Or make a will, yet, sure, Fifteen
's a ripe age for a long-tail'd Coat.

What! would you have him sport a chin
Like Colonel Stanhope, or that goat
O'Gorman Mahon, ere begin
To figure in a long-tail'd Coat?

Suppose he goes to France--can he
Sit down at any _table d'hote_,
With any sort of decency,
Unless he's got a long-tail'd Coat?

Why Louis Philippe, Royal Cit,
There soon may be a _sans culotte_;
And Nugents self must then admit
The advantage of a long-tail'd Coat.

Things are not now as when, of yore,
In Tower encircled by a moat,
The lion-hearted chieftain wore
A corselet for a long-tail'd Coat.

Then ample mail his form embraced,
Not, like a weazel, or a stoat,
"Cribb'd and confined" about the waist,
And pinch'd in, like Dick's long-tail'd Coat;--

With beamy spear, orbiting axe,
To right and left he thrust and smote--
Ah! what a change! no sinewy thwacks
Fall from a modern long tail'd Coat.

For stalwart knights, a puny race
In stays, with locks _en papillote_,
While cuirass, cuisses, greaves give place
To silk-net _Tights_, and long-tail'd Coat.

Worse changes still! now, well-a-day!
A few cant phrases learnt by rote
Each beardless booby spouts away,
A Solon, in a long-tail'd Coat.

Prates of "The march of intellect"--
--"The schoolmaster" _a Patriote_
So noble, who could ere suspect
Had just put on a long-tail'd Coat?

Alack! Alack! that every thick-
skull'd lad must find an antidote
For England's woes, because, like Dick.
He has put on a long-tail'd Coat.

But lo! my rhymes begin to fail,
Nor can I longer time devote;
Thus rhyme and time cut short the _tale_,
The _long tale_ of Dick's long-tail'd Coat.

_Blackwood's Magazine_.

* * * * *

SIR JOHN HAWKINS'S HISTORY OF MUSIC.

The fate of this work was decided like that of many more important things,
by a trifle, a word, a pun. A ballad, chanted by a fille-de-chambre,
undermined the colossal power of Alberoni; a single line of Frederic the
Second, reflecting not on the politics but the poetry of a French
minister, plunged France into the seven years' war; and a pun condemned
Sir John Hawkins's sixteen years' labour to long obscurity and oblivion.
Some wag wrote the following catch, which Dr. Callcott set to music:--

"Have you read Sir John Hawkins's His