Who to the Dean, and silver bell can swear,
And sees at Canons what was never there;
Who reads but with a lust to misapply,
Make satire a lampoon, and fiction lie;
A lash like mine no honest man shall' dread,
But all such babbling blockheads in his stead.
Let Sporus tremble-A. What? that thing of silk,
Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk?
Satire of sense, alas! can Sporus feel?

Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

P. Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,
This painted child of dirt, that stinks and stings;
Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys,
Yet wit ne'er tastes, and beauty ne'er enjoys:
So well-bred spaniels civilly delight

In mumbling of the game they dare not bite.
Eternal smiles his emptiness betray,

As shallow streams run dimpling all the way.
Whether in florid impotence he speaks,

And, as the prompter breathes, the puppet squeaks,
Or at the ear of Eve, familiar toad,

Half froth, half venom, spits himself abroad,
In puns, or politics, or tales, or lies,

Or spite, or smut, or rhymes, or blasphemies.
His wit all see-saw, between that and this.
Now high, now low, now master up, now miss,
And he himself one vile antithesis.

Amphibious thing! that acting either part,
The trifling head, or the corrupted heart,
Fop at the toilet, flatterer at the board,
Now trips a lady, and now struts a lord.
Eve's tempter thus the rabbins have express'd,
A cherub's face, a reptile all the rest,

Beauty that shocks you, parts that none will trust,
Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust.
Not fortune's worshipper, nor fashion's fool,
Not lucre's madman, nor ambition's tool,
Not proud, nor servile; be one poet's praise,
That, if he pleased, he pleased by manly ways:
That flattery, even to kings, he held a shame,
And thought a lie in verse or prose the same:
That not in fancy's maze he wander'd long,
But stoop'd to truth, and moralized his song:
That not for fame, but virtue's better end,
He stood the furious foe, the timid friend,

The damning critic, half-approving wit,
The coxcomb hit, or fearing to be hit;
Laugh'd at the loss of friends he never had,
The dull, the proud, the wicked, and the mad;
The distant threats of vengeance on his head,
The blow unfelt, the tear he never shed;
The tale revived, the lie so oft o'erthrown,'
The imputed trash, and dulness not his own;
The morals blacken'd when the writings 'scape,
The libell'd person, and the pictured shape;
Abuse on all he loved, or loved him, spread,
A friend in exile, or a father dead;

The whisper, that to greatness still too near,
Perhaps, yet vibrates on his SOVEREIGN's ear-
Welcome for thee, fair virtue! all the past:
For thee, fair virtue! welcome even the last!
A. But why insult the poor, affront the great?
P. A knave's a knave to me, in every state:
Alike my scorn, if he succeed or fail,
Sporus at court, or Japhet in a jail,
A hireling scribbler, or a hireling peer,
Knight of the post corrupt, or of the shire;
If on a pillory, or near a throne,

He gain his prince's ear, or lose his own.

Yet soft by nature, more a dupe than wit,
Sappho can tell you how this man was bit:
This dreaded satirist Dennis will confess
Foe to his pride, but friend to his distress:
So humble, he has knock'd at Tibbald's door,
Has drunk with Cibber, nay has rhymed för Moore.
Full ten years3 slander'd, did he once reply?

Three thousand suns went down on Welsted's lie.4

1 As, that he received subscriptions for Shakspeare, that he set his name to Mr. Broome's verses, &c., which, though publicly disproved, were nevertheless shamelessly repeated in the Libels, and even in that called the Nobleman's Epistle.

2 Namely, on the Duke of Buckingham, the Earl of Burlington, Lord Bathurst, Lord Bolingbroke, Bishop Atterbury, Dr. Swift, Dr. Arbuthnot, Mr. Gay, his friends, his parents, and his very nurse, aspersed in printed papers, by James Moore, G. Duckett, L. Welsted, Tho. Bentley, and other obscure persons.

3 It was so long, after many libels, before the author of the Dunciad published that poem; till when, he never writ a word in answer to the many scurrilities and falsehoods concerning him.

4 This man had the impudence to tell, in print, that Mr. P. had occasioned a lady's death, and to name a person he never heard of. He also published that he libelled the Duke of Chandos; with whom (it was

To please his mistress, one aspersed his life;
He lash'd him not, but let her be his wife:
Let Budgell1 charge low Grub-street on his quill,
And write whate'er he pleased, except his will
Let the two Curlls of town and court, abuse
His father, mother, body, soul, and muse.3
Yet why? that father held it for a rule,
It was a sin to call our neighbour fool:
That harmless mother thought no wife a whore:
Hear this, and spare his family, James Moore!
Unspotted names, and memorable long!

If there be force in virtue, or in song.

added) that he had lived in familiarity, and received from him a present of five hundred pounds: the falsehood of both which is known to his Grace. Mr. P. never received any present, farther than the subscription for Homer, from him, or from any great man whatsoever.

1 Budgell, in a weekly pamphlet called The Bee, bestowed much abuse on him, in the imagination that he writ some things about the last will of Dr. Tindal, in the Grub-street Journal; a paper wherein he never had the least hand, direction, or supervisal, nor the least knowledge of its author.

2 Alluding to Tindal's will: by which, and other indirect practices, Budgell, to the exclusion of the next heir, a nephew, got to himself almost the whole fortune of a man entirely unrelated to him.

3 In some of Curll's and other pamphlets, Mr. Pope's father was said to be a mechanic, a hatter, a farmer, nay, a bankrupt. But, what is stranger, a nobleman (if such a reflection could be thought to come from a nobleman) had dropt an allusion to that pitiful untruth, in a paper called An Epistle to a Doctor of Divinity; and the following line,

"Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure,”

had fallen from a like courtly pen, in certain verses to the imitator of Horace. Mr. Pope's father was of a gentleman's family in Oxfordshire, the head of which was the Earl of Downe, whose sole heiress married the Earl of Lindsay. His mother was the daughter of William Turner, Esq., of York: she had three brothers, one of whom was killed, another died in the service of King Charles; the eldest following his fortunes, and becoming a general officer in Spain, left her what estate remained after the sequestrations and forfeitures of her family.-Mr. Pope died in 1717, aged 75; she in 1733, aged 93, a very few weeks after this poem was finished. The following inscription was placed by their son on their monument in the parish of Twickenham, in Middlesex:--

D. O. M.

ALEXANDRO. POPE. VIRO. INNOCVO. PROBO. PIO.
QUI. VIXIT. ANNOS. LXXV. OB. MDCCXVIL.

ET. EDITHÆ. CONIVGI. INCVLPABILI.
PIENTISSIMÆ. QUÆ. VIXIT. ANNOS.
XCIII. OB, MDCCXXXIII.

PARENTIBVS. BENEMERENTIBVS. FILIVS. FECIT.'
ET. SIBI.

Of gentle blood (part shed in honour's cause,
While yet in Britain honour had applause)
Each parent sprung-A. What fortune, pray?-
P. Their own;

And better got, than Bestia's from the throne.
Born to no pride, inheriting no strife,

Nor marrying discord in a noble wife,
Stranger to civil and religious rage,

The good man walk'd innoxious through his age.
No courts he saw, no suits would ever try,
Nor dared an oath, nor hazarded a lie.
Unlearn'd, he knew no schoolman's subtle art,
No language but the language of the heart.
By nature honest, by experience wise,
Healthy by temperance, and by exercise;
His life, though long, to sickness past unknown,
His death was instant, and without a groan.
O grant me thus to live, and thus to die!
Who sprung from kings shall know less joy than I.
O friend! may each domestic bliss be thine!
Be no unpleasing melancholy mine:
Me, let the tender office long engage,
To rock the cradle of reposing age,

With lenient arts extend a mother's breath,
Make languor smile, and smooth the bed of death,
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,
And keep a while one parent from the sky!
On cares like these, if length of days attend,
May Heaven, to bless those days, preserve my friend,
Preserve him social, cheerful, and serene,
And just as rich as when he served a QUEEN.

A. Whether that blessing be denied or given,
Thus far was right, the rest belongs to Heaven.

SATIRES AND EPISTLES OF HORACE

IMITATED.

Ludentis speciem dabit, et torquebitur.-HOR.

ADVERTISEMENT.

THE occasion of publishing these Imitations was the clamour raised on some of my Epistles. An answer from Horace was both more full, and of more dignity, than any I could have made in my own person; and the example of much greater freedom in so eminent a divine as Dr. Donne, seemed a proof with what indignation and contempt a Christian may treat vice or folly, in ever so low, or ever so high a station. Both these authors were acceptable to the princes and ministers under whom they lived. The Satires of Dr. Donne I versified at the desire of the Earl of Oxford, while he was lord treasurer, and of the Duke of Shrewsbury, who had been secretary of state; neither of whom looked upon a satire on vicious courts as any reflection on those they served in. And indeed there is not in the world a greater error than that which fools are so apt to fall into, and knaves with good reason to encourage,-the mistaking a satirist for a libeller, whereas to a true satirist nothing is so odious as a libeller, for the same reason as to a man truly virtuous nothing is so hateful as a hypocrite.

Uni æquus virtuti atque ejus amicis.

SATIRE I.

TO MR. FORTESCUE.

P. THERE are, (I scarce can think it, but am told)
There are, to whom my Satire seems too bold:
Scarce to wise Peter complaisant enough,
And something said of Chartres much too rough.
The lines are weak, another's pleased to say,
Lord Fanny spins a thousand such a day.
Timorous by nature, of the rich in awe,
I come to counsel learned in the law:
You'll give me, like a friend both sage and free,
Advice; and (as you use) without a fee.