And knows he stole the daughter of his prince. 'Tis time enough, in some succeeding age, To bring this mitred captain on the stage. These are the leaders in apostacy, And the blind guides of poor elective majesty; A thing which commonwealths-men did devise, Till plots were ripe, to catch the people's eyes. Their king's a monster, in a quagmire born, Of all the native brutes the grief and scorn; With a big snout, cast in a crooked mould, Which runs with glanders and an inborn cold; His substance is of clammy snot and phlegm; Sleep is his essence, and his life a dream. To Caprea this Tiberius does retire, To quench with catamite his feeble fire. Dear catamite! who rules alone the state, } While monarch dozes on his unpropt height, } Silent, yet thoughtless, and secure of fate. } Could you but see the fulsome hero led By loathing vassals to his noble bed! In flannel robes the coughing ghost does walk, And his mouth moats like cleaner breech of hawk; Corruption, springing from his cankered breast, Furs up the channel, and disturbs his rest. With head propt up, the bolstered engine lies; If pillow slip aside, the monarch dies. * * * * * To these poems ascribed to Dryden, may be added the following; which, however, have so little mark of his hand, that the Editor thinks it most proper to degrade them into a note. Indeed Dryden could not have written the first of these without being guilty of gross ingratitude, a fault which was entirely inconsistent with his character. _Epitaph on the Earl of Rochester's being dismissed from the Treasury, in 1687._ Here lies a creature of indulgent fate, From Tory Hyde, raised to a chit of state; In chariot now, Elijah-like, he's hurled To the upper empty regions of the world. The airy thing cuts through the yielding sky, And as it goes does into atoms fly; While we on earth see, with no small delight, The bird of prey changed to a paper kite; With drunken pride and rage he did so swell, The hated thing without compassion fell; By powerful force of universal prayer, The ill-blown bubble now is turned to air; To his first less than nothing he is gone, By his preposterous transaction. _Epigram on the Duchess of Portsmouth's Picture._ Sure we do live by Cleopatra's age, Since Sunderland does govern now the stage; She of Septimius had nothing made, Pompey had been alone by her betrayed; Were she a poet, she would surely boast, That all the world for pearls had well been lost. _The Soliloquy of a Royal Exile._