And then as meanly labours to get loose; A life so infamous is better quitting, Spent in base injury and low submitting.[53] I'd like to have left out his poetry; Forgot by all almost as well as me. Sometimes he has some humour, never wit, And if it rarely, very rarely, hit, 'Tis under so much nasty rubbish laid, To find it out's the cinderwoman's trade, Who, for the wretched remnants of a fire, Must toil all day in ashes and in mire. So lewdly dull his idle works appear, The wretched text deserves no comments here; Where one poor thought sometimes, left all alone, For a whole page of dulness must atone. How vain a thing is man, and how unwise! E'en he, who would himself the most despise! I, who so wise and humble seem to be, Now my own vanity and pride can't see. While the world's nonsense is so sharply shown, We pull down others but to raise our own; That we may angels seem, we paint them elves, And are but satires to set up ourselves. I, who have all this while been finding fault, E'en with my master, who first satire taught; And did by that describe the task so hard, It seems stupendous and above reward; Now labour with unequal force to climb That lofty hill, unreached by former time,-- 'Tis just that I should to the bottom fall, Learn to write well, or not to write at all. FOOTNOTES: [Footnote 31: Would Dryden have pardoned such a rhyme?] [Footnote 32: Sir Thomas Armstrong, then an officer of the guards, and gentleman of horse to the king. He seems to have been remarkable for riot and profligacy, even in that profligate age; witness his stabbing a gentleman in the pit of the theatre. Thus principled, he became, unfortunately for himself and his patron, a favourite of the Duke of Monmouth, and engaged deeply in all his intrigues, particularly in that of the Rye-house plot, on the discovery of which he fled to Holland, of which he was a native: nevertheless, he was there seized and delivered. He was tried by Jefferies; and sustained the brutality of that judge with more spirit than his friends or his enemies expected. Upon a conviction of outlawry for treason, he was executed, June 1685.] [Footnote 33: Aston is mentioned as a sort of half wit in some of the lampoons of the day; but I have not been able to trace any thing of his history, except that he seems to have been a courtier of the period; perhaps the same Colonel Aston, whom the reader will find in a subsequent note, acting as Mulgrave's second, in an intended duel with Rochester. If this be so, from the slight with which he is here mentioned, there may have been a coolness in their friendship, although, indeed, the mere want of _morals_ was not considered as an insufferable stigma in the reign of Charles II., and might pass for a good-natured joke, were the epithet _dull_ omitted. The name Aston is mentioned in the "Epistle to Julian."]