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Then spend your life in joy and sport,
(This doctrine, friend, I learn'd at court).'
The veriest hermit in the nation

May yield, God knows, to strong temptation.
Away they come, through thick and thin,
To a tall house near Lincoln's Inn;
("Twas on the night of a debate,
When all their lordships had sat late.)
Behold the place where, if a poet
Shined in description, he might show it;
Tell how the moonbeam trembling falls,
And tips with silver1 all the walls;
Palladian walls, Venetian doors,
Grotesco roofs, and stucco floors:
But let it (in a word) be said,
The moon was up, and men a-bed,
The napkins white, the carpet red:
The guests withdrawn had left the treat,
And down the mice sat, tête-à-tête.

Our courtier walks from dish to dish,
Tastes for his friend of fowl and fish ;
Tells all their names, lays down the law,
"Que ça est bon! Ah goutez ça!
That jelly 's rich, this malmsey healing,
Pray, dip your whiskers and your tail in.'
Was ever such a happy swain ?
He stuffs and swills, and stuffs again.
'I'm quite ashamed-'tis mighty rude
To eat so much-but all 's so good.
I have a thousand thanks to give—
My lord alone knows how to live.'

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1 Tips with silver: ' occurs also in the famous moonlight scene in the Iliad '-'Tips with silver every mountain's head.'

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No sooner said, but from the hall

Rush chaplain, butler, dogs, and all:

A rat! a rat! clap to the door'-
The cat comes bouncing on the floor.
O for the heart of Homer's mice,
Or gods to save them in a trice!
(It was by Providence they think,
For your damn'd stucco has no chink.)
'An 't please your honour, quoth the peasant,
This same dessert is not so pleasant:

Give me again my hollow tree,

A crust of bread, and liberty!'

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BOOK IV. ODE I. TO VENUS.

AGAIN? new tumults in my breast?

Ah, spare me, Venus! let me, let me rest! I am not now, alas! the man

As in the gentle reign of my Queen Anne.

Ah, sound no more thy soft alarms,

Nor circle sober fifty with thy charms.

Mother too fierce of dear desires!

Turn, turn to willing hearts your wanton fires,

To Number Five direct your doves,

There spread round Murray all your blooming loves:

Noble and young, who strikes the heart

With every sprightly, every decent part;

Equal, the injured to defend,

To charm the mistress, or to fix the friend.

He, with a hundred arts refined,

Shall stretch thy conquests over half the kind;

To him each rival shall submit,

Make but his riches equal to his wit.

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Then shall thy form the marble grace,

(Thy Grecian form) and Chloe lend the face: His house, embosom'd in the grove,

Sacred to social life and social love,

Shall glitter o'er the pendant green,

Where Thames reflects the visionary scene: Thither, the silver-sounding lyres

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Shall call the smiling Loves, and young Desires; There, every Grace and Muse shall throng, Exalt the dance, or animate the song; There, youths and nymphs, in consort gay, Shall hail the rising, close the parting day. With me, alas! those joys are o'er;

For me, the vernal garlands bloom no more. Adieu fond hope of mutual fire,

The still believing, still-renew'd desire ; Adieu! the heart-expanding bowl,

And all the kind deceivers of the soul!

But why? ah, tell me, ah, too dear!

Steals down my cheek th' involuntary tear? Why words so flowing, thoughts so free,

Stop, or turn nonsense, at one glance of thee? Thee, dress'd in fancy's airy beam,

Absent I follow through th' extended dream;

Now, now I seize, I clasp thy charms,

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And now you burst (ah, cruel!) from my arms; And swiftly shoot alang the Mall,

Or softly glide by the canal,

Now shown by Cynthia's silver ray,

And now on rolling waters snatch'd away.

Adieu!' how like Burns's lines, beginning

"But when life's day draws near the gloaming,

Farewell to vacant, careless roaming!" &c.

PART OF THE NINTH ODE OF THE FOURTH BOOK.

1 LEST you should think that verse shall die,
Which sounds the silver Thames along,
Taught, on the wings of truth to fly
Above the reach of vulgar song ;

2 Though daring Milton sits sublime,
In Spenser, native Muses play;
Nor yet shall Waller yield to time,
Nor pensive Cowley's moral lay.

3 Sages and chiefs long since had birth. Ere Cæsar was, or Newton named ;

These raised new empires o'er the earth,

And those, new heavens and systems framed.

4 Vain was the chief's, the sage's pride!
They had no poet, and they died.
In vain they schemed, in vain they bled!
They had no poet, and are dead.

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YES; thank my stars! as early as I knew
This town, I had the sense to hate it too:
Yet here, as ev'n in Hell, there must be still
One giant-vice, so excellently ill,

That all beside, one pities, not abhors;

As who knows Sappho, smiles at other whores.
I grant that poetry's a crying sin;

It brought (no doubt) the Excise and Army in:

Catch'd like the plague, or love, the Lord knows how, But that the cure is starving, all allow.

Yet like the papist's is the poet's state,

Poor and disarm'd, and hardly worth your hate!
Here a lean bard, whose wit could never give
Himself a dinner, makes an actor live;
The thief condemn'd, in law already dead,
So prompts, and saves a rogue who cannot read.
Thus as the pipes of some carved organ move,
The gilded puppets dance and mount above.

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Donne:' Pope, it is said, imitated Donne's 'Satires' to show that celeprated men before him had been as severe as he. Donne was an extraordinary man-first a Roman Catholic, then a barrister, then a clergyman in the Church of England, and Dean of St Paul's,-a vigorous although rude satirist, a fine Latin versifier, the author of many powerful sermons, and of a strange book defending suicide; altogether a strong, eccentric, extravagant genius.

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