Tea, a poem/The Frenchmen
FRENCHMEN.
In my mind there is no position more positive and unexceptonable than that most Frenchmen, dead or alive, are born dancers. I came pounce upon this discovery at the assembly, and I immediately noted it down in my register of indisputeable facts—the public shall know all about it. As I never dance cotillions, holding them to be monstrous distorters of the human frame, and tantamount in their operations to being broken and dislocated on the wheel, I generally take occasion, while they are going on, to make my remarks on the company. In the course of these observations I was struck with the energy and eloquance of sundry limbs, which seemed to be flurishing about without appertaining to any body. After much investigation and difficulty, I, at length, traced them to their respective owners, whom I found to be all Frenchmen to a man. Art may have meddled somewhat in these affairs, but nature certainly did more. I have since been considerably employed in calculations on this subject; and by the most accurate computation I have determined, that a Frenchman passes at least three fifths of his time between the heavens and the earth, and partakes eminently of the nature of a gossam or soap bubble. One of these jack-a-lantren heroes, in taking a figure, which neither Euclid nor Pythagoras himself could demonstrate unfortunately wound himself—I mean his foot—his better part—into a lady's cobweb muslin robe; but preceiving it at the instant, he set himself a spinning the other way, like a top, unravelled his step, without omiting one angle or curve, and extricated himself without breaking one thread of the lady's dress! he then sprung up like a sturgeon, crossed his feet four times, and finished this wonderful evolution by quivering his left leg, as a cat does her paw, when she has accidentally dipped it in water. No man "of woman born;" who was not a Frenchman, or a mountebank, could have done the like.
FINIS