Classic Poem

spoken by Mrs. Cibber

To speak ten words, again I've fetched my breath:
The tongue of woman struggles hard with death.
Ten words! Will that suffice? Ten words—no more.
We always give a thousand to the score.

What can provoke these wits their time to waste,
To please that fickle, fleeting thing called “taste”?
It mocks all search, for substance has it none;
Like Hamlet's ghost, 'tis here, 'tis there, 'tis gone.
How very few about the stage agree.
As men with different eyes a beauty see,
So judge they of that stately dame Queen Tragedy.

The Greek-read critic as his mistress holds her,
And having little love, for trifles scolds her:
Excuses want of spirit, beauty, grace,
But ne'er forgives her failing time and place.
How do our sex of taste in judgement vary?
Miss Bell adores what's loathed by Lady Mary.
The first, in tenderness a very dove,
Melts like the feathered snow at Juliet's love,
Then, sighing, turns to Romeo by her side,
“Can you believe that men for love have died?”
Her Ladyship, who vaults the courser's back,
Leaps the barred gate and calls you Tom and Jack,
Detests these whinings like a true virago.
She's all for daggers! Blood! Blood! Blood! Iago!
A third, whose heart defies all perturbations,
Yet dies for triumphs, funerals, coronations,
Ne'er asks which tragedies succeed or fail,
But whose procession has the longest tail.
The youths to whom France gives a new belief,
Who look with horror on a rump of beef,

On Shakespeare's plays with shrugged-up shoulders stare:
“These plays? They're bloody murders! O barbare!
And yet the man has ment— entre nous —
He'd been damned clever had he read Bossu.”
“Shakespeare read French!” roars out a surly cit:
“When Shakespeare wrote our valour matched our wit.
Had Britons then been fops Queen Bess had hanged 'em.
Those days they never read the French—they banged 'em.”

If taste evaporates by too high breeding,
And eke is overlaid by too deep reading,
Lest, then, in search of this you lose your feeling
And barter native sense in foreign dealing,
Be this neglected truth to Britons known:
No tastes, no modes become you but your own.