPPOINTMENT.
Ye Aldermen! list to my lay--
Oh, list, ere your bumpers ye fill--
Her Majesty's dead!--lack-a-day!
She remember'd me not in her will.
Oh, folly! oh baneful ill-luck!
That I ever to court her begun;
She was Queen, and I could not but suck--
But she died, and poor Matty's undone!
Perhaps I was void of all thought,
Perhaps it was plain to foresee,
That a Queen so complete would be sought
By a courtier more knowing than me.
But self-love each hope can inspire,
It banishes _wisdom_ the while;
And I thought she would surely admire
My countenance, whiskers, and smile.
She is dead though, and I am undone!
Ye that witness the woes I endure,
Oh let me instruct you to shun
What I cannot instruct you to cure:
Beware how you loiter in vain
Amid nymphs of a higher degree;
It is not for me to explain
How fair and how fickle they be.
Alas! that her lawyers e'er met,
They alone were the cause of my woes;
Their tricks I can never forget--
Those lawyers undid my repose.
Yet the _Times_ may diminish my pain,
If the _Statesman_ and _Traveller_ agree--
Which I rear'd for her pleasure in vain--
Yes, the _Times_ shall have comfort for me.
Mrs. W--d, ope your doors then apace;
To your deepest recesses I fly;
I must hide my poor woe-begone face.
I must vanish from every eye.
But my sad, my deplorable lay,
My reed shall resound with it still:--
How her Majesty died t'other day,
And remember'd me not in her will.
[Illustration: THEODORE OF PUT-KNEE.
=A= my bad knee.
=B= my beard.
=C= my crural tendon,
" or muscle--
" or artery--
" or something,--as big as your fist.
=D= my well leg.
=E= the place where my hair was when I was young.]
TENTAMEN.
1820.
TENTAMEN;
OR,
AN ESSAY TOWARDS THE HISTORY
OF
WHITTINGTON,
[Illustration: (pen portrait)]
Some Time
LORD MAYOR OF LONDON.
BY
VICESIMUS BLINKINSOP, L.L.D., F.R.S., A.S.S., &c.
LONDON:
PRINTED FOR WILLIAM WRIGHT,
46, FLEET-STREET.
1820.
"Hook had returned to England penniless; but he brought with him
stores, the result of increased knowledge of the world and of an
observation active under every vicissitude of fortune, which,
with his singular facility in composition, were readily reducible
to current coin. According, notwithstanding the harassing and
protracted business at the Audit-office, he found time to strike
off a succession of papers and pamphlets, the proceeds of which
for some months formed his sole income. These, for obvious
reasons, were published anonymously; and from this fact, and that
of their being for the most part mere hits at the politics of the
day, they have, with scarcely an exception, been swept from the
face of the literary globe, and are only to be met with in the
museums of such curious collectors as Tom Hill and the like.
"One of these _jeux d'esprit_, entitled '_Tentamen_; or, an
Essay towards the History of Whittington, some time Lord Mayor
of London, by Dr. Vicesimus Blinkinsop,' produced no little
sensation, and ran rapidly through two or three editions.
Hook, however, we believe, was not suspected to be the author.
This _opusculum_, which is now extremely rare, and a copy of
which would fetch quadruple its original price, was an attack,
conducted in a strain of elaborate irony, equal to the happiest
efforts of Martinus Scriblerus, upon the worthy Alderman Wood
(a portrait of whom adorned the title-page), and his royal
_protégée_."--_Barham._
TO HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS
AUGUSTUS FREDERICK, DUKE OF SUSSEX,
_Earl of Inverness, and Baron Arklow_:
President of the Society of Arts; Grand Master of the United Grand
Lodge of the Ancient Masons of England; Colonel of the Honourable
Artillery Company; Colonel Commandant of the Loyal North Britain
Volunteers; Vice President of the Bible Society; of the Infirmary
for Asthma, Union Street, Bishopsgate; of the London Dispensary,
Artillery Street, Bishopsgate; and of the Public Dispensary, Bishop's
Court, Chancery Lane; of the Universal Medical Institution, Ratcliff
Highway; of the _Original_ Vaccine Pock Institution, Broad Street,
Golden Square; of the Free Masons' Charity, St. George's Fields, and
one of the Trustees of the same; Patron of the Mile End Philanthropic
Society; Vice Patron of the Westminster General Dispensary, 32,
Gerrard Street, Soho; of the Society for the Relief of the Ruptured
Poor; of the Universal Dispensary for Children, St. Andrew's Hill,
Doctors' Commons; of the Lancasterian School Society, Borough
Road; Patron of the Choral Fund, and of the Northern Dispensary,
Duke's Road, New Road; Vice President of Queen Charlotte's Lying-in
Hospital, Lisson Green; of the Benevolent Institution for delivering
Married Women at their own Habitations, Hungerford Coffee House,
Strand; and of the General Central Lying-in Charity, Great Queen
Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields; Knight of the Garter; President of
the Beef Steak Club; One of His Majesty's _most_ Honourable Privy
Council; and a FISHMONGER.[27]
SIR,--Your connexion with the fine arts and the city of London so
honourably celebrated in the preceding enumeration of your titles,
is a combination of merits wholly unexpected and unprecedented. You
alone, Sir, among the members of scientific bodies, can glory in
being a Fishmonger; and you alone, among Fishmongers, can boast of
being President of the Society of Arts.
Glorious, and more truly honourable, than rank or ribbons, is the
list of the numerous charities of which your Royal Highness is the
ostensible head. It may seem, at first sight, inconsistent with the
Christian precepts to give so much notoriety to benevolent actions;
but, even in this view, your Royal Highness's conduct is above all
imputation: that precept applies to the hand, and not to the head;
and though your Royal Highness gives your great personal weight to
the chair of those associations, your worst enemy cannot say that
you were ever known to give any thing else. Your left hand (which,
agreeably to the scriptural suggestion, is as discerning as your
Royal Highness's intellect) does certainly not know of any particular
charity, performed by your Royal Highness's right hand.
You are thus enabled, Sir, to extend the sphere of your utility and
beneficence. Actual donations must have had a limit; but the charity
which costs nothing, may, as we see in your Royal Highness's case, be
indefinitely extended, to the great encouragement and increase of the
contributions of others.
To all the above mentioned distinctions, equally high, equally
honourable, and equally deserved, your Royal Highness, on the
principle just stated,--that you have still countenance enough to
bestow on meritorious institutions,--has intimated your gracious
intention of succeeding Sir Joseph Banks as President of the Royal
Society. Amongst your many and obvious claims to this situation, the
first is, that you are a _fishmonger_; for thus your Royal Highness
will be in a condition to solve that celebrated problem propounded to
the Society by its Royal Founder Charles the Second, and which has
not been yet satisfactorily explained, relative to the respective
gravities of fish, dead or alive. Nor if the late President had been
a fishmonger, would the Society have been involved in the failure and
disgrace of that experiment which the indignant poet has immortalized by the line
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