These stories were of old design'd As fables: but you have refined The poets mythologic dreams, To real Muses, gods, and streams. Who would not swear, when you contrive thus, That you're Don Quixote redivivus? Beneath, a dry canal there lies, Which only Winter's rain supplies. O! couldst thou, by some magic spell, Hither convey St. Patrick's well![6] Here may it reassume its stream, And take a greater Patrick's name! If your expenses rise so high; What income can your wants supply? Yet still you fancy you inherit A fund of such superior merit, That you can't fail of more provision, All by my lady's kind decision. For, the more livings you can fish up, You think you'll sooner be a bishop: That could not be my lord's intent, Nor can it answer the event. Most think what has been heap'd on you To other sort of folk was due: Rewards too great for your flim-flams, Epistles, riddles, epigrams. Though now your depth must not be sounded, The time was, when you'd have compounded For less than Charley Grattan's school! Five hundred pound a-year's no fool! Take this advice then from your friend, To your ambition put an end, Be frugal, Pat: pay what you owe, Before you build and you bestow. Be modest, nor address your betters With begging, vain, familiar letters. A passage may be found,[7] I've heard, In some old Greek or Latian bard, Which says, "Would crows in silence eat Their offals, or their better meat, Their generous feeders not provoking By loud and inharmonious croaking, They might, unhurt by Envy's claws, Live on, and stuff to boot their maws." [Footnote 1: "King Henry the Fourth," Part I, Act ii, Scene 4.--_W. E. B._] [Footnote 2: Adapted from Hor., "Epist. ad Pisones," 140.--_W. E. B._] [Footnote 3: See the "Petition to the Duke of Grafton," _post_, p. 345.--_W. E. B._] [Footnote 4: Alluding to Dr. Delany's ambitious choice of fixing in the island of the Lake of Erin, where Sir Ralph Gore had a villa.--_Scott_.] [Footnote 5: When residing at Chester, he obliged eight of his tributary princes to row him in a barge upon the Dee. Hume's "History of England," vol. i, p. 106.--_W. E. B_.] [Footnote 6: Which had suddenly dried up. See _post_, vol. ii, "Verses on the sudden drying up of St. Patrick's Well, near Trinity College, Dublin."--_W.E.B._] [Footnote 7: Hor., "Epist.," lib. I, xvii, 50. "Sed tacitus pasci si corvus posset, haberet Plus dapis, et rixae multo minus invidiaeque." I append the original, for the sake of Swift's very free rendering.--_W. E. B._] A LIBEL ON THE REVEREND DR. DELANY, AND HIS EXCELLENCY JOHN, LORD CARTERET 1729