The rich buffet well-coloured serpents grace,1
And gaping tritons spew to wash your face.
Is this a dinner? this a genial room?
No, 'tis a temple, and a hectaomb."

A solemn sacrifice, performed in state,
You drink by measure, and to minutes eat.
So quick retires each flying course, you'd swear
Sancho's dread doctor and his wand were there.'
Between each act the trembling salvers ring,
From soup to sweet-wine, and God bless the king.
In plenty starving, tantalised in state,
And complaisantly helped to all I hate,
Treated, caressed, and tired, I take my leave,
Sick of his civil pride from morn to eve;
I curse such lavish cost, and little skill,
And swear no day was ever past so ill.

Yet hence the poor are clothed, the hungry fed;*
Health to himself, and to his infants bread
The lab'rer bears: what his hard heart denies,
His charitable vanity supplies.

Another age shall see the golden ear Embrown the slope, and nod on the parterre, Deep harvests bury all his pride has planned, And laughing Ceres re-assume the land.

Who then shall grace, or who improve the soil? Who plants like Bathurst, or who builds like Boyle. "Tis use alone that sanctifies expense,

And splendour borrows all her rays from sense.
His father's acres who enjoys in peace,
Or makes his neighbours glad, if he increase:
Whose cheerful tenants bless their yearly toil,
Yet to their lord owe more than to the soil;
Whose ample lawns are not ashamed to feed
The milky heifer and deserving steed;

1 Taxes the incongruity of ornaments (though sometimes practised by the ancients) where an open mouth ejects the water into a fountain, or where the shocking images of serpents, &c., are introduced in grottoes or buffets.-Pope.

2 The proud festivals of some men are here set forth to ridicule, where pride destroys the ease, and formal regularity all the pleasurable enjoyment of the entertainment.-Pope

See "Don Quixote."-Pope.

4 The moral of the whole, where Providence is justified in giving wealth to those who squander it in this manner. A bad taste employs more hands, and diffuses expense more than a good one. This recurs to what is laid down in Book I. Ep. ii, ver. 230--7; and in the Epistle preceeding this, ver, 161, &c.—Pope,

Whose rising forests, not for pride or show,
But future buildings, future navies, grow:
Let his plantations stretch from down to down,
First shade a country, and then raise a town.

You too proceed! make falling arts your care,
Erect new wonders, and the old repair;
Jones and Palladio to themselves restore,
And be whate'er Vitruvius was before:
'Till kings call forth the ideas of your mind,
(Proud to accomplish what such hands designed,)
Bid harbours open, public ways extend,
Bid temples, worthier of the God, ascend;
Bid the broad arch the dangerous flood contain,
The mole projected break the roaring main;
Back to their bounds their subject sea command,
And roll obedient rivers through the land:
These honours peace to happy Britain brings,
These are imperial works, and worthy kings.

EPISTLE V.1

TO MR. ADDISON.

OCCASIONED BY HIS DIALOGUES ON MEDALS.

SEE the wild waste of all-devouring years!
How Rome her own sad sepulchre appears,
With nodding arches, broken temples spread!
The very tombs now vanished like their dead!
Imperial wonders raised on nations spoiled,
Where, mixed with slaves, the groaning martyr toiled:
Huge theatres, that now unpeopled woods,
Now drained a distant country of her floods:
Fanes, which admiring gods with pride survey,
Statues of men, scarce less alive than they!

1 This was originally written in the year 1715, when Mr. Addison intended to publish his book of Medals; it was some time before he was Secretary of State; but not published till Mr. Tickell's edition of his works; at which time the verses on Mr. Craggs, which conude the poem, were added, viz, in 1720,-Pope,

Some felt the silent stroke of mould'ring age,
Some hostile fury, some religious rage.
Barbarian blindness, Christian zeal conspire,
And Papal piety, and Gothic fire.

Perhaps, by its own ruins saved from flame,
Some buried marble half preserves a name;
That name the learned with fierce disputes pursue,
And give to Titus old Vespasian's due.

Ambition sighed: she found it vain to trust
The faithless column and the crumbling bust:
Huge moles, whose shadow stretched from shore
to shore,

Their ruins perished, and their place no more!
Convinced, she now contracts her vast design,
And all her triumphs shrink into a coin.
A narrow orb each crowded conquest keeps;
Beneath her palm here sad Judea weeps:
Now scantier limits the proud arch confine,
And scarce are seen the prostrate Nile or Rhine;
A small Euphrates through the piece is rolled,
And little eagles wave their wings in gold.

The medal, faithful to its charge of fame,
Through climes and ages bears each form and name:
In one short view subjected to our eye
Gods, emp'rors, heroes, sages, beauties, lie.
With sharpened sight pale antiquaries pore,
The inscription value, but the rust adore.
This the blue varnish, that the green endears,'
The sacred rust of twice ten hundred years!
To gain Pescennius' one employs his schemes,
One grasps a Cecrops in ecstatic dreams.

3

Poor Vadius, long with learned spleen devoured,
Can taste no pleasure since his shield was scoured;
And Curio, restless by the fair one's side,
Sighs for an Otho, and neglects his bride."
Theirs is the vanity, the learning thine:

1 This is a collection of silver, that of brass coins.- Warburton.

2 The rare medal of the Emperor Pescennius Niger, who succeeded Pertinax, 193: killed, 195.

3 The Athenian lawgiver.

4 See his history, and that of his shield, in the "Memoirs of Scriblerus."- Warburton.. Vadius was Dr. Woodward, an antiquary and naturalist.

5 Charles Patin was banished from the court because he sold Louis XIV. an Otho that was not genuine.-Warton.

Stand emulous of Greek and Roman fame?

In living medals see her wars enrolled,

And vanquished realms supply recording gold?
Here, rising bold, the patriot's honest face;
There warriors frowning in historic brass:
Then future ages with delight shall see
How Plato's, Bacon's, Newton's looks agree;
Or in fair series laurelled bards be shown,
A Virgil there, and here an Addison.

Then shall thy Craggs (and let me call him mine)
On the cast ore, another Pollio, shine;

With aspect open, shall erect his head,
And round the orb in lasting notes be read,
"Statesman, yet friend to truth! of soul sincere,
In action faithful, and in honour clear;

Who broke no promise, served no private end,
Who gained no title, and who lost no friend;1
Ennobled by himself, by all approved,

And praised, unenvied, by the muse he loved."

1 James Craggs had raised himself from an inferior position to be Secretary of State to George I. When in power he offered Pope a pension of £300 a year.

SATIRES.

EPISTLE TO DR. ARBUTHNOT

BEING •

THE PROLOGUE TO THE SATIRES.

ADVERTISEMENT.

66

This paper is a sort of bill of complaint, begun many years since, and drawn up by snatches, as the several occasions offered. I had no thoughts of publishing it, till it pleased some persons of rank and fortune (the authors of "Verses to the Imitator of Horace," and of an Epistle to a Doctor of Divinity from a Nobleman at Hampton Court") to attack, in a very extraordinary manner, not only my writings, (of which, being public, the public is judge,) but my person, morals, and family,' whereof, to those who know me not, a truer information may be requisite. Being divided between the necessity to say something of myself, and my own laziness to undertake so awkward a task, I thought it the shortest way to put the last hand to this epistle. If it have anything pleasing, it will be that by which I am most desirous to please, the truth, and the sentiment; and if anything offensive, it will be only to those I am least sorry to offend, the vicious or the ungenerous.

Many will know their own pictures in it, there being not a circumstance but what is true; but I have for the most part spared their names, and they may escape being laughed at, if they please.

I would have some of them know, it was owing to the request of the learned and candid friend to whom it is in

1 Lady Mary W. Montagu thus addressed him in her "Address te Mr. Pope on his Imitation of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace:

Thine is just such an image of his pen

As thou thyself art of the sons of men,
Where our own species in burlesque we trace,

A sign-post likeness of the human race,

That is at once resemblance and disgrace.

A cruel, unwomanly sneer at the poet's physical defects A gain:

His style is elegant: his diction pure,

Whilst none thy crabbed numbers may endure, Hard as thy heart, and as thy birth obscure. The remainder or tuo passage is too coarse to quote.