Lie down obscure like other folks
Below the lash of snarlers' jokes.
Their faction is five-hundred odds;
Fer every coxcomb lends them rods,
And sneers as learnedly as they,
Like females o'er their morning tea.
You say, the Muse will not contain,
And write you must, or break a vein.
Then, if you find the terms too hard,
No longer my advice regard:
But raise your fancy on the wing.
The Irish senate's praises sing;
How jealous of the nation's freedom,
And for corruptions, how they weed 'em;
How each the public good pursues,
How far their hearts from private views;
Make all true patriots up to shoeboys
Huzza their brethren at the Blue-boys.1
Thus grown a member of the club,
No longer dread the rage of Grub.
How oft am I for rhyme to seek!
Te dress a thought, I toil a week:
And then how thankful to the town
If all my pains will earn a crown!
Whilst every critic can devour
My work and me in half an hour.
Would men of genius cease to write,
The rogues must die for want and spite,
Must die for want of food and raiment,
If scandal did not find them payment.
How cheerfully the hawkers cry
"A satire," and the gentry buy!
While my hard-laboured poem pines
Unsold upon the printer's lines.
A genius in the reverend gown
Must ever keep its owner down;
'Tis an unnatural conjunction,
And spoils the credit of the function.
Round all your brethren cast your eyes;
Point out the surest men to rise.
That club of candidates in black,
The least deserving of the pack,
Aspiring, factious, fierce, and loud,
With grace and learning unendowed,
Can turn their hands to every job,
The fittest tools to work for Bob;2
1 The Irish parliament sat at the Blue-boys' Hospital while the new parliament-house was building.
Will sooner coin a thousand lies
Than suffer men of parts to rise.
They crowd about preferment's gate,
And press you down with all their weight.
For, as of old mathematicians
Were by the vulgar thought magicians,
So academic dull ale-drinkers
Pronounce all men of wit freethinkers.
Wit, as the chief of virtue's friends,
Disdains to serve ignoble ends.
Observe what loads of stupid rhymes
Oppress us in corrupted times.
What pamphlets in a court's defence
Show reason, grammar, truth, or sense?
For, though the Muse delights in fiction,
She ne'er inspires against conviction.
Then keep your virtue still unmixed,
And let not faction come betwixt :
By party-steps no grandeur climb at,
Though it would make you England's primate.
First learn the science to be dull,-
You then may soon your conscience lull;
If not, however seated high,
Your genius in your face will fly.
When Jove was from his teeming head
Of wit's fair goddess brought to bed,
There followed at his lying-in
For afterbirth a Sooterkin;
Which, as the nurse pursued to kill,
Attained by flight the Muses' hill;
There in the soil began to root,
And littered at Parnassus' foot.
From hence the critic vermin sprung,
With harpy claws and poisonous tongue,
Who fatten on poetic scraps,
Too cunning to be caught in traps.
Dame Nature, as the learned show,
Provides each animal its foe:
Hounds hunt the hare, the wily fox
Devours your geese, the wolf your flocks:
Thus Envy pleads a natural claim
To persecute the Muses' fame;
On poets in all times abusive,
From Homer down to Pope inclusive.
Yet what avails it to complain?
You try to take revenge in vain.
A rat your utmost rage defies,
That safe behind the wainscot lies.
Say, did you ever know by sight
In cheese an individual mite?
Show me the same numeric flea
That bit your neck but yesterday:
You then may boldly go in quest
To find the Grub-street poets' nest;
What spunging-house in dread of jail
Receives them while they wait for bail;
What alley they are nestled in,
To flourish o'er a cup of gin:
Find the last garret where they lay,
Or cellar where they starve to-day.
Suppose you had them all trepanned,
With each a libel in his hand,
What punishment would you inflict?
Or call 'em rogues, or get 'em kicked?
These they have often tried before;
You but oblige 'em so much more:
Themselves would be the first to tell,
To make their trash the better sell.
You have been libelled-Let us know
What fool officious told you so.
Will you regard the hawker's cries,
Who in his titles always lies?
Whate'er the noisy scoundrel says,
It might be something in your praise:
And praise bestowed on Grub-street rhymes
Would vex one more a thousand times.
Till critics blame, and judges praise,
The poet cannot claim his bays.
On me when dunces are satiric,
I take it for a panegyric.
Hated by fools, and fools to hate,
Be that my motto, and my fate.
WHITSHEDS MOTTO ON HIS COACH.1
Libertas et natale solum.-Liberty and my native country.
"LIBERTAS et natale solum :
Fine words! I wonder where you stole 'em.
Could nothing but thy chief reproach
Serve for a motto on thy coach ?"
"But let me now the words translate.
Natale solum, my estate;
1 Whitshed was the Chief Justice who acted against Swift in the affair of the letters by "M. B. Drapier."
My dear estate, how well I love it!
My tenants, if you doubt, will prove it:
They swear I am so kind and good
I hug them till I squeeze their blood.
Libertas bears a large import:
First, how to swagger in a court;
And, secondly, to show my fury
Against an uncomplying jury;
And, thirdly, 'tis a new invention
To favour Wood, and keep my pension;
And, fourthly, 'tis to play an odd trick,
Get the great seal, and turn out Brod❜rick;
And, fifthly (you know whom I mean),
To humble that vexatious Dean;
And, sixthly, for my soul, to barter it,
For fifty times its worth, to Carteret."1
"Now, since your motto thus you construe, I must confess you've spoken once true. Libertas et natale solum:
You had good reason when you stole 'em."
DEATH AND DAPHNE.
TO AN AGREEABLE YOUNG LADY, BUT EXTREMELY LEAN.
DEATH went upon a solemn day
At Pluto's hall his court to pay.
The phantom, having humbly kissed
His grisly monarch's sooty fist,
Presented him the weekly bills
Of doctors, fevers, plagues, and pills.
Pluto, observing, since the peace,
The burial-article decrease,
And vexed to see affairs miscarry,
Declared in council Death must marry:
Vowed he no longer could support
Old bachelors about his court:
The interest of his realm had need
That Death should get a numerous breed;
Young deathlings, who, by practice made
Proficient in their father's trade,
With colonies might stock around
His large dominions underground.
A consult of coquets below
Was called to rig him out a beau.
From her own head Megæra takes
A periwig of twisted snakes;
Which in the nicest fashion curled
1 Lord Carteret, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.
(Like toupets of this upper world),
With flour of sulphur powdered well,
That graceful on his shoulders fell;
An adder of the sable kind,
In line direct, hung down behind.
The owl, the raven, and the bat,
Clubbed for a feather to his hat;
His coat, an usurer's velvet pall,
Bequeathed to Pluto, corpse and all.
But, loth his person to expose
Bare, like a carcase picked by crows,
A lawyer o'er his hands and face
Stuck artfully a parchment case.
No new-fluxed rake showed fairer skin,
Nor Phillis after lying in.
With snuff was filled his ebon box,
Of shin-bones rotted by the pox.
Nine spirits of blaspheming fops
With aconite anoint his chops:
And give him words of dreadful sounds,
"God damn his blood," and "blood and wounds."
Thus furnished out, he sent his train
To take a house in Warwick Lane.
The faculty, his humble friends,
A complimental message sends:
Their president in scarlet gown
Harangued, and welcomed him to town.
But Death had business to dispatch;
His mind was running on his match.
And, hearing much of Daphne's fame,
His Majesty of Terrors came,
Fine as a colonel of the guards,
To visit where she sat at cards.
She, as he came into the room,
Thought him Adonis in his bloom.
And now her heart with pleasure jumps;
She scarce remembers what is trumps;
For such a shape of skin and bone
Was never seen except her own:
Charmed with his eyes, and chin, and snout,
Her pocket-glass drew slily out;
And grew enamoured with her phiz,
As just the counterpart of his.
She darted many a private glance,
And freely made the first advance;
Was of her beauty grown so vain
She doubted not to win the swain;
Nothing, she thought, could sooner gain him
Than with her wit to entertain him.
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