England's Alfred Abroad

[M. Alfred Austin, poete-laureat d'Angleterre, vient d'arriver a Nice, o' il a devance la Reine. Il etait, hier, dans les jardins de Monte-Carlo. Sera-ce sous notre ciel qu'il ecrira son premier poeme?, Menton-Mondain.]

Wrong? are they wrong? Of course they are,

I venture to reply;

For I bore 'my first' (and, I hope, my worst)

A month or so gone by;

And I can't repeat it under this

Or any other sky.

What! has the public never heard

In these benighted climes

That nascent note of my Laureate throat,

That fluty fitte of rhymes

Which occupied about a half

A column of the Times?

They little know what they have lost,

Nor what a carnal beano

They might have spent in the thick of Lent

If only Daniel Leno

Had sung them Jameson's Ride and knocked

The Monaco Casino.

Some day the croupiers' furtive eyes

Will all be wringing wet;

Even the Prince will hardly mince

The language of regret

At entertaining unawares

The famed Alhambra Pet.

But still not quite incognito

I mark the moving scene,

In a tepid zone where (like my own)

The palms are ever green,

And find myself reported as

A herald of the Queen.

Here where aloft the heavens are blue,

And blue the seas below,

I roll my eye and fondly try

To get the rhymes to go,

As I pace The Garden that I love,

Composing all I know.

But when my poet-pinions droop,

And all the air is wan,

I enter in to the courts of sin

And put a louis on,

And hold my heart and look again,

And lo! the thing is gone!

Wrong? is it wrong? To baser crafts

Has England's Alfred pandered,

Who once to the sign of Ph'bus' shrine

With awesome gait meandered,

And ever wrote in the cause of right

According to his Standard?

Nay! this is life! to take a turn

On Fortune's captious crust;

To pluck the day in a human way

Like men of common dust;

But O! if England's only bard

Should absolutely bust!

A laureate never borrows on

His coming quarter's pay;

And I mean to stop or ever I pop

My crown of peerless bay;

So I'll take the next rapide to Nice,

And the 'bus to Cimiez.

MENTONE, Feb. 1896.