What might ensue, 'tis hard for me to tell;
But I was drench'd to-day, for loving well;
And fear the poison that would make me swell. J
You saw our wife was chaste, yet throughly try'd,
And, without doubt, y' are hugely edify'd ;
For like our hero whom we shew'd to-day,
You think no woman true, but in a play.
Love once did make a pretty kind of show;
Esteem and kindness in one breast would grow;
But 'twas, Heav'n knows how many years ago.
Now some small chat, and guinea expectation,
Gets all the pretty creatures in the nation.
In comedy, your little selves you meet;
'Tis Covent-Garden, drawn in Bridges-street.
Smile on our author then, if he has shown
A jolly nut-brown bastard of your own.
Ah! happy you,—with ease and with delight,
Who act those follies,-poets toil to write !
The sweating Muse does almost leave the chase;
She puffs, and hardly keeps your Protean vices pace,
Pinch you but in one vice, away you fly
To some new frisk of contrariety.
You roll like snow-balls, gath'ring as you run; And get sev'n devils, when dispossess'd of one.
Your Venus once was a Platonic queen ;
Nothing of love beside the face was seen ;
But ev'ry inch of her you now uncase
And clap a vizard-mask upon the face.
For sins like these, the zealous of the land,
With little hair, and little or no band,
Declare how circulating pestilences
Watch ev'ry twenty years, to snap offences.
Saturn, e'en now, takes doctoral degrees;
He'll do your work, this summer, without fees.
Let all the boxes, Phoebus! find thy grace,
And, ah! preserve the eighteen-penny place!
But for the pit-confounders,-let them go,
And find as little mercy as they show :
The actors thus, and thus thy poets * pray;
For ev'ry critic sav'd, thou damn'st a play.
EPILOGUE TO THE PILGRIM.
PERHAPS the Parson stretch'd a point too far,
When, with our theatres, he wag'd a war.
He tells you that this very moral age
Receiv'd the first infection from the stage.
But, sure, a banish'd court, with lewdness fraught,
The seeds of open vice, returning, brought.
Thus lodg'd (as vice by great examples thrives)
It first debauch'd the daughters and the wives.
*Still addressing Phoebus.
London, a fruitful soil, yet never bore
So plentiful a crop of horns before.
The poets, who must live by courts or starve,
Were proud so good a government to serve;
And, mixing with buffoons and pimps profane,
Tainted the stage, for some small snip of gain.
For they, like harlots, under bawds profest,
Took all th' ungodly pains, and got the least.
Thus did the thriving malady prevail,
The court its head, the poets but the tail.
The sin was of our native growth, 'tis true,
The scandal of the sin was wholly new.
Misses they were, but modestly conceal'd;
Whitehall the naked Venus first reveal'd,
Who standing, as at Cyprus, in her shrine,
The strumpet was ador'd with rites divine.
Ere this, if saints had any secret motion,
'T was chamber-practice all, and close devotion.
the peccadillos of their time;
Nothing but open lewdness was a crime.
A monarch's blood was venial to the nation,
Compar'd with one foul act of fornication.
Now, they would silence us, and shut the door,
That let in all the bare-fac'd vice before.
As for reforming us, which some pretend,
That work in England is without an end :
Well may we change, but we shall never mend.
Yet if you can but bear the present stage,
We hope much better of the coming age.
What would you say, if we should first begin
Το stop the trade of love behind the scene;
Where actresses make bold with married men?
For while, abroad, so prodigal the dolt is,
Poor spouse, at home, as ragged as a colt is*.
In short, we'll grow as moral as we can.
Save here and there a woman or a man:
But neither you, nor we, with all our pains,
Can make clean work; there will be some remains,
While you have still your Oats and we our
Hains.
*This Couplet occurs in the Prologue to the Disappointment, line 55. and may have crept in here by mistake.
The Medal-a Satire against Sedition Alexander's Feast, or the Power of Musican Ode
To his sacred Majesty-a Panegyric on his
Victory gained by the Duke over the
Hollanders, in 1665
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