In ancient times, when Rome with Athens vied For polish’d luxury and useful arts; All hot and reeking from th’ Olympic strife, And warm Palestra, in the tepid bath Th’ athletic youth relax’d their weary’d limbs. 245 Soft oils bedew’d them, with the grateful pow’rs Of Nard and Cassia fraught, to sooth and heal The cherish’d nerves. Our less voluptuous clime Not much invites us to such arts as these. ’Tis not for those, whom gelid skies embrace, 250 And chilling fogs; whose perspiration feels Such frequent bars from Eurus and the North; ’Tis not for those to cultivate a skin Too soft; or teach the recremental fume Too fast to crowd thro’ such precarious ways. 255 For thro’ the small arterial mouths, that pierce In endless millions the close-woven skin, The baser fluids in a constant stream Escape, and viewless melt into the winds. While this eternal, this most copious waste 260 Of blood degenerate into vapid brine, Maintains its wonted measure; all the powers Of health befriend you, all the wheels of life With ease and pleasure move: But this restrain’d Or more or less, so more or less you feel 265 The functions labour. From this fatal source What woes descend is never to be sung. To take their numbers, were to count the sands That ride in whirlwind the parch’d Lybian air; Or waves that, when the blustering North embroils 270 The Baltic, thunder on the German shore. Subject not then, by soft emollient arts, This grand expence, on which your fates depend, To every caprice of the sky; nor thwart The genius of your clime: For from the blood 275 Least fickle rise the recremental steams, And least obnoxious to the styptic air, Which breathe thro’ straiter and more callous pores. The temper’d Scythian hence, half-naked treads His boundless snows, nor rues th’ inclement heaven; 280 And hence our painted ancestors defied The East; nor curs’d, like us, their fickle sky.