l. Praed's 'Belle of the Ballroom' was a provincial beauty; but not
so, assuredly, was Pope's and Lord Peterborough's Mrs. Howard,
Congreve's Miss Temple, Lord Chesterfield's Duchess of Richmond, Fox's
Mrs. Crewe, Lord Lytton's La Marquise, Mr. Aide's Beauty Clare, or Mr.
Austin Dobson's Avice. Of London balls and routs the poets have been
many, including Edward Fitzgerald, C. S. Calverley, and Mr. Dobson
again. The opera, so far as I know, has had very few celebrants in
rhyme. The 'Monday Pops' figure in 'Patience' with the Grosvenor
Gallery, but have not otherwise, I fancy, been distinguished in song. On
the whole, however, the Season has received poetic tributes at once
numerous and interesting.

THE 'RECESS' IN RHYME.

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