doivent bientôt rendre compte à Dieu de leurs actions. L. 2. Tom. v. 4. P. 18.

Happy indeed was the poet, of whom his worthy and amiable * friend could so truly say, that in all his works was not to be discovered

One line, that dying, he could wish to blot!

"Would to God," said AVERROES, (regretting the libertinism of some verses which he had made in his youth,) "I had been born old !"

FONTAINE and CHAUCER, dying, wisht unwrote
The sprightliest effort of their wanton thought:
SIDNEY and WALLER, brightest sons of fame,
Condemn'd the charm of ages to the flame.t

25. Let Sporus tremble-What! that thing of silk,
Sporus, that mere white curd of ass's milk!
Satire or sense, alas! can Sporus feel?
Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?

Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,
This painted child of dirt, that stinks and stings;
Whose buzz the witty and the fair annoys,

Yet wit ne'er tastes, and beauty ne'er enjoys;

So

* Lord Lyttelton, in the Prologue to Thomson's Corio

lanus.

+ Young's Epistle to Authors.

So well-bred spaniels civilly delight

In mumbling of the game they cannot bite.
Eternal smiles his emptiness betray,

As shallow streams run dimpling all the
Whether in florid impotence he speaks,

way.

And as the prompter breathes the puppet squeaks,
Or at the ear of Eve, familiar toad,*
Half froth, half venom, spits himself abroad,
In puns, or politics, or tales, or lyes,

Or spite, or smut, or rhymes, or blasphemies.
Amphibious thing! that acting either part,
The trifling head, or the corrupted heart;
Fop at the toilet, flatt'rer at the board,
Now trips a lady, and now struts a lord.
Eve's tempter thus, the rabbins have exprest,
A cherub's face, a reptile all the rest;

Beauty that shocks you, pride that none will trust,
Wit that can creep, and pride that licks the dust.†

Language cannot afford more glowing or more forcible terms to express the utmost bitterness of

contempt.

It is but justice (said Pope in the first advertisement, since omitted) to own, that the hint of Eve and the Serpent was taken from the verses to the Imitator of Horace:

When God created thee, one would believe,
He said the same as to the snake of Eve;

To human race antipathy declare,
"Twixt them and thee be everlasting war.

But oh! the sequel of the sentence dread,

And whilst you bruise their heel, beware your head.

+ Ver. 305.

contempt. We think we are here reading MILTON against SALMASIUS. The raillery is carried to the very verge of railing, some will say ribaldry. He has armed his muse with a scalpingknife. The portrait is certainly overcharged: for Lord H. for whom it was designed, whatever his morals might be, had yet considerable abi lities, though marred indeed by affectation. Some of his speeches in parliament were much beyond florid impotence. They were, it is true, in favour of Sir R. Walpole,† and this was sufficiently offensive to Pope. The fact that particularly incited his indignation, was Lord H.'s Epistle to a Doctor of Divinity, (Dr. Sherwin,) from a Nobleman at Hampton Court, 1733; as well as his having been concerned with Lady M. W. M.

* That strong expression in the discourse pro Populo Anglicano, of "Nerone ipso Neronior," applied to Charles I. is taken from what Peter, King of Arragon, wrote to Charles, Duke of Anjou, who had caused to be beheaded the son of the Emperor Conrad.

Lord H. fought a duel with Mr. Pulteney upon a political quarrel. See also a pamphlet, entitled, The Court Secret, occasioned by Lord Scarborough's death, for a severe character of Ibrahim, intended for this Lord. Printed 8vo. 1741.

M. W. M. in Verses to the Imitator of Horace,. 1732. This lady's beauty, wit, genius, and travels, of which she gave an account in a series of elegant and entertaining letters, very characteristical of the manners of the Turks, and of which many are addressed to Pope, are well known, and justly celebrated. With both these noble personages had Pope lived in a state of intimacy. And justice obligeth us to confess, that he himself was the aggressor in the quarrel with them; as he first assaulted and affronted Lord H. by these two lines in his imitation of the 1st Sat. of Horace's second book to

The lines are weak, another's pleas'd to say;
Lord Fauny spins a thousand such a day.

And

* After her quarrel with Mr. POPE, which Lord Peterborough in vain endeavoured to reconcile, she wrote thus from Florence, to the Countess of "The word malignity,

and a passage in your letter, call to my mind the wicked wasp of Twickenham; his lyes affect me now no more; they will be all as much despised as the story of the seraglio and the handkerchief, of which I am persuaded he was the only inventor. That man has a malignant and ungenerous heart; and he is base enough to assume the mask of a moralist, in order to decry human nature, and to give a decent vent to his hatred of man and womankind."

And Lady M. W. M. by the eighty-third line of the same piece, too gross to be here repeated..

It is a singular circumstance, that our author's, indignation was so vehement and inexhaustible, that it furnished him with another invective, of equal power, in prose, which is to be found at the end of the eighth volume, containing his letters. The reader that turns to it, page 253, (for it is too long to be here inserted, and too full of matter to be abridged,) will find, that it abounds in so many new modes of irony, in so many unexpected strokes of sarcasm, in so many sudden and repeated blows, that he does not allow the poor devoted peer a moment's breathing

time:

Nunc dextrâ ingeminans ictus, nunc ille sinistrâ ;
Nec mora, nec requies; quam multâ grandine nimbi
Culminibus crepitant; sic densis ictibus heros

Creber utrâque manû pulsat, versatque.+

It

So also are lines 87, 88, 89, 90, of the third epistle con. cerning Fulvia and Old Narses. But let us remember, that

As the soft plume gives swiftness to the dart,
Good-breeding sends the satire to the heart.

+ En. v. ver. 457.

YOUNG,