* * * * *
Dear Johnny Bull, you boast much resolution,
With, thanks to Heaven, a glorious constitution;
Your taste, recovered half from foreign quacks,
Takes airings now on English horses' backs.
While every modern bard may raise his name,
If not on lasting praise, on stable fame.
Think that to Germans you have given no check,
Think bow each actor horsed has risked his neck;
You've shown them favour. Oh, then, once more show it
To this night's Anglo-German horse-play poet.
In the course of the play the sentimental sentinel in "Pizarro" was
ridiculed, and the whole concluded with a grand battle, in which the
last scene of "Timour the Tartar" was imitated and burlesqued.
"Stuffed ponies and donkeys frisked about with ludicrous agility,"
writes a critic of the time. The play was thoroughly successful, and
would seem to have retrieved the fortunes of the theatre, which had
been long in a disastrous condition.
Drury Lane also struck a blow at the "horse spectacles" of the rival
house.
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