Prologue to M.. H_________

If we have err’d in paring down a name,
All civil well bred Authors do the same:
Survey the columns of our daily writers
You’ll find that some Initials are great pens fight.
How great the shock, how fatal is the jar, 
When Ensign W.__ meets Lieutenant R._____
With two stout seconds, just of their own gizzazrd
Cross Captain X. and rough old General Izzard.
Letter to letter spreads the dire alarms, 
Till half the alphabet is up in arms.
Nor with less lustre have Initials shone
To grace the gentler annals of Crim. Con.
Where the dispenser of the public bash
Lost penance give a letter and a dash _____
When vice reduced in size, shrinks to a failing
And loses half its grossness by curtailing:
Faux pas are told in such a modest way,
“The affair of Colonel B. with Mrs. A.”
You must excuse them. – for what is there, say?
Which such a pliant vowel must not grant
To such a very pressing consonant?
Or who poetic justice dares dispute,
When mildly melting at a lover’s suit,
The wife’s a liquid, her good man a mute.
Even in the homeliest scenes of honest life
The coarse-spun intercourse of man and wife, 
Initials I am told, have taken place, 
Of Deary, Spouse, & that old-fashion’d race,
And Cabbage, ask’d by brother Snip to tea,
Replies, “I’d come – but it don’t rest with me
“I always leaves them things to Mrs. C.”
O should this mincing fashion ever spread
From names of living Heroes, to the dead,
How would ambition sigh, and hang her head.
As each loved syllable shou’d melt away ---
Her Alexander turn’d into great A_____
A single C her Caesar to express -----
Her Sapho shorten’d to a roman S. 
And midst and docked to these new modes of speech
Great Hannibal himself a Mr. H.