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Title: The 'Recess' In Rhyme
Author: William Davenport Adams [
More Titles by Adams]
If the Season has had its laureates, so has the Recess. Why not? Of the two, the latter has the more numerous elements of poetry. Town has its charms for the versifier; there is much to say about its streets, its parks, its belles, its balls, its many diversions. But there is even more, surely, to say about the country, with its ancestral halls, its watering-places, and its shootings, as well as about the seaside and the various attractions outre-mer. Surely, of the two, life out of town has even more delights, for the poet, at any rate, than life in town. Sylvester is reported to have said that people, after tiring in town, go to re-tire in the country. But the saying, if epigrammatic, is not strictly true. No doubt some of us feel bored, wherever we may go, or whatever we may do. But to most people, I imagine, the Recess, if spent out of London, is a time of genuine enjoyment, and certainly it is a time which deserves to be distinguished in song.
The Recess, as spent in London, has been drawn by the rhymers in depressing tints. The picture painted by Haynes Bayly remains--for the fashionable world, at least--almost as true as it ever was. As he said:
'In town, in the month of September,
We find neither riches nor rank;
In vain we look out for a member
To give us a nod or a frank.
Each knocker in silence reposes,
In every mansion you find
One dirty old woman who dozes,
Or peeps through the dining-room blind.'
This may be compared with the soliloquy put by H. S. Leigh in the mouth of 'the last man' left in London:
'The Row is dull, as dull can be;
Deserted is the Drive;
The glass that stood at eighty-three,
Now stands at sixty-five.
The summer days are over,
The town, ah me! has flown,
Through Dover, or to clover--
And I am all alone.'
It has long been held, among a certain class, that to be seen in town during the Recess is to forfeit all pretensions to haut ton. And so 'the last man' of the Season is naturally represented by Bayly as somewhat ashamed of himself. 'He'll blush,' we are told, 'if you ask him the reason Why he with the rest is not gone':
'He'll seek you with shame and with sorrow,
He'll smile with affected delight;
He'll swear he leaves London to-morrow,
And only came to it last night!'
He will tell you that he is in general request--that the difficulty is to know where not to go:
'So odd you should happen to meet him;
So strange, as he's just passing through.'
The Season may be said to go to its grave with parting volleys from the sportsmen on the moors. One is fired on 'the Twelfth,' the other on 'the First.' The one is associated with grouse, the other with partridges. And Haynes Bayly makes his fashionable matron only too conscious of these facts. 'Don't talk of September,' she says; 'a lady
'Must think it of all months the worst;
The men are preparing already
To take themselves off on the First.'
'Last month, their attention to quicken,
A supper I knew was the thing;
But now, from my turkey and chicken,
They're tempted by birds on the wing!
They shoulder their terrible rifles
('Tis really too much for my nerves!)
And, slighting my sweets and my trifles,
Prefer my Lord Harry's preserves!'
And she goes on to say:
'Oh, marriage is hard of digestion,
The men are all sparing of words;
And now 'stead of popping the question,
They set off to pop at the birds.'
Life at English country houses has been depicted by more than one poet. Pope, for instance, tells us what happened when Miss Blount left town--how
'She went, to plain-work, and to purling brooks,
Old-fashion'd halls, dull aunts, and croaking rooks...
(To) divert her eyes with pictures in the fire,
Hum half a tune, tell stories to the squire.'
Lord Lyttelton's 'beauty in the country' complains that
'Now with mamma at tedious whist I play,
Now without scandal drink insipid tea;'
while Lady Mary Montagu's 'bride in the country' deplores the fact that she is
'Left in the lurch,
Forgot and secluded from view,
Unless when some bumpkin at church
Stares wistfully over the pew.'
Agreeably descriptive of rural pleasures is Lord Chesterfield's 'Advice to a Lady in Autumn.' Of recent years the subject has been treated by a versifier who has at least a measure of the neatness of Praed, and who enumerates among the typical guests at a country house
'A sporting parson, good at whist,
A preaching sportsman, good at gateways;'
and, again:
'A lady who once wrote a book,
And one of whom a book's been written...
One blonde whose fortune is her face,
And one whose face caught her a fortune.'
As for the daily round:
'We dance, we flirt, we shoot, we ride,
Our host's a veritable Nimrod:
We fish the river's silver tide,'
and so on. There are, of course, the county balls, and the fancy balls, and the private theatricals, and what not, all of them celebrated by the inevitable Praed. It was at the county ball that he saw 'the belle of the ballroom':
'There, when the sounds of flute and fiddle
Gave signal sweet in that old hall
Of hands across and down the middle.'
It was to the county ball, as well as to the theatricals at Fustian Hall, that Praed's 'Clarence' was so prettily invited. As for fancy balls:
'Oh, a fancy ball's a strange affair!
Made up of silks and leathers,
Light heads, light heels, false hearts, false hair,
Pins, paint, and ostrich feathers.'
Of inland watering-places, Bath and Cheltenham have been perhaps most often poetized. Bath found its vates sacer in the author of the 'New Bath Guide'; it has rarely found one since; its glories have virtually departed. It was at Cheltenham--
'Where one drinks one's fill
Of folly and cold water'--
that Praed met his 'Partner.' And C. S. Calverley has told us how
'Year by year do Beauty's daughters
In the sweetest gloves and shawls
Troop to taste the Chattenham waters,
And adorn the Chattenham balls.
'Nulla non donanda lauru
Is that city: you could not,
Placing England's map before you,
Light on a more favoured spot.'
Praed has a poem called 'Arrivals at a Watering-Place,' but it is not one of the most successful of his efforts. Nor have seaside places in general been made the subject of very excellent verse. Brighton is the one exception. Of that 'favoured spot,' James Smith, of 'Rejected Addresses' fame, was, perhaps, the first to write flatteringly. 'Long,' he declared--
'Long shalt thou laugh thy enemies to scorn,
Proud as Phoenicia, queen of watering-places!
Boys yet unbreech'd, and virgins yet unborn,
On thy bleak downs shall tan their blooming faces.'
The prophecy, one need not say, has been amply fulfilled. And the poets still conspire to sing the praises of 'Old Ocean's bauble, glittering Brighton.' Everybody remembers the stirring exhortation of Mortimer Collins:
'If you approve of flirtations, good dinners,
Seascapes divine, which the merry winds whiten;
Nice little saints, and still nicer young sinners,
Winter at Brighton!'
Nor has Mr. Ashby-Sterry proved himself at all less enthusiastic. Brighton in November, he says, 'is what one should remember':
'If spirits you would lighten,
Consult good Doctor Brighton,
And swallow his prescriptions and abide by his decree;
If nerves be weak or shaken,
Just try a week with Bacon;
His physic soon is taken at our London-by-the-Sea.'
Something might be said of the delights of foreign sojourn in the Recess; but space fails me. Reference may, however, be made to Mr. Locker's graceful 'Invitation to Rome' and 'The Reply' to it, from which I take this typical tribute to the Italian capital:
'Some girls, who love to ride and race,
And live for dancing, like the Bruens,
Confess that Rome's a charming place--
In spite of all the stupid ruins!'
[The end]
William Davenport Adams's essay: 'recess' In Rhyme
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