ANOTHER. WELL then! poor Gay lies under ground, So little justice here he found, 'Tis ten to one he'll ne'er come back. INTENDED FOR SIR ISAAC NEWTON, ISAACUS NEWTONUS: Quem Immortalem Testantur Tempus, Natura, Cœlum : Hoc Marmor Fatetur. NATURE and nature's laws lay hid in night. ON DR. FRANCIS ATTERBURY, Who died in Exile in Paris, 1732. His only daughter having expired in his arms, imme diately after she arrived in France to see him.] DIALOGUE. She. YES, we have lived-one pang, and then we part; May Heaven, dear father! now have all thy heart. Yet, ah! how once we loved, remember still, Till you are dust like me. Then mix this dust with thine-O spotless ghost! O more than fortune, friends, or country lost! Yes-'Save my country, Heaven,'-He'said, and diea ON EDMUND DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM, Who died in the 19th year of his age, 1735. FOR ONE WHO WOULD NOT BE BURIED IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY. HEROES and kings! your distance keep; In peace let one poor poet sleep, Who never flatter'd folks like you: Let Horace blush, and Virgil too. ANOTHER, ON THE SAME. UNDER this marble or under this sill, Or under this turf, or e'en what they will; Whatever an heir, or a friend in his stead, Or any good creature shall lay o'er my head; Lies one who ne'er cared, and still cares not a pin, What they said, or may say, of the mortal within; But who, living and dying, serene still and free, Trusts in God, that as well as he was, he shall be LORD CONINGSBY'S EPITAPH. ON BUTLER'S MONUMENT. RESPECT to Dryden, Sheffield justly paid, 1 This Epitaph, originally written on Picus Mirandula, is applied to F. Chartres, and printed among the works of Swift. See Hawkesworth's edition, vol. vi.-S. 2 Mr. Pope, in one of the prints from Scheemaker's nonument of Shakspeare in Westminster Abbey, has sufficiently shown his contempt of Alderman Barber, by the following couplet, which is substituted in the place of 'The cloud-capt towers,' &c. "Thus Britain loved me; and preserved my fame, Clear from a Barber's or a Benson's name.'-A. POPE Pope might probably have suppressed his satire on the alderman, because he was one of Swift's acquaintances and correspondents; though in the fourth book of the Dunciad he has an anonymous stroke at him: 'So by each bard an alderman shall sit, THE DUNCIAD, IN FOUR BOOKS; With the Prolegomena of Scriblerus, the Hypercritica of Aristarchus, and Notes Variorum. A LETTER TO THE PUBLISHER, Occasioned by the first correct Edition of the Dunciad. It is with pleasure I hear that you have procured a correct copy of the Dunciad, which the many surreptitious ones have rendered so necessary; and it is yet with more, that I am informed it will be attended with a Commentary: a work so requisite, that I cannot think the author himself could have omitted it, had he approved of the first appearance of this poem. Such notes as have occurred to me I herewith send you you will oblige me by inserting them amongst those which are, or will be, transmitted to you by others; since not only the author's friends, but even strangers, appear engaged by humanity, to take some care of an orphan of so much genius and spirit, which its parent seems to have abandoned from the very beginning, and suffered to step into the world naked, unguarded, and unattended. It was upon reading some of the abusive papers lately published, that my great regard to a person, whose friendship I esteem as one of the chief honours of my life, and a much greater respect to truth than to him or any man living, engaged me in inquiries, of which the inclosed notes are the fruit. I perceive that most of these authors had been (doubtless very wisely) the first aggressors. They had tried, till they were weary, what was to be got by railing at each other: nobody was either con cerned or surprised, if this or that scribbler was proved a dunce. But every one was curious to read what could be said to prove Mr. Pope one, and was ready to pay something for such a discovery: a stratagem which, would they fairly own it, might not only reconcile them to me, but screen them from the resentment of their lawful superiors, whom they daily abuse, only (as I charitably hope) to get that by them, which they cannot get from them. I found this was not all ill success in that had transported them to personal abuse, either of himself or (what I think he could less forgive) of his friends. They had called men of virtue and honour bad men, long before he had either leisure or inclination to call them bad writers; and some had been such old offenders, that he had quite forgotten their persons as well as their slanders, till they were pleased to revive them. Now what had Mr. Pope done before, to incense them? He had published those works which are in the hands of every body, in which not the least mention is made of any of them. And what has he done since? He has laughed, and written the Dunciad. What has that said of them? A very serious truth, which the public had said before, that they were dull; and what it had no sooner said, but they themselves were at great pains to procure, or even purchase, room in the prints, to testify under their hands the truth of it. I should still have been silent, if either I had seen any inclination in my friend to be serious with such accusers, or if they had only meddled with his writings; since whoever publishes, puts himself on his trial by his country :-but when his moral character was attacked, and in a manner from which neither truth nor virtue can secure the most innocent; in a manner, which, though it annihilates the credit of the accusation with the just and impartial, yet ag |