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With horns and trumpets now to madness swell,
Now sink in sorrows with a tolling bell!
Such happy arts attention can command
When Fancy flags, and sense is at a stand.
230
Improve we these. Three cat-calls be the bribe
Of him whose chatt'ring shames the monkey tribe:
And his this drum, whose hoarse heroic base
Drowns the loud clarion of the braying ass.

Now thousand tongues are heard in one loud din:
The monkey-mimics rush discordant in; 236
'Twas chatt'ring, grinning, mouthing, jabbʼring all,
And Noise and Norton, Brangling and Breval,
Dennis and dissonance, and captious Art,
And snip-snap short, and interruption smart, 240
And demonstration thin, and theses thick,
And major, minor, and conclusion quick.
Hold, (cry'd the Queen) a cat-call each shall win;
Equal your merits! equal is your din !
But that this well-disputed game may end,
Sound forth, my Brayers, and the welkin rend.

REMARKS,

How proud a little dirt to spread,
Conscious of nothing o'er its head!
Till lab'ring on for want of eyes,
"It blunders into light, and dies.'

You have him again in Book III. ver. 169.

245

v. 238... Norton.] See ver. 415...J. Durant Breval, author of a very extraordinary book of travels, and some poems.

IMITATIONS.

243...A cat-call cach shall win, &c.]

Non nostrum intervos tantas componere lites,

*Et vitula tu dignus, et hic.'

Virg. Ecl. III.

250

As when the long-car'd milky mothers wait At some sick miser's triple-bolted gate, For their defrauded, absent, foals they make A moan so loud, that all the guild awake; Sore sighs Sir Gilbert, starting at the bray, From dreams of millions, and three groats to pay : So swells each wind-pipe; ass intones to ass, Harmonic twang! of leather, horn, and brass; Such as from lab'ring lungs th' enthusiast blows, High sound, attemper'd to the vocal nose; Or such as bellow from the deep divine; There, Webster! peal'd thy voice, and, Whitfield! But far o'er all, sonorous Blackmore's strain; [thine. Walls, steeples, skies, bray back to him again. 260

REMARKS.

256

v. 258... Webster..and, Whitfield.] The one the writer of a newspaper called The Weekly Miscellany, the other a fieldpreacher.

IMITATIONS.

v. 247. As when he, &c.] A simile, with a long tail, in the manner of Homer. v. 260...bray back to him again.] A figure of speech taken from Virgil:

Et vox assensu nemorum ingeminata remugit.'

Georg. III.

He hears his numerous herds low o'er the plain,
While neighb'ring hills low back to them again."

Cowley.

The poet here celebrated, Sir R. B. delighted much in the word bray, which he endeavored to ennoble by applying it to the sound of armour, war, &c. In imitation of him, and strengthened by his authority, our Author has here admitted it into he roic poetry.

In Tot'nam-fields the Brethren with amaze,
Prick all their ears up, and forget to graze!
Long Chanc'ry-lane retentive rolls the sound,
And courts to courts return it round and round;
Thames wafts it thence to Rufus' roaring hall, 26ă
And Hungerford re-echoes bawl for bawl.
All hail him victor in both gifts of song,
Who sings so loudly, and who sings so long.
This labor past, by Bridewell all descend,
(As morning pray'r and flagellation end)
To where Fleet-ditch, with disemboguing streams
Rolls the large tribute of dead dogs to Thames,
The king of dykes! than whom, no sluice of mud
With deeper sable blots the silver flood. 174

270

Here strip, my Children! here at once leap in, • Here prove who best can dash thro' thick and thin, And who the most in love of dirt excel, Or dark dexterity of groping well:

• Who flings most filth, and wide pollutes around The stream, be his the Weekly Journals bound;

IMITATIONS.

v. 262. Prick all their ears up, and forget to graze!)

"Immemor herbarum quos est mirata juvenca."

Virg. Ecl. viii. The progress of the sound from place to place, and the scenery here of the bordering regions, Tottenham-fields, Chancery-lane, the Thames, Westminster hall, and Hungerford-stairs, are imitated from Virgil, Æn. VII. on the sounding the horn of Alecto: Audiit et Triviae longe lacus, audiit amnis

'Sulphurea Nar albus aqua fontesque Velini,' &c. D. 273. The king of dykes! &c.]

Fluviorum rex Eridanus,

..Quo non alius, per pinguia culta,

In mare purpureum violentior influit amnis.'

Virg.

A pig of lead to him who dives the best; 281 A peck of coals a-piece shall glad the rest."

In naked majesty Oldmixon stands, And, Milo-like, surveys his arms and hands; 284 Then sighing thus, And am I now threescore? Ah, why, ye Gods! should two and two make four?' He said, and climb'd a stranded lighter's height, Shot to the black abyss, and plung'd downright; The senior's judgment all the crowd admire, Who but to sink the deeper rose the higher. 290

Next Smedley div'd; slow circles dimpled o'er The quaking mud, that clos'd and op'd no more. All look, all sigh, and call on Smedley lost; Smedley in vain resounds through all the coast.

REMARKS.

v. 283. In naked Majesty Oldmixon stands.] Mr. John Oldmixon, next to Mr. Dennis, the most ancient critic of our nation; an unjust censurer of Mr. Addison in his prose Essay on Criticism, whom also in his imitation of Bouhours (called the Arts of Logic and Rhetoric) he misrepresents in plain matter of fact; for in p. 45, he cites the Spectator as abusing Dr. Swift by name, where there is not the least hint of it; and in p. 304, is so injurious as to suggest that Mr. Addison himself writ that Tatler, No. 43, which says of his own similie that It is as great as ever entered into the mind of man.' In poetry he was not so happy as laborious, and is therefore characterized by the Tatier, 'No. 62, by the name of Omicron, the unborn poet,'..Curl,

IMITATIONS.

Ovid.

v. 285. Then sighing, thus, And am I now threescore? &c.] ..Fletque Milon senior, cum spectat inanes Herculeis similes, fluidos pendere lacertos.' v. 293. And call on Smedley lost, &c.] Alcides wept in vain for Hylas lost,

Hylas, in vain, resounds through all the coast.'

Lord Roscom. Translat. of Ecl. vi. of Virgil.

Then**essay'd; scarce vanish'd out of sight, 295 He buoys up instant, and returns to light; He bears no tokens of the sabler streams, And mounts får off among the swans of Thames.

REMARKS.

Key, p. 13. He writ dramatic works, and a volume of po etry, consisting of Heroic epistles, &c. some whereof are ver well done,' said that great judge, Mr. Jacob, in his Lives of Poets, vol. II. p. 303.

In his Essay on Criticism, and the Arts of Logic and Rhetoric, he frequently reflects on our Author. But the top of his cha racter was a perverter of history, in that scandalous one of the Stuarts, in folio, and his Critical History of England, two yo lumes, octavo. Being employed by Bishop Kennet, in publish ing the historians in his collection, he falsified Daniel's Chroni cle in numberless places. Yet this very man, in the preface to the first of these books, advanced a particular fact to charge three eminent persons of falsifying the Lord Clarendon's History which fact has bean disproved by Dr. Atterbury, late Bishop of Rochester, then the only survivor of them; and the particular part he pretended to be falsified produced since, after almost ninety years, in that noble author's original manuscript. He was all his life a virulent party-writer for hire, and received his reward in a small place, which he enjoyed to his death.

7.91. Nert Smedley div'd.] In the surreptitious editions, this whole episode was applied to an initial letter E-, by whom if they meant the Laureate, nothing was more absurd, no part agreeing with his character. The allegory evidently demandsa person dipped in scandal, and deeply immersed in dirty work -whereas, Mr. Eusden's writings rarely offended, but by their length and multitude, and accordingly are taxed of nothing else in Book 1. v. 102. But the person here mentioned, an Irishman, was author and publisher of many scurrilous pieces, a Weekly Whitehall Journal, in the year 1722, in the name of Sir James Baker; and particularly whole volumes of Billingsgate against Dr. Swift and Mr. Pope, called Gulliveriana and Alexandriana, printed in octavo, 1728.

v. 295. Then**essay'd.] A gentleman of genius and spirit,

VARIATIONS.

After ver. 298. in the first edit, followed these:

Far worse unhappy D-r succeeds,

He search'd for coral, but he gather'd weeds.

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