The fine you pay for being great. } Nay, here's a harder imposition, Which is indeed the court's petition, That, setting worldly pomp aside, Which poet has at font denied, You would be pleased in humble way To write a trifle called a Play. This truly is a degradation, } But would oblige the crown and nation } Next to your wise negotiation. } If you pretend, as well you may, } Your high degree, your friends will say, } The duke St Aignon made a play. } If Gallic wit convince you scarce, His grace of Bucks has made a farce, And you, whose comic wit is terse all, Can hardly fall below Rehearsal. Then finish what you have began, But scribble faster if you can; For yet no George, to our discerning, Has writ without a ten years warning.[43] FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 40: The map does not convey any such information. Ratisbon lies in latitude 48° 58´ N. Dryden alludes to the commencement of Etherege's epistle to Middleton, in which he mentions having gone three degrees northward, London being 41° 15´ N. Dryden transfers Ratisbon into a high latitude, merely to suit the rhyme, and produce the antithesis of 53 degrees latitude, to 52 years of age.] [Footnote 41: The three ecclesiastical Electors WERE, the Electors of Treves, Cologne, and Mentz. At this time the Diet of the empire was sitting at Ratisbon.] [Footnote 42: Etherege has been pleased to confirm our author's opinion of the German jollity, and his own inclination to softer pleasures, by the following passage of a letter to the Duke of Buckingham. "I find that to this day, they (_i.e._ the Germans) make good the observation that Tacitus made of their ancestors; I mean, that their affairs (let them be never so serious and pressing) never put a stop to good eating and drinking, and that they debate their weightiest negociations over their cups. "'Tis true, they carry this humour by much too far for one of my complexion; for which reason I decline appearing among them, but when my master's concerns make it necessary for me to come to their assemblies: They are, indeed, a free-hearted open sort of gentlemen that compose the Diet, without reserve, affectation, and artifice; but they are such unmerciful plyers of the bottle, so wholly given up to what our sots call good-fellowship, that 'tis as great a constraint upon my nature to sit out a night's entertainment with them, as it would be to hear half a score long-winded Presbyterian divines cant successively one after another.