[Page 46]

The CEREMONIAL.

By the Same.
1 "SIR, will you please to walk before?"
2 No pray, Sir — you are next the door.
3 "Upon mine honour, I'll not stir!"
4 Sir, I'm at home; consider, Sir.
5 "Excuse me Sir, I'll not go first."
6 Well, if I must be rude, I must;
7 But yet I wish I cou'd evade it;
8 'Tis strangely clownish — be persuaded, &c. &c.
9 — Go forward, cits! go forward, squires!
10 Nor scruple each, what each admires.
11 Life squares not, friends, with your proceeding:
12 It flies, while you display your breeding;
13 Such breeding as one's granam preaches,
14 Or some old dancing-master teaches —
[Page 47]
15 O for some rude tumultuous fellow,
16 Half crazy, or at least half-mellow,
17 To come behind you, unawares,
18 And fairly push you both down stairs!
19 But Death's at hand — Let me advise ye,
20 Go forward, friends — or he'll surprize ye.

Text

  • TEI/XML [chunk] (XML - 46K / ZIP - 5.5K) / ECPA schema (RNC - 357K / ZIP - 73K)
  • Plain text [excluding paratexts] (TXT - 809 / ZIP - 686 )

Facsimile (Source Edition)

(Page images digitized by the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive from a copy in the archive's library.)

Images

PDF

All Images (PDF - 1.1M)

About this text

Title (in Source Edition): The CEREMONIAL.
Author: William Shenstone
Themes: manners
Genres:
References: DMI 27239

Text view / Document view

Source edition

Dodsley, Robert, 1703-1764. A Collection of Poems in Six Volumes. By Several Hands. Vol. V. London: printed by J. Hughs, for R. and J. Dodsley, 1763 [1st ed. 1758], pp. 46-47. 6v.: music; 8⁰. (ESTC T131163; OTA K104099.005) (Page images digitized by the Eighteenth-Century Poetry Archive from a copy in the archive's library.)

Editorial principles

The text has been typographically modernized, but without any silent modernization of spelling, capitalization, or punctuation. The source of the text is given and all editorial interventions have been recorded in textual notes. Based on the electronic text originally produced by the TCP project, this ECPA text has been edited to conform to the recommendations found in Level 5 of the Best Practices for TEI in Libraries version 4.0.0.

Other works by William Shenstone