But what does our proud ignorance Learning call? We oddly Plato's paradox make good, Our knowledge is but mere remembrance all; Remembrance is our treasure and our food; Nature's fair table-book, our tender souls, We scrawl all o'er with old and empty rules, Stale memorandums of the schools: For learning's mighty treasures look Into that deep grave, a book; Think that she there does all her treasures hide, And that her troubled ghost still haunts there since she died; Confine her walks to colleges and schools; Her priests, her train, and followers, show As if they all were spectres too! They purchase knowledge at th'expense Of common breeding, common sense, And grow at once scholars and fools; Affect ill-manner'd pedantry, Rudeness, ill-nature, incivility, And, sick with dregs and knowledge grown, Which greedily they swallow down, Still cast it up, and nauseate company. IV Curst be the wretch! nay, doubly curst! (If it may lawful be To curse our greatest enemy,) Who learn'd himself that heresy first, (Which since has seized on all the rest,) That knowledge forfeits all humanity; Taught us, like Spaniards, to be proud and poor, And fling our scraps before our door! Thrice happy you have 'scaped this general pest; Those mighty epithets, learned, good, and great, Which we ne'er join'd before, but in romances meet, We find in you at last united grown. You cannot be compared to one: I must, like him that painted Venus' face, Borrow from every one a grace; Virgil and Epicurus will not do, Their courting a retreat like you, Unless I put in Caesar's learning too: Your happy frame at once controls This great triumvirate of souls. V Let not old Rome boast Fabius' fate; He sav'd his country by delays, But you by peace.[1] You bought it at a cheaper rate; Nor has it left the usual bloody scar, To show it cost its price in war; War, that mad game the world so loves to play, And for it does so dearly pay; For, though with loss, or victory, a while Fortune the gamesters does beguile, Yet at the last the box sweeps all away. VI Only the laurel got by peace No thunder e'er can blast: Th'artillery of the skies Shoots to the earth and dies: And ever green and flourishing 'twill last, Nor dipt in blood, nor widows' tears, nor orphans' cries. About the head crown'd with these bays, Like lambent fire, the lightning plays; Nor, its triumphal cavalcade to grace, Makes up its solemn train with death; It melts the sword of war, yet keeps it in the sheath. VII