It pleases me, that _Pope_ unlaurell'd goes, While _Cibber_ wears the Bays for Play-house Prose, So _Britain's_ Monarch once uncover'd sate, While _Bradshaw_ bully'd in a broad-brimmed hat,-- a reminiscence of King Charles's trial which might have been added to Bramston stock quotations. The productions of "Curll's chaste press" are also this connoisseur's favourite reading,--the lives of players in particular, probably on the now obsolete grounds set forth in Carlyie's essay on Scott.[8] Among these the memoirs of Cibber's "Lady Betty Modish," Mrs. Oldfield, then lately dead, and buried in Westminster Abbey, are not obscurely indicated. Note: [8] "It has been said. 'There are no English lives worth reading except those of Players, who by the nature of the case have bidden Respectability good-day.'" In morals our friend--as might be expected _circa_ l730--is a Freethinker and Deist. Tindal is his text-book: his breviary the _Fable of the Bees_;-- T' Improve In Morals _Mandevil_ I read, And _Tyndal's_ Scruples are my settled Creed. I travell'd early, and I soon saw through Religion all, e'er I was twenty-two. Shame, Pain, or Poverty shall I endure, When ropes or opium can my ease procure? When money's gone, and I no debts can pay, Self-murder is an honourable way. As _Pasaran_ directs I'd end my life, And kill myself, my daughter, and my wife. He would, of course, have done nothing of the kind; nor, for the matter of that, did his Piedmontese preceptor.[9] Note: [9] Count Passeran was a freethinking nobleman who wrote _A Philosophical Discourse on Death_, in which he defended suicide, though he refrained from resorting to it himself. Pope refers to him in the _Epilogue to the Satires_, Dialogue i. 124:-- If Blount despatch'd himself, he play'd the man, And so may'st thou, illustrious Passeran! _Nil admirari_ is the motto of the Man of Taste in Building, where he is naturally at home. He can see no symmetry in the Banqueting House, or in St. Paul's Covent Garden, or even in St. Paul's itself. Sure wretched _Wren_ was taught by bungling _Jones_, To murder mortar, and disfigure stones! "Substantial" Vanbrugh he likes-=chiefly because his work would make "such noble ruins." Cost is his sole criterion, and here he, too, seems to glance obliquely at Canons:-- _Dorick, Ionick,_ shall not there be found, But it shall cost me threescore thousand pound. But this was moderate, as the Edgware "folly" reached L250,000. In Gardening he follows the latest whim for landscape. Here is his burlesque of the principles of Bridgeman and Batty Langley:-- Does it not merit the beholder's praise, What's high to sink? and what is low to raise? Slopes shall ascend where once a green-house stood, And in my horse-pond I will plant a wood. Let misers dread the hoarded gold to waste, Expence and alteration show a _Taste_.