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While with neck like a swan, and with high beating breast,
With wast nicely taper'd, and form'd to be pres'd;
Scarcely touching the floor, full of frolick and game,
The elegant fair one first challenges fame.
Now the Park's thickly throng'd, the high phaeton see,
The delicate hunter, gilt coach, vis a-vis;
Each grace and each charm, every party displays,
And fashion peeps forth in a thousand sweet ways;
While alike fitly bred for the ball-room or course,
The phaeton to drive, or to curb the fleet horse;
By this time fair virtue's an obsolete word,
And the elegant fair one is kept by a lord.
Grown stale, somewhat aged, unfit for my Lord,
Devoid of all passion, her appetite's cloy'd;
While beaux and box-swellers her pedigree trace,
Tell whose she has been, from the groom to his grace;
And what style me has liv'd in with pleasure count o'er,
As they loiter their time at some bagnio door;
While with poverty sunk, and diseases weigh'd down.
The elegant fair one's a girl of the town.
At length from St James's to wapping she strays,
Her blood all polluted, her system decays!
On straw at some bunter's, she gives up her breath,
Or in some filthy kennel's arrested by death!
Who so lately each pomp and each gaiety knew,
Is now left a horrible sight to the view;
Her relics a pitying crowd now behold,
And the elegant fair one to the surgeon is sold.
THE
