404

His life, though long, to sickness pass'd unknown;
His death was instant, and without a groan.
O, grant me thus to live, and thus to die!
Who sprung from kings shall know less joy than I.
O friend, may each domestic bliss be thine;
Be no unpleasing melancholy mine.
Me, let the tender office long engage,
To rock the cradle of reposing age,

410

With lenient arts extend a mother's breath,
Make languor smile, and smoothe the bed of death,
Explore the thought, explain the asking eye,
And keep awhile one parent from the sky!
On cares like these if length of days attend,
May Heaven, to bless those days, preserve my

friend;

415

Preserve him social, cheerful, and serene,
And just as rich as when he served a queen.
A. Whether that blessing be denied or given,
Thus far was right; the rest belongs to Heaven.

417 As rich as when he served a queen. A compliment to Arbuthnot's disinterestedness: he had been the favorite physician of queen Anne.

SATIRES AND EPISTLES

OF

HORACE

IMITATED.

Ludentis speciem dabit, et torquebitur.-HORACE.

SATIRES AND EPISTLES OF HORACE

IMITATED.

THIS Satire was published in 1733, in folio, under the singular title of Dialogue between Alexander Pope of Twickenham, in com. Midd., on the one part, and the learned Counsel on the other.' The title must have been given by the learned counsel himself: it has the true obscurity of the law. The respondent was Fortescue, successively a judge of the exchequer court, and master of the rolls.

Of the poem, Warburton pronounces, in the first place, that if the reader should expect to find a faithful copy of the genius or manner of Horace in these imitations, he will be much disappointed;' and in the next, that had it been Pope's purpose to paraphrase an ancient satirist, he would hardly have made choice of Horace.' The first he ought to have known to be false, the second he could not know to be true. Of all the writers of antiquity, every scholar will tell us that Horace is the happiest subject for imitation. Eminently the poet of human nature, his maxims belong to every age while human nature continues the same: not less eminently the poet of manners in an age altogether different from our own, the distinction allows room for all the dexterity of the imitator. Nothing gives a stronger idea of Pope's sensibility to attack, than his suffering Warburton to be thus his defender: alternately extolling imaginary beauties, and obscuring the true, it is doubtful whether he more encumbers the text by baseless panegyric or unlucky elucidation.

ADVERTISEMENT.

THE occasion of publishing these Imitations was the clamor raised on some of my Epistles: an answer from Horace was both more full, and of more dignity, than any I could have made in my own person; and the example of much greater freedom in so eminent a divine as Dr. Donne, seemed a proof with what indignation and contempt a christian may treat vice or folly, in ever so low or ever so high a station. Both these authors were acceptable to the princes and ministers under whom they lived. The satires of Dr. Donne I versified, at the desire of the earl of Oxford, while he was lord treasurer; and of the duke of Shrewsbury, who had been secretary of state; neither of whom looked on a satire on vicious courts as any reflection on those they served in and indeed there is not in the world a greater error, than that which fools are so apt to fall into, and knaves with good reason to encourage;-the mistaking a satirist for a libeller; whereas to a true satirist nothing is so odious as a libeller, for the same reason as to a man truly virtuous nothing is so hateful as a hypocrite:

Uni æquus virtuti atque ejus amicis.-POPE.