"Hail, Prince of Witts! thy fumbling Age is past, Thy youth and witt and art's renewed at last. So on some rock the Joviall bird assays Her ore-grown beake, that marke of age, to rayse; That done, through yield'ing air she cutts her way, And strongly stoops againe, and breaks the trembling prey. What though prodigious thunder stripp'd thy brows Of envy'd bays, and the dull world allows Shadwell should wear them,--wee'll applaud the change; Where nations feel it, who can think it strange! So have I seen the long-ear'd brute aspire To drest commode with every smallest wire; With nightrail hung on shoulders, gravely stalke, Like bawd attendant on Aurelias walke. Hang't! give the fop ingratefull world its will; He wears the laurel,--thou deservs't it still. Still smooth, as when, adorn'd with youthful pride, For thy dear sake the blushing virgins dyed; When the kind gods of witt and love combined, And with large gifts thy yielding soul refined. "Not Phœbus could with gentler words pursue His flying Daphne, not the morning dew Falls softer than the words of amorous Jove, When melting, dying, for Alcmene's love. "Yet briske and airy too, thou fill'st the stage, Unbroke by fortune, undecayed by age. French wordy witt by thine was long surpast; Now Rome's thy captive, and by thee wee taste Of their rich dayntyes; but so finely drest, Theirs was a country meal, thine a triumphant feast. "If this to thy necessityes wee ow, O, may they greater still and greater grow! Nor blame the wish; Plautus could write in chaines, Wee'll blesse thy wants, while wee enjoy thy pains. Wealth makes the poet lazy, nor can fame, That gay attendant of a spritely flame, A Dorset or a Wycherly invite, Because they feel no pinching wants, to write. "Go on! endenizon the Romane slave; Let an eternal spring adorne his grave; His ghost would gladly all his fame submitt To thy strong judgment and thy piercing witt. Purged by thy hand, he speaks immortall sense, And pleases all with modish excellence. Nor would we have thee live on empty praise The while, for, though we cann't restore the bays, While thou writ'st thus,--to pay thy merites due, Wee'll give the claret and the pension too." Milbourne concludes, by desiring to be supplied with such of our author's writings, as he had not already, to be sent to Yarmouth in Norfolk, where he probably had then a living. "Amphitryon" was produced in the same year with "Don Sebastian;" and although it cannot be called altogether an original performance, yet it contains so much original writing as to shew, that our author's vein of poetry was, in his advanced age, distinguished by the same rapid fluency, as when he first began to write for the stage.