Or bring ill music in to grate the ear,
Because 'tis what the entertained might spare:
'Tis the same case with those that deal in wit,
Whose main design and end should be delight;
They must by this same sentence stand, or fall,
Be highly excellent, or not at all.
In all things else, save only poetry,
Men show some signs of common modesty.
You'll hardly find a fencer so unwise,
Who at Bear-garden e'er will fight a prize,
Not having learnt before; nor at a wake
One, that wants skill and strength, the girdle take,
Or be so vain the ponderous weight to sling,
For fear they should be hissed out of the ring.[1]
Yet every coxcomb will pretend to verse,
And write in spite of nature and his stars;
All sorts of subjects challenge at this time
The liberty and property of rhyme.[2]
The sot of honour, fond of being great
By something else than title and estate,
As if a patent gave him claim to sense,
Or 'twere entailed with an inheritance,
Believes a cast of footboys, and a set
Of Flanders[3] must advance him to a wit.
But you who have the judgment to descry
Where you excel, which way your talents lie,
- ↑ Throwing for the hammer, leaping for slippers, and dancing for the ring were amongst the sports practised at wakes. See Brand's Antiquities, by Ellis: Herriot's Hesperides.
- ↑ Dryden had brought rhyme into universal fashion by his use and defence of it in his heroic plays. But he had renounced the heresy three years before this poem of Oldham's was published. His recantation dates from the production of All for Love (the only play, according to Dr. Johnson, he wrote to please himself), in 1678. It was not so easy, however, to check the impulse he had given to the use of rhyme, and we here learn from Oldham that it was the common vice of every coxcomb about town.
- ↑ Flemish barbs were in general request amongst people of quality, and are frequently mentioned in the comedies of the Restoration. Some of the nobility used to drive six Flemish horses in the time of Elizabeth. The custom is alluded to by Massinger.
