Yes; thank my stars! as early as I knew This town, I had the sense to hate it too: Yet here, as ev'n in Hell, there must be still One giant-vice, so excellently ill, That all beside, one pities, not abhors; As who knows Sappho, smiles at other whores. I grant that poetry's a crying sin; It brought (no doubt) the Excise and Army in: Catch'd like the plague, or love, the Lord knows how, But that the cure is starving, all allow. 10 Yet like the papist's is the poet's state, Poor and disarm'd, and hardly worth your hate! Here a lean bard, whose wit could never give Himself a dinner, makes an actor live; The thief condemn'd, in law already dead, So prompts, and saves a rogue who cannot read. Thus as the pipes of some carved organ move, The gilded puppets dance and mount above. Heaved by the breath the inspiring bellows blow: The inspiring bellows lie and pant below. 20 One sings the fair; but songs no longer move; No rat is rhymed to death, nor maid to love: In love's, in nature's spite, the siege they hold, And scorn the flesh, the devil, and all--but gold. These write to lords, some mean reward to get, As needy beggars sing at doors for meat. Those write because all write, and so have still Excuse for writing, and for writing ill. Wretched indeed! but far more wretched yet Is he who makes his meal on others' wit: 30 'Tis changed, no doubt, from what it was before, His rank digestion makes it wit no more: Sense, pass'd through him, no longer is the same; For food digested takes another name. I pass o'er all those confessors and martyrs, Who live like Sutton, or who die like Chartres, Out-cant old Esdras, or out-drink his heir, Out-usure Jews, or Irishmen out-swear; Wicked as pages, who in early years Act sins which Prisca's confessor scarce hears. 40 Ev'n those I pardon, for whose sinful sake Schoolmen new tenements in hell must make; Of whose strange crimes no canonist can tell In what commandment's large contents they dwell. One, one man only breeds my just offence; Whom crimes gave wealth, and wealth gave impudence: Time, that at last matures a clap to pox, Whose gentle progress makes a calf an ox, And brings all natural events to pass, Hath made him an attorney of an ass. 50 No young divine, new-beneficed, can be More pert, more proud, more positive than he. What further could I wish the fop to do, But turn a wit, and scribble verses too; Pierce the soft labyrinth of a lady's ear With rhymes of this per cent, and that per year? Or court a wife, spread out his wily parts, Like nets or lime-twigs, for rich widows' hearts: Call himself barrister to every wench, And woo in language of the Pleas and Bench? 60 Language, which Boreas might to Auster hold More rough than forty Germans when they scold.