Or damn to all eternity at once,

At ninety-nine, a modern and a dunce?

• We shall not quarrel for year or two; By courtesy of England, he may do.'

60

Then, by the rule that made the horse-tail bare, I pluck out year by year, as hair by hair;

And melt down ancients like a heap of snow: 65
While you, to measure merits, look in Stowe;
And, estimating authors by the year,
Bestow a garland only on a bier.

Shakspeare, whom you and every play-house bill

Style the divine, the matchless, what you will; 70
For gain, not glory, wing'd his roving flight,
And grew immortal in his own despite.

63 The horse-tail bare. The story is told of the brave and dexterous Sertorius. To teach his rude soldiery the value of perseverance, he bade one of them stand forth and pull off his horse's tail: the soldier grasped the intire at once, and pulled; but pulled, of course, in vain: he then bade another pluck it away hair by hair. The success of the latter expedient visibly established the maxim, that patience and skill succeed where force must fail.

72 Immortal in his own despite. Nothing can be clearer than that Shakspeare was singularly negligent of posthumous fame. By leaving no memoirs of himself, he abandoned his personal character to chance: by leaving his works to the caprice of the players, he abandoned the still dearer part of himself, his fame, to mutilation. But the life of Shakspeare, while he continued in London, must have been one of intense occupation. The stupendous labor of producing five-and-thirty plays in five-and-twenty years, the proverbial anxieties of theatrical management, and the whirl of existence round him, might well account for his negligence of all things but the moment. When at last he retired, but two years lay between him and the grave: he left London in 1614, and died in 1616.

Bowles quotes Foote's pleasantry of him, that Shakspeare meant only to write farces, but the poetry he threw in gratis.'

Ben, old and poor, as little seem'd to heed
The life to come, in every poet's creed.
Who now reads Cowley? if he pleases yet,
His moral pleases, not his pointed wit;
Forgot his epic, nay, Pindaric art;
But still I love the language of his heart.

75

80

'Yet surely, surely, these were famous men! What boy but hears the sayings of old Ben? In all debates where critics bear a part, Not one but nods, and talks of Jonson's art, Of Shakspeare's nature, and of Cowley's wit; How Beaumont's judgment check'd what Fletcher writ;

How Shadwell hasty, Wycherley was slow;
But, for the passions, Southern sure and Rowe.
These, only these, support the crowded stage,
From eldest Heywood down to Cibber's age.'
All this may be; the people's voice is odd;
It is, and it is not, the voice of God.
To Gammer Gurton if it give the bays,
And yet deny the Careless Husband praise,
Or say our fathers never broke a rule ;-
Why then, I say, the public is a fool :

85

90

But let them own, that greater faults than we 95 They had, and greater virtues, I'll agree.

Spenser himself affects the obsolete,

And Sidney's verse halts ill on Roman feet: Milton's strong pinion now not heaven can bound;

Now serpent-like, in prose he sweeps the ground;

91 Gammer Gurton. One of the first printed plays in English, written by Still, of Christ's-college, Cambridge; afterwards bishop of Bath and Wells.

In quibbles angel and archangel join,

And God the Father turns a school-divine.

101

Not that I'd lop the beauties from his book,
Like slashing Bentley with his desperate hook;
Or damn all Shakspeare, like the affected fool 105
At court, who hates whate'er he read at school.

But for the wits of either Charles's days,

The mob of gentlemen who wrote with ease,
Sprat, Carew, Sedley, and a hundred more,
Like twinkling stars the Miscellanies o'er; 110
One simile, that solitary shines

In the dry desert of a thousand lines,

Or lengthen'd thought that gleams through many

a page,

Has sanctified whole poems for an age.

I lose my patience, and I own it too,

115

When works are censured, not as bad, but new; While, if our elders break all reason's laws, These fools demand not pardon, but applause.

On Avon's bank, where flowers eternal blow, If I but ask if any weed can grow; One tragic sentence if I dare deride, Which Betterton's grave action dignified,

120

109 Sprat. In his last will, he gave thanks to God, that he, who had been bred at neither Eton nor Westminster, but at a little country school by the churchyard side, should come to be a bishop at last.' Warburton, who was in the same condition, sarcastically observes, that the honor of being a Westminster schoolboy, some have at one age, and some at another, and some all their life long.'

122 Betterton's grave action. This celebrated actor was one of the earliest friends of Pope. Cibber, in his Life,' has given an interesting analysis of Betterton's powers: he was a man of honor and intelligence. Booth, who was second only to him, was a Westminster boy, whom Busby's praises of his perform.

125

Or well-mouth'd Booth with emphasis proclaims,
Though but perhaps a muster-roll of names,
How will our fathers rise up in a rage,
And swear all shame is lost in George's age!
You'd think no fools disgraced the former reign,
Did not some grave examples yet remain,
Who scorn a lad should teach his father skill;
And having once been wrong, will be so still. 130
He, who, to seem more deep than you or I,
Extols old bards, or Merlin's prophecy,
Mistake him not; he envies, not admires;
And to debase the sons, exalts the sires.
Had ancient times conspired to disallow
What then was new, what had been ancient now?
Or what remain'd, so worthy to be read
By learned critics of the mighty dead?

135

In days of ease, when now the weary sword Was sheathed, and luxury with Charles restored; In every taste of foreign courts improved,

141

All, by the king's example, lived and loved.' Then peers grew proud in horsemanship to excel; Newmarket's glory rose, as Britain's fell;

The soldier breathed the gallantries of France, 145
And every flowery courtier writ romance:
Then marble, soften'd into life, grew warm;
And yielding metal flow'd to human form:

ance of the Pamphilus of Terence stimulated to try the stage. His chef d'œuvre was Othello: yet the description of his figure seems singularly at variance with success. . His form was clumsy, his head was large, his arms were remarkably short, and his back was bowed.'

142 A verse of lord Lansdowne.

143 In horsemanship to excel,-And every flowery courtier writ romance. The duke of Newcastle's book of borsemanship, the romance of Parthenissa' by the earl of Orrery, and most of the French romances translated by persons of quality.-Pope.

Lely on animated canvas stole

150

The sleepy eye that spoke the melting soul.
No wonder then, when all was love and sport,
The willing Muses were debauch'd at court:
On each enervate string they taught the note
To pant, or tremble through an eunuch's throat.
But Britain, changeful as a child at play, 155
Now calls in princes, and now turns away:
Now whig, now tory, what we loved we hate ;
Now all for pleasure, now for church and state ;
Now for prerogative, and now for laws:

Effects unhappy, from a noble cause!

Time was, a sober Englishman would knock
His servants up, and rise by five o'clock,
Instruct his family in every rule,

And send his wife to church, his son to school:
To worship like his fathers was his care;
To teach their frugal virtues to his heir;
To prove that luxury could never hold;
And place on good security his gold.

160

165

149 Lely on animated canvas stole. Walpole says, that if Wycherley had nature in his comedies, it was nature stark naked the painters of his time veiled it but little more.' With his usual finesse, he observes that Lely's nymphs are too irregular in their appearance to be taken for any thing but maids of honor.' When Cromwell sat to Lely, he characteristically said,' Mr. Lely, I desire you would use all your skill to paint my picture truly like me, and not flatter me at all but remark all those roughnesses, pimples, warts, and every thing as you see me; otherwise I shall not pay a farthing for it.'

152 The willing Muses. Warton quotes a letter from the duke of Ormond to Clarendon, in 1658, in which he strikingly says of Charles II.,-1 fear his immoderate delight in empty, effeminate, and vulgar conversations, is become an irresistible part of his nature; and will never suffer him to animate his own designs and others' actions with that spirit which is requisite for his quality, and much more for his fortune.'