The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) Volume I.Cibber, Theophilus
General
The Lives of the Poets of Great Britain and Ireland (1753) Volume I.
Cibber, Theophilus
Poets, English -- Biography -- Early works to 1800; Poets, Irish -- Biography -- Early works to 1800
Thus have I writ, in smoother cedar tree,
So gentle Satires, penn'd so easily.
Henceforth I write in crabbed oak-tree rynde,
Search they that mean the secret meaning find.
Hold out ye guilty and ye galled hides,
And meet my far-fetched stripes with waiting sides.
In his biting satires he breathes still more of the spirit and
stile of Juvenal, his third of this book being an imitation of that
satirist's eighth, on Family-madness and Pride of Descent; the
beginning of which is not translated amiss by our author. The
principal object of his fourth satire, Gallio, would correspond with
a modern Fribble, but that he supposes him capable of hunting and
hawking, which are exercises rather too coarse and indelicate for
ours: this may intimate perhaps, that the reign of the great Elizabeth
had no character quite so unmanly as our age. In advising him to wed,
however, we have no bad portrait of the Petit Maitre.
Hye thee, and give the world yet one dwarfe more,
Such as it got when thou thy selfe was bore.
His fifth satire contrasts the extremes of Prodigality and Avarice;
and by a few initials, which are skabbarded, it looks as if he had
some individuals in view; though he has disclaimed such an intention
in his postscript (now the preface) p. 6. lin. 25, &c. His sixth sets
out very much like the first satire of Horace's first book, on the
Dissatisfaction and Caprice of mankind--Qui fit Mecænas; and, after
a just and lively-description of our different pursuits in life, he
concludes with the following preference of a college one, which, we
find in the Specialities of his life, he was greatly devoted to in his
youth. The lines, which are far from inelegant, seem indeed to come
from his heart, and make him appear as an exception to that too
general human discontent, which was the subject of this satire.
'Mongst all these stirs of discontented strife,
Oh let me lead an academick life;
To know much, and to think we nothing know;
Nothing to have, yet think we have enowe;
In skill to want, and wanting seek for more;
In weele nor want, nor wish for greater store.
Envy, ye monarchs, with your proad excesse,
At our low sayle, and our high happinesse.
The last satire of this book is a severe one on the clergy of the
church of Rome. He terms it POMH-PYMH, by which we suppose he intended
to brand Roma, as the Sink of Superstition. He observes, if Juvenal,
whom he calls Aquine's carping spright, were now alive, among other
surprising alterations at Rome,
--that he most would gaze and wonder at,
Is th' horned mitre, and the bloody hat,
The crooked staffe, their coule's strange form and store,
Save that he saw the fame in hell before.
The first satire of the fifth book is levelled at Racking Landlords.
The following lines are a strong example of the taste of those times
for the Punn and Paronomasia.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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