Bowles! in thy memory let this precept dwell,
Stick to thy Sonnets, Man!—at least they sell.
But if some new-born whim, or larger bribe,
Prompt thy crude brain, and claim thee for a scribe:
If 'chance some bard, though once by dunces feared,
Now, prone in dust, can only be revered;
If Pope, whose fame and genius, from the first,[1]
Have foiled the best of critics, needs the worst,
Do thou essay: each fault, each failing scan;
The first of poets was, alas! but man.370
Rake from each ancient dunghill ev'ry pearl,
Consult Lord Fanny, and confide in Curll;[2]
Let all the scandals of a former age
Perch on thy pen, and flutter o'er thy page;
Affect a candour which thou canst not feel,
Clothe envy in the garb of honest zeal;
Write, as if St. John's soul could still inspire,
And do from hate what Mallet[3] did for hire.
Oh! hadst thou lived in that congenial time,
- ↑
If Pope, since mortal, not untaught to err
Again demand a dull biographer.—[MS.] - ↑ Curll is one of the Heroes of the Dunciad, and was a bookseller. Lord Fanny is the poetical name of Lord Hervey, author of Lines to the Imitator of Horace.
- ↑ Lord Bolingbroke hired Mallet to traduce Pope after his decease, because the poet had retained some copies of a work by Lord Bolingbroke—the "Patriot King,"—which that splendid, but malignant genius had ordered to be destroyed.
- ↑ Dennis the critic, and Ralph the rhymester:—
"Silence, ye Wolves! while Ralph to Cynthia howls,
Making Night hideous: answer him, ye owls!"Dunciad.[Book III. ll. 165, 166. Pope wrote, "And makes night," etc.]
