Or add one patriot to a sinking state; XV.-FOR ONE WHO WOULD NOT BE BURIED HEROES, and kings! your distance keep: ANOTHER, ON THE SAME. UNDER this marble, or under this sill, LORD CONINGSBY'S EPITAPH. HERE lies Lord Coningsby-be civil: 1 Now on Pope's monument in Twickenham church. 2 This epitaph, originally written on Picus Mirandula, was printed among the works of Swift. See Hawkesworth's edition, vol. iv. Pope, in one of the prints from Scheemaker's monument of Shake ages ше. Poet and patron then had been well pair'd, ¿peare in Westminster Abbey, has shewn his contempt of Alderman Barber, by the following couplet, which is substituted in the place of the cloud capt towers, &c.' "Thus Britain loved me: and preserved my fame, Clear from a Barber's or a Benson's name.' Pope might probably have suppressed his satire on the alderman, because he was one of Swift's acquaintances and correspondents: hough in the fourth book of the Dunciad he has an anonymous troke at him: 'So by each bard an alderman shall sit, A heavy lord shall hang at every wit,” MISCELLANEOUS POEMS. ODE ON ST. CECILIA'S DAY. 1703. I. DESCEND, ye Nine! descend and sing: The shrill echoes rebound: While in more lengthened notes and slow, Now louder, and yet louder rise And fill with spreading sounds the skies; Exulting in triumph now swell the bold notes, In broken air, trembling, the wild music floats, Till, by degrees, remote and small, The strains decay, And melt away, In a dying, dying fall. II. By music, minds an equal temper know, Or, when the soul is pressed with cares, Warriors she fires with animated sounds; Melancholy lifts her head, III. But when our country's cause provokes to arms, Each chief his sev'nfold shield displayed, 1 Dr. Greene set this ode to music in 1730, as an exercise for his doctor's degree at Cambridge, on which occasion Pope added the following stanza at line 35. Amphion thus bade wild dissension cease, From various discords to create, The music of a well tuned state; Nor slack nor strain the tender strings, That strike the subject's answering heart, and he made another alteration at the same time, in stanza 4, v. 51, and wrote it thus: Sad Orpheus sought his consort lost; The adamantine gates were barred, And nought was seen and nought was heard But dreadful gleams, &c.- Warton. 2 The Argo in which Jason and the Argonauts sailed to Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece. 3 Orpheus. 4 Few images in any poet, ancient or modern, are more striking than that in Apollonius, where he says, that when the Argo was sailing near the coast where the centaur Chiron dwelt, he came down to the very margin of the sea, bringing his wife with the young Achilles in her arms, that he might show the child to his father Peleus, who was on his voyage with the other Argonauts. Apollonius Rhodias. Lib. 1.- Warton. IV. But when through all th' infernal bounds, What scenes appeared, O'er all the dreary coasts! Dismal screams, 3 And cries of tortured ghosts! Thy stone, Ŏ Sisyphus, stands still,* And the pale spectres dance! The Furies sink upon their iron beds, [heads. And snakes uncurled hang list'ning round their V. By the streams that ever flow, By those happy souls who dwell 1 Phlegethon, a river of Tartarus. 2 See the "Divine Legation," Book 2, where Orpheus is considered as a philosopher, a legislator, and a mystic.- Warton. 3 The fable is that Orpheus, led by "Love strong as death," descended to Tartarus to beg that the Infernal God and Goddess would permit his dead wife, Eurydice (who had died of snake-bite) to return to earth with him. Won by his divine music they assented, on condition that he did not turn round to look at her till they reached the upper air. But alas! in his tender impatience, Orpheus cast a glance back, and she was instantly borne away. Very ancient hymns, ascribed to Orpheus (but not his), remain, Warton tells us, "certainly older than the expedition of Xerxes against Greece." 4 Sisyphus was doomed to roll a huge stone up to a hill-top of Tartarus, but when the summit was nearly gained it invariably fell back headlong to the plain; thus his efforts were always in vain. • Ixion was fastened to a wheel, which incessantly revolved, |