The short lines of whose life did to our eyes
Their love and majesty epitomise:
Tell them, whose stern decrees impose our laws,
The feasted grave may close her hollow jaws.
Tho'sin search Nature, to provide her here
A second entertainment half so dear,
She'll never meet a plenty like this hearse,
Till Time present her with the universe.
TO SIR JOHN MENNIS, Being invited from Calais to Bologne to eat a pig.
I.
All on a weeping Monday,
With a fat Bulgarian sloven,
Little Admiral John
To Bologne is gone,
Whom I think they call Old Loven,
II.
Hadst thou not thy fill of carting
Will. Aubrey, Count of Oxon,
When nose lay in breechi, ;
And breech made a speech,
So often cry'd a pox on?
III.
A knight by land and water
Esteem'd at such a high rate,
When 'tis told in Kent :
In a cart that he went,
They'll say now, Hang him, pirate.
* We three riding in a cart from Dunkirk te Calais with a fat Dutch woman, who broke wind all along. DENHAM.
H
IV.
Thou might'st have ta'en example.
From what thou read'st in story,
Being as worthy to sit
On an ambling tit
As thy predecessor Dory..
V.
But, oh! the roof of linen,
Intended for a shelter :
But the rain made an ass
Of tilt and canvas,
which you know is a melter,
VI.
But with thee to inveigle
That tender stripling Astcot,
Who was soak'd to the skin
Thro' drugget so thin,
Having neither coat nor waistcoat..
VII.
He being proudly mounted,
Clad in cloak of Plymouth,
Defy'd cart so base,
For thief without grace,
That goes to make a wry
mouth.
VIII.
Nor did he like the omen,
For fear it might be his doom
One day for to sing,
With gullet in string,
A bymn of Robert Wisdom.
IX.
But what was all this bus'ness?
For sure it was important;
For who rides i' th' wet,
When affairs are not great,
The neighbours make but a sport on't.
X.
To a goodly fat sow's baby,
John! thou hast a malice;
The old driver of swine
That day sure was thine,
Or thou had'st not quitted Calais.
TO SIR RICHARD FANSHAW,
UPON HIS TRANSLATION OF
PASTOR FIDO.
Such is our pride, our folly, or our fate,
That few, but such as 'cannot write, translate:
But what in them is want of art or voice,
In thee is either modesty or choice.
While this great piece, restor'd by thee, doth stand
Free from the blemish of an artless haud,
Secure of fame thou justly dost esteem
Less honour to create than to redeem.
Nor ought a genius less than his that writ
Attempt translation; for transplanted wit
All the defects of air and soil doth share,
And colder brains like colder climates are:
In vain they toil, since nothing can beget
I A vital spirit but a vital heat.
That servile part thou nobly dost decline
Of tracing word by word and line by line :
Those are the labour'd births of slavish brains,
Not the effect of poetry, but pains;
Cheap vulgar arts, whose narrowness affords
No flight for thoughts, but poorly sticks at words.
A new and nobler way thou dost pursue
To make translations and translators too.
They but preserve the ashes, thou the flame,
True to his sense but truer to his fame:
Fording his current, where thou find’st it law
Lett'st in thine own to make it rise and flow,
Wisely restoring whatsoever gracę
It lost by change of times, or tongues, or place.
Nor fetter'd to his numbers and his times,
Betray'st his music to unhappy rhymes.
Nor are the nerves of his compacted strength
Stretch'd and dissolv'd into unsinew'd length:
Yet, after all, (lest we should think it thine,)
Thy spirit to his circle dost confine.
New names, new dressings, and the modern cast,
Some scenes, some persons alter'd, and out-fac'd
The world, it were thy work; for we have known
Some thank'd and prais'd for what was less their
That master's hand which to the lifecan trace[own,
The airs, the lines, and features of the face,
May with a free and bolder stroke express
A vary'd posture or a flatt'ring dress :
He could have made those like who made the rest
But that he knew his own design was beste
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