Given on the 3rd of June, 1815, at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden.

When wine and masquerades were hither sent,
Neatly imported from the Continent,
Then Johnny Bull each continental freight
Incontinently did adulterate;
And masquerades, announced in town, forebode
As downright trash as port upon the road.

Take, in a careless hasty sketch displayed,
The joys of London's public masquerade;
A midnight squeeze, which ends in morning riot,
All roaring! no, the dominoes are quiet;
In lutestring state they stalk, and seem to say:
We are by night just what we are by day,
Mere Bond Street loungers come to see the fun,
And as for character, we keep up none.

Then pouring in come Punches, Turks, and tailors,
Heavy-heeled harlequins and inland sailors;
Jews without Hebrew, brogueless Pats from Cork,
And clodpoles without dialect from York;
Sportsmen who scarce have seen one furrow's ridge,
And ne'er shot anything but London Bridge;
Attorneys' clerks as shepherds, doomed to know
No fields but those which Lincoln's Inn can show;
But who, if not by sheep, by parchment thrive,
And scrawl upon the skins they never drive.
These Corydons address in cockney tone
The high-rouged Phyllises from Marybone;
The high-rouged Phyllises, more kind than fair,
Bid not the shepherds, blest with cash, despair;
Preferring far the notes of modern swains
To those which old Arcadians piped on plains.

Thickening the throng, see staggering upright Quakers,
Butchers; haymakers, bakers, kennel-rakers,
Nun, gipsy, jockey, friar, cobbler, king;
All, all that Chaos can together bring,
Sans wit, sans humour, and " sans everything. "
Here songsters squall, fat waltzers there advance,
To crush our toes with what they call a dance;
A dance at which a well-taught bear would blush;
Till supper is announced, and then a rush!
The masks get neither seats nor meats enough:
Rolls stale, ham rank, pies mouldy, chickens tough:
Cold punch grown warm, dead porter, wine that's rum,
And waiters " coming " who will never come.
The scramble o'er, the revel rises high,
With debauchees and dollies in full cry:
Till all in blazing sunshine reel away,
With fevered head-aches to doze out the day.

To-night we try from foreign schools to glean,
And, if we can, to regulate the scene;
To cleanse the home-bred specimens before us,
And be, if not less dull, much more decorous.