The church itself he labours to assail,
And keeps fit tools to break the sacred pale.
Of those let him the guilty roll commence,
Who has betrayed a master and a prince ;
A man, seditious, lewd, and impudent;
An engine always mischievously bent;
One who from all the bans of duty swerves,
No tie can hold but that which he deserves;
An author dwindled to a pamphleteer;
Skilful to forge, and always insincere;
Careless exploded practices to mend ;
Bold to attack, yet feeble to defend.
Fate's blindfold reign the atheist loudly owns,
And providence blasphemously dethrones.
In vain the leering actor strains his tongue
To cheat, with tears and empty noise, the throng;
Since all men know, whate'er he says or writes,
Revenge, or stronger interest, indites;
And that the wretch employs his venal wit
How to confute what formerly he writ.
Next him the grave Socinian claims a place,
Endowed with reason, though bereft of grace;
A preaching pagan of surpassing fame,
No register records his borrowed name.
O, had the child more happily been bred,
A radiant mitre would have graced his head;
But now unfit, the most he should expect,
Is to be entered of T-F-'s sect. †
* Lord Halifax, whose correspondence with the Prince of Orange may be seen in Dalrymple's "Memoirs." He wrote several tracts about the time of the Revolution, and was in religious principle a Free-thinker.
+ Who is here meant I am ignorant. T. F., as chief of the Socinians, is mentioned in a very satirical pamphlet in Somers' Tracts, entitled, "Remarks from the Country upon the two Letters relating to the Convocation, and Alterations in the Liturgy."
To him succeeds, with looks demurely sad, A gloomy soul, with revelation mad ; False to his friend, and careless of his word; A dreaming prophet, and a griping lord ; He sells the livings which he can't possess, And forms that sinecure, his diocese. Unthinking man! to quit thy barren see And vain endeavours in chronology, For the more fruitless care of royal charity. Thy hoary noddle warns thee to return, The treason of old age in Wales to mourn; Nor think the city-poor may less sustain, Thy place may well be vacant in this reign. I should admit the booted prelate now, But he is even for lampoon too low; The scum and outcast of a royal race, The nation's grievance, and the gown's disgrace. None so unlearned did e'er at London sit; This driveller does the sacred chair besh-t. I need not brand the spiritual parricide, Nor draw the weapon dangling by his side; The astonished world remembers that offence, And knows he stole the daughter of his prince. "Tis time enough, in some succeeding age, To bring this mitred captain on the stage.
These are the leaders in apostacy,
And the blind guides of poor elective majesty;
A thing which commonwealths-men did devise,
Till plots were ripe, to catch the people's eyes.
Their king's a monster, in a quagmire born,
Of all the native brutes the grief and scorn;
* Compton, Bishop of London, who took up arms in person on the Revolution, and escorted the Princess, afterwards Queen Anne, from London. See Vol. IX. p. 303.
With a big snout, cast in a crooked mould,
Which runs with glanders and an inborn cold;
His substance is of clammy snot and phlegm;
Sleep is his essence, and his life a dream.
To Caprea this Tiberius does retire,
To quench with catamite his feeble fire.
Dear catamite! who rules alone the state,
While monarch dozes on his unpropt height,
Silent, yet thoughtless, and secure of fate.
Could you but see the fulsome hero led
By loathing vassals to his noble bed!
In flannel robes the coughing ghost does walk,
And his mouth moats like cleaner breech of hawk;
Corruption, springing from his cankered breast,
Furs up the channel, and disturbs his rest.
With head propt up, the bolstered engine lies;
If pillow slip aside, the monarch dies.
To these poems ascribed to Dryden, may be added the following; which, however, have so little mark of his hand, that the Editor thinks it most proper to degrade them into a note. Indeed Dryden could not have written the first of these without being guilty of gross ingratitude, a fault which was entirely inconsistent with his character.
Epitaph on the Earl of Rochester's being dismissed from the Treasury, in 1687.
Here lies a creature of indulgent fate,
From Tory Hyde, raised to a chit of state;
In chariot now, Elijah-like, he's hurled
To the upper empty regions of the world.
The airy thing cuts through the yielding sky,
And as it goes does into atoms fly;
While we on earth see, with no small delight,
The bird of prey changed to a paper kite;
With drunken pride and rage he did so swell,
The hated thing without compassion fell;
By powerful force of universal prayer,
The ill-blown bubble now is turned to air;
To his first less than nothing he is gone,
By his preposterous transaction.
Epigram on the Duchess of Portsmouth's Picture.
Sure we do live by Cleopatra's age,
Since Sunderland does govern now the stage;
She of Septimius had nothing made,
Pompey had been alone by her betrayed;
Were she a poet, she would surely boast,
That all the world for pearls had well been lost.
The Soliloquy of a Royal Exile.
Unhappy I who, once ordained to bear
God's justice-sword, and be's vicegerent here,
Am now deposed-'gainst me my children rise,
My life must be their only sacrifice;
Highly they me accuse, but nothing prove,
But this is out of tenderness and love.
They seek to spill my blood; 'tis that alone
Must for the nation's crying sins atone.
But careful beaven forewarned me in a dream,
And shewed me that my dangers were extreme;
The heavenly vision spoke, and bade me flee
The ungrateful brood, that were not worthy me;
Alarmed, I fled at the appointed time,
And mere necessity became my crime !
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