THE mighty mother,* and her son who brings
The Smithfield musest to the ear of kings,
I sing. Say you, her instruments the great!
Call'd to this work by Dulness, Jove, and Fate ;
You by whose care, in vain decried and curs'd,
Still Dunce the second reigns like Dunce the first;
Say how the goddess bade Britannia sleep,
And pour'd her spirit o'er the land and deep.

In eldest time, ere mortals writ or read,
Ere Pallas issued from the Thunderer's head,
Dulness o'er all possess'd her ancient right,
Daughter of Chaos and eternal Night:
Fate in their dotage this fair idiot gave,
Gross as her sire, and as her mother grave,
Laborious, heavy, busy, bold, and blind,
She ruled, in native anarchy, the mind.

Still her old empire to restore she tries,
For, born a goddess, Dulness never dies.

O thou! whatever title please thine ear,
Dean, Drapier, Bickerstaff, or Gulliver!§
Whether thou choose Cervantes' serious air,
Or laugh and shake in Rabelais' easy chair,
Or praise the court, or magnify mankind,
Or thy grieved country's copper chains unbind;
From thy Boeotia though her power retires,
Mourn not, my Swift, at aught our realm acquires,
Here pleased behold her mighty wings outspread
To hatch a new Saturnian age of lead.

Close to those walls where Folly holds her throne,
And laughs to think Monro would take her down,

The reader ought here to be cautioned that the mother, and not thre son, is the principal agent of this poem.

+ Smithfield is the place where Bartholomew Fair was kept, whose shows, machines, and dramatical entertainments, formerly agreeable only to the taste of the rabble, were, by the hero of this poem and others of equal genius, brought to the theatres of Covent-Garden, Lincoln's-Inn-Fields, and the Haymarket, to be the reigning pleasures of the court and town. This happened in the reigns of Kings George I, and II.

i.e., by their judgments, their interests, and their inclinations.-W. The names he assumed in his other writings.

Copper coinage in Ireland.

Where o'er the gates, by his famed father's hand*
Great Cibber's brazen brainless brothers stand;
One cell there is, conceal'd from vulgar eye,
The cave of Poverty and Poetry.

Keen hollow winds howl thro' the bleak recess,
Emblem of music caus'd by emptiness.

Hence bards, like Proteus long in vain tied down,
Escape in monsters, and amaze the town.
Hence Miscellanies spring, the weekly boast
Of Curl's chaste press, and Lintot's rubric post :+
Hence hymning Tyburn's elegiac lines,+
Hence Journals, Medleys, Merc'ries, Magazines,
Sepulchral lies, our holy walls to grace,

And new-year odes, and all the Grub-street race.
In clouded majesty here Dulness shone;
Four guardian Virtues, round, support her throne:
Fierce champion Fortitude, that knows no fears
Of hisses, blows, or want, or loss of ears:

Calm Temperance, whose blessings those partake
Who hunger and who thirst for scribbling sake:
Prudence, whose glass presents the approaching gaol;
Poetic Justice, with her lifted scale,

Where, in nice balance, truth with gold she weighs,
And solid pudding against empty praise.

Here she beholds the chaos dark and deep,
Where nameless somethings in their causes sleep,
'Til genial Jacob,§ or a warm third day,
Call forth each mass, & poem, or a play:

How hints, like spawn, scarce quick in embryo lie,
How new-born nonsense first is taught to cry;

• Mr Caius Gabriel Cibber, father of the poet laureate. The two statues of the lunatics formerly placed over the gates of Bedlam Hospital were done by him, and (as the son justly says of him) are no ill monuments of his fame as an artist.

Two booksellers. The former was fined by the Court of King's Bench for publishing obscene books; the latter usually adorned his shop with titles in red letters.

It was an ancient English custom for the malefactors to sing a psalm at their execution at Tyburn, and no less customary to print elegies on their deaths, at the same time, or before.

Jacob Tonson, the publisher.

Maggots half form'd in rhyme exactly meet,
And learn to crawl upon poetic feet.

Here one poor word an hundred clenches makes,
And ductile Dulness new meanders takes;
There motley images her fancy strike,
Figures ill pair'd, and similes unlike.
She sees a mob of metaphors advance,
Pleased with the madness of the mazy dance:
How Tragedy and Comedy embrace ;
How Farce and Epic get a jumbled race;
How Time himself stands still at her command,
Realms shift their place, and ocean turns to land,
Here gay description Ægypt glads with showers,
Or gives to Zembla fruits, to Barca flowers;
Glittering with ice here hoary hills are seen,
There painted valleys of eternal green,
In cold December fragrant chaplets blow,
And heavy harvests nod beneath the snow.
All these, and more, the cloud-compelling queen
Beholds through fogs, that magnify the scene:
She, tinsel'd o'er in robes of varying hues,
With self-applause her wild creation views;
Sees momentary monsters rise and fall,
And with her own fools-colours gilds them all.
'Twas on the day,* when *
* rich and grave,

Like Cimon, triumph'd both on land and wave:
(Pomps without guilt, of bloodless swords and maces,
Glad chains, warm furs, broad banners, and broad faces :)
Now night descending, the proud scene was o'er,
But lived, in Settle's numbers, one day more :†

Lord Mayor's day; his name the author had left in blanks, but most certainly could never be that which the editor foisted in formerly, and which no ways agrees with the chronology of the poem. The procession of a Lord Mayor is made partly by land, and partly by water.-Cimon, the famous Athenian general, obtained a victory by sea, and another by land, on the same day, over the Persians and barbarians.

+ Settle was poet to the city of London. His office was to compose yearly panegyrics upon the Lord Mayors, and verses to be spoken in the pageants; but that part of the show being at length frugally abolished, the employment of city post ceased so that upon Settle's demise, there was no successor to that place.

Now mayors and shreives all hush'd and satiate lay,
Yet eat, in dreams, the custard of the day;
While pensive poets painful vigils keep,
Sleepless themselves, to give their readers sleep.
Much to the mindful queen the feast recals
What city swans once sung within the walls;
Much she revolves their arts, their ancient praise,
And sure succession down from Heywood's days,*
She saw, with joy, the line immortal run,
Each sire impress'd and glaring in his son:
So watchful Bruin forms, with plastic care,
Each growing lump, and brings it to a bear,
She saw old Prynne in restless Daniel shine,
And Eusdent eke out Blackmore's endless line;
She saw slow Phillips creep like Tate's poor page,
And all the mighty mad in Dennis$ rage.

In each she marks her image full express'd,
But chief in Bays's monster-breeding breast;
Bays, form'd by nature stage and town to bless,
And act, and be, a coxcomb, with success.
Dulness with transport eyes the lively dunce,
Remembering she herself was Pertness once.
Now (shame to Fortune!) an ill run at play
Blank'd his bold visage, and a thin third day :
Swearing and supperless the hero sate,
Blasphemed his gods, the dice, CONDEMNED his fate.
Then gnaw'd his pen, then dash'd it on the ground,
Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound!
Plunged for his sense, but found no bottom there,
Yet wrote and flounder'd on, in mere despair.

* John Heywood, whose interludes were printed in the time of Henry VIII. † Laurence Eusden, poet laureate. Mr Jacob gives a catalogue of some few only of his works, which were very numerous.

Nahum Tate was poet laureate, a cold writer, of no invention; but sometimes translated tolerably when befriended by Mr Dryden.

§ Mr John Dennis was the son of a saddler in London, born in 1657. He paid court to Mr Dryden; and having obtained some correspondence with Mr Wycherly and Mr Congreve, he immediately obliged the public with their letters. He made himself known to the government by many admirable schemes and projects, which the ministry, for reasons best known to themselves, constantly kept private.

Round him much embryo, much abortion lay,
Much future ode, and abdicated play;
Nonsense precipitate, like running lead,
That slipp'd through cracks and zig-zags at the head;
All that on Folly Frenzy could beget,

Fruits of dull heat, and sooterkins of wit.
Next, o'er his books his eyes began to roll,
In pleasing memory of all he stole,

How here he sipp'd, how there he plunder'd snug,
And suck'd all o'er, like an industrious bug.
Here lay poor Fletcher's half-eat scenes, and here
The frippery of crucified Moliere;

There hapless Shakspeare, yet of Tibbald sore,
Wish'd he had blotted for himself before.
The rest on outside merit but presume,
Or serve (like other fools) to fill a room;
Such with their shelves as due proportion hold,
Or their fond parents dress'd in red and gold;
Or where the pictures for the page atone,
And Quarles is saved by beauties not his own.
Here swells the shelf with Ogilby the great ;*
There, stamp'd with arms, Newcastlet shines complete:
Here all his suffering brotherhood retire,

And 'scape the martyrdom of jakes and fire:

A Gothic library! of Greece and Rome

Well purged, and worthy Settle, Banks, and Broome.

"John Ogilby was one, who, from a late initiation into literature made such a progress as might well style him the prodigy of his time in sending into the world so many large volumes!"

†The Duchess of Newcastle. Langbaine reckons up eight folios of her Grace's, which were usually adorned with gilded covers, and had her coat of arms upon them,

The poet has mentioned these three authors in particular, as they are parallel to our hero in his three capacities:-1. Settle was his brother laureate; only indeed upon half-pay, for the city instead of the court; but equally famous for unintelligible flights in his poems on public occasions, such as shows, birthdays, &c. 2. Banks was his rival in tragedy, though more successful in one of his tragedies, the Earl of Essex, which is yet alive: Anna Boleyn, the Queen of Scots, and Cyrus the Great, are dead and gone. Those he dressed in a sort of beggar's velvet, or a happy mixture of the thick fustian and thin prosaic; exactly imitated in Perolla and Isidora, Cæsar in Egypt, and the Heroic Daughter. 3. Broome was a serv