Who to the Dean, and silver bell can swear, Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel? P. Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings, In mumbling of the game they dare not bite. As shallow streams run dimpling all the way. And, as the prompter breathes, the puppet squeaks, Half froth, half venom, spits himself abroad, Or spite, or smut, or rhymes, or blasphemies. Amphibious thing! that acting either part, Beauty that shocks you, parts that none will trust, The damning critic, half-approving wit, The whisper, that to greatness still too near, He gain his prince's ear, or lose his own. Yet soft by nature, more a dupe than wit, 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; 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. ET. EDITHÆ. CONIVGI. INCVLPABILI. PARENTIBVS. BENEMERENTIBVS. FILIVS. FECIT.' Of gentle blood (part shed in honour's cause, And better got, than Bestia's from the throne. Nor marrying discord in a noble wife, The good man walk'd innoxious through his age. With lenient arts extend a mother's breath, A. Whether that blessing be denied or given, 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) |