Vouchsafe to be an azure knight, When on thy breast and sides Herculean, He fix'd the star and string cerulean. Say, poet, in what other nation Shone ever such a constellation! Attend, ye Popes, and Youngs, and Gays, And tune your harps, and strew your bays: Your panegyrics here provide; You cannot err on flattery's side. Above the stars exalt your style, You still are low ten thousand mile. On Lewis all his bards bestow'd Of incense many a thousand load; But Europe mortified his pride, And swore the fawning rascals lied. Yet what the world refused to Lewis, Applied to George, exactly true is. Exactly true! invidious poet! 'Tis fifty thousand times below it. Translate me now some lines, if you can, From Virgil, Martial, Ovid, Lucan. They could all power in Heaven divide, And do no wrong on either side; They teach you how to split a hair, Give George and Jove an equal share.[32] Yet why should we be laced so strait? I'll give my monarch butter-weight. And reason good; for many a year Jove never intermeddled here: Nor, though his priests be duly paid, Did ever we desire his aid: We now can better do without him, Since Woolston gave us arms to rout him. _Caetera desiderantur_. [Footnote 1: See Young's "Satires," and "Life" by Johnson.--_W. E. B._] [Footnote 2: The prison or house of correction to which harlots were often consigned. See Hogarth's "Harlot's Progress," and "A beautiful young Nymph," _ante_, p. 201.--_W. R. B._] [Footnote 3: Colley Cibber, born in 1671, died in 1757; famous as a comedian and dramatist, and immortalized by Pope as the hero of the "Dunciad"; appointed Laureate in December, 1730, in succession to Eusden, who died in September that year. See Cibber's "Apology for his Life"; Disraeli's "Quarrels of Authors," edit. 1859.--_W. E. B._] [Footnote 4: Barnaby Bernard Lintot, publisher and bookseller, noted for adorning his shop with titles in red letters. In the Prologue to the "Satires" Pope says: "What though my name stood rubric on the walls"; and in the "Dunciad," book i, "Lintot's rubric post." He made a handsome fortune, and died High Sheriff of Sussex in 1736, aged sixty-one.--_W. E. B._] [Footnote 5: The coffee-house most frequented by the wits and poets of that time.--_W. E. B._] [Footnote 6: See _ante_, p. 192, "On Stephen Duck, the Thresher Poet."--_W. E. B._] [Footnote 7: Allusion to the large sums paid by Walpole to scribblers in support of his party.--_W. E. B._] [Footnote 8: "Sunt geminae Somni portae: quarum altera fertur Cornea; qua veris facilis datur exitus Vmbris: Altera candenti perfecta nitens elephanto; Sed falsa ad coelum mittunt insomnia Manes." VIRG., _Aen._, vi.--_W. E. B._] [Footnote 9: See the "South Sea Project," _ante_, p. 120.--_W. E. B._]