JOHN DAY.

A PATHETIC BALLAD.

"A Day after the Fair!"-OLD PROVERE

JOHN DAY he was the biggest man Of all the coachman-kind,

With back too broad to be conceived
By any narrow mind.

The very horses knew his weight
When he was in the rear,
And wished his box a Christmas-box

To come but once a year.

Alas! against the shafts of love,
What armor can avail?
Soon Cupid sent an arrow through
His scarlet coat of mail.

The bar-maid of the Crown he loved
From whom he never ranged,
For tho' he changed his horses there,
His love he never changed.

He thought her fairest of all fares,
So fondly love prefers;
And often, among twelve outsides,
Deemed no outside like hers.

One day as she was sitting down
Beside the porter-pump—
He came, and knelt with all his fat,
And made an offer plump.

Said she, my taste will never lean
To like so huge a man,

So I must beg you will come here
As little as you can.

But still he stoutly urged his suit,
With vows, and sighs, and tears,
Yet could not pierce her heart, although
He drove the Dart for years.

In vain he wooed, in vain he sued;
The maid was cold and proud,
And sent him off to Coventry,
While on his way to Stroud.

He fretted all the way to Stroud,
And thence all back to town,
The course of love was never smooth,
So his went up and down.

At last her coldness made him pine
To merely bones and skin;

But still he loved like one resolved
To love through thick and thin.

Oh Mary, view my wasted back,
And see my dwindled calf;
Tho' I have never had a wife,
I've lost my better half.

Alas, in vain he still assailed,

Her heart withstood the dint;

Though he had carried sixteen stone
He could not move a flint.

Worn out, at last he made a vow
To break his being's link;
For he was so reduced in size
At nothing he could shrink.

Now some will talk in water's praise,
And waste a deal of breath,

But John, though he drank nothing else-
He drank himself to death.

The cruel maid that caused his love,
Found out the fatal close,

For looking in the butt, she saw,
The butt-end of his woes.

Some say his spirit haunts the Crown,

But that is only talk

For after riding all his life,
His ghost objects to walk.

POMPEY'S GHOST.

A PATHETIC BALLAD.

"Skins may differ, but affection

Dwells in white and black the same."

COWER.

"T WAS twelve o'clock, not twelve at night

But twelve o'clock at noon; Because the sun was shining bright

And not the silver moon.

A proper time for friends to call,

Or Pots, or Penny Post;
When, lo! as Phoebe sat at work,

She saw her Pompey's Ghost!

Now when a female has a call
From people that are dead;
Like Paris ladies, she receives
Her visiters in bed.

But Pompey's spirit would not come
Like spirits that are white,
Because he was a Blackamoor,
And would n't show at night!

But of all unexpected things
That happen to us here,
The most unpleasant is a rise
In what is very dear.

So Phoebe screamed an awful scream

To prove the seaman's text;
That after black appearances,
White squalls will follow next.

"Oh, Phoebe dear! oh, Phoebe dear!
Don't go to scream or faint;
You think because I'm black I am
The Devil, but I ain't!

Behind the heels of Lady Lambe

I walked while I had breath; But that is past, and I am now A-walking after Death!

"No murder, though, I come to tell

By base and bloody crime;

So Phoebe dear, put off your fits

To some more fitting time.

No Coroner, like a boatswain's mate,

My body need attack,

With his round dozen to find out

Why I have died so black.

"One Sunday, shortly after tea,
My skin began to burn
As if I had in my inside

A heater, like the urn.
Delirious in the night I grew,
And as I lay in bed,

They say I gathered all the wool
You see upon my head.

"His Lordship for his Doctor sent,
My treatment to begin;-

I wish that he had called him out,
Before he called him in!

For though to physic he was bred,
And passed at Surgeon's Hall,

To make his post a sinecure

He never cured at all!

"The Doctor looked about my

And then about my back,

breast

And then he shook his head and said

'Your case looks very black.'
And first he sent me hot cayenne
And then gamboge to swallow,
But still my fever would not turn
To Scarlet or to Yellow!

"With madder and with turmeric,
He made his next attack;
But neither he nor all his drugs
Could stop my dying black.
At last I got so sick of life,
And sick of being dosed,
One Monday morning I gave up
My physic and the ghost!