A PORTRAIT OF 1783.

Your hair and chin are like the hair

And chin Burne-Jones's ladies wear;

You were unfashionably fair

In‘ 83;

And sad you were when girls are gay,

You read a book about Le vrai

Merite de l'homme, alone in May.

What CAN it be,

Le vrai merite de l'homme? Not gold,

Not titles that are bought and sold,

Not wit that flashes and is cold,

But Virtue merely!

Instructed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau

( And Jean-Jacques, surely, ought to know ),

You bade the crowd of foplings go,

You glanced severely,

Dreaming beneath the spreading shade

Of‘ that vast hat the Graces made;’

So Rouget sang — while yet he played

With courtly rhyme,

And hymned great Doisi's red perruque,

And Nice's eyes, and Zulme's look,

And dead canaries, ere he shook

The sultry time

With strains like thunder. Loud and low

Methinks I hear the murmur grow,

The tramp of men that come and go

With fire and sword.

They war against the quick and dead,

Their flying feet are dashed with red,

As theirs the vintaging that tread

Before the Lord.

O head unfashionably fair,

What end was thine, for all thy care?

We only see thee dreaming there:

We cannot see

The breaking of thy vision, when

The Rights of Man were lords of men,

When virtue won her own again

In‘ 93.