sirloins of meat Complain like a beggar of nothing to eat. 

  

  

       He Discourseth of the Wherefore of Bachelorism.     

    “What else do we live for in this world beside?”     Alas! 't is the question of ten times a day, That comes on the wind, or that floats on the tide, And creeps in the houses where men go to pray. What else do we live for than get such a wife As this of the banker of our faint description? What else is the end of our fashionable life From which men escape as they would from conscription? What else is the reason so few natives marry, Than this, that extravagance leads on to ruin? It is because few men are able to carry The load of this baking and roasting and stewing, Of buying and wasting extravagant meat, Where women are dying of “nothing to eat;”     Where men in corruption so rapidly tending, In morals and wealth in bankruptcy ending. That forging and stealing and breaches of trust, And ten thousand arts of the confidence game, And follies uncounted of men “on a bust,”     Are follies and crimes of this age to our shame, Till angels who witness the folly so wide Extended from palace to farm-house and cot, Might wonder if mortals life's objects forgot, Or Merdle's position is man's common lot? 

  

  

       He Discourseth of What some Mortals Live for.     

    “What else do they live for in this world beside?”     What else but for Kittys or one of the same, Do mothers their daughters at schools give the touch That leaves them to live as a wife but in name While position and fashion they frantically clutch. What else do they live for, our girls so refined, So forward, precocious, and gifted at ten They are flirting and courting and things of the kind, That never came under our grandmother's ken. At fifteen so dressed up, and hooped up, I ween, They're mothers full often before they're sixteen, And fading and dowdy and sickly at twenty, With one boy in trowsers and two girls in laces Complaining of starving while dying of plenty The fate is of ladies in fashionable places. 

  

  

       He Imploreth Mercy upon those condemned with fashionable folly to Marry, and Illustrateth 

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