Yet, ah! how once we lov'd, remember still, He. Dear shade! I will: Then mix this dust with thine--O spotless ghost! O more than fortune, friends, or country lost! Is there on earth one care, one wish beside? Yes--Save my country, heaven,'---He said, and died. ON EDMUND DUKE OF BUCKINGHAM, Who died in the 19th year of his age, 1735. IF modest youth, with cool reflection crown'd, And ev'ry opening virtue blooming round, FOR ONE WHO WOULD NOT BE BURIED IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY. H EROES and kings! your distance keep, ANOTHER ON THE SAME. UNDER this marble, or under this sill, Or under this turf, or e'en what they will; LORD CONINGSBY'S EPITAPH*. HERE lies Lord Coningsby---be civil; The rest God knows---so does the devil. ON BUTLER'S MONUMENT. Perhaps by Mr. Popet. RESPECT to Dryden, Sheffield justly paid, And noble Villers honour'd Cowley's shade: But whence this Barber?-that a name so mean Should, join'd with Butler's, on a tomb be seen : * This Epitaph, originally written on Picus Mirandula, is applied to F. Chartres, and printed among the works of Swift. See Hawkesworth's edition, vol. vi. S. + Mr. Pope, in one of the prints from Scheemaker's monument of Shakespeare in Westminster Abbey, has sufficiently shown his contempt of Alderman Barber, by the following couplet, which is This pyramid would better far proclaim, substituted in the place of The cloud-capp'd tow ers, zc.' Thus Britain lov'd me; and preserv'd my fame, Clear from a Barber's or a Benson's name. A. POPE. Pope might probably have suppressed his satire on the alderman, because he was one of Swift's acquaintances and correspondents; though in the fourth book of the Dunciad he has an anonymous stroke at him: So by each bard an alderman shall sit, 8. THE DUNCIAD, IN FOUR BOOKS; With the Prolegomena of Scriblerus, the Hypercritics of Aristarchus, and Notes Variorum. A LETTER TO THE PUBLISHER, Occasioned by the first correct Edition of the Dunciad. IT is with pleasure I hear that you have procured a correct copy of the Dunciad, which the many surreptitious ones have rendered so necessary; and it is yet with more that I am informed it will be attended with a commentary; a work so requisite, that I cannot think the author himself would have omitted it, had he approved of the first appearance of this poem. ▼ Such notes as have occurred to me I herewith send you: you will oblige me by inserting them amongst those which are, or will be, transmitted to you by others; since not only the author's friends, but even strangers, appear engaged, by humanity, to take some care of an orphan of so much genius and spirit, which its parent seems to have abandoned from the very beginning, and suffered to step into the world naked, unguarded, and unattended. It was upon reading some of the abusive papers lately published, that my great regard to a person, whose friendship I esteem as one of the chief honours of my life, and a much greater respect to truth than to him or any man living, engaged me in inquiries, of which the enclosed notes are the fruit. • I perceived that most of these authors had been (doubtless very wisely) the first aggressors. They had tried, till they were weary, what was to be got by railing at each other: nobody was either concerned or surprised, if this or that scribbler was proved a dunce. But every one was curious to read what could be said to prove Mr. Pope one, and was ready to pay something for such a discovery; a stratagem which, would they fairly own it, might not only reconcile them to me, but screen them from the resentment of their lawful superiors, whom they daily abuse, only (as I charitably hope) to get that by them, which they cannot get from them. I found this was not all: ill success in that had transported them to personal abuse, either of himself, or (what I think he could less forgive) of his friends. They had called men of virtue and honour bad men, long before he had either leisure or inclination to call them bad writers; and some had been such old offenders, that he had quite forgotten their persons as well as their slanders, till they were pleased to revive them. Now what had Mr. Pope done before to incense them? He had published those works which are in the hands of every body, in which not the least mention is made of any of them. And what has he doue since? He has laughed, and written the Dunciad. What has that said of them? A very serious truth, which the public had said before, that they were dull; and what it had no sooner said, but they themselves were at great pains to procure, or even purchase, room in the prints to testify under their hands the truth of it. I should still have been silent, if either I had seen U2 : |