Now, then, let us hear how this accomplished scholar, this great genius, whose works are read with such admiration, and which make a part of the library of every man of sense who has the means of procuring books; let us hear how this all-accomplished writer expressed himself upon the subject of the then prevailing vice and corruption.
Lo; at the wheels of her triumphal car,
Old England’s Genius, rough with many a scar,
Dragg’d in the dust! his arms hang idly round,
His flag inverted trails along the ground!
Our youth, all liv’ry’d o’er with foreign gold,
Before her dance: behind her, crawl the old!
See thronging millions to the pagod run,
And offer country, parent, wife, or son!
Hear her black trumpet thro’ the land proclaim,
That not to be corrupted is the shame.
In soldier, churchman, patriot, man in pow’r,
’Tis av’rice all, ambition is no more!
See, all our nobles begging to be slaves!
See, all our fools aspiring to be knaves!
The wit of cheats, the courage of a whore,
Are what ten thousand envy and adore:
All, all look up, with reverential awe,
At crimes that ’scape, or triumph o’er the Law;
While truth, worth, wisdom, daily they decry—
Nothing is sacred now but villany.
Yet may this verse (if such a verse remain)
Show there was one who held it in disdain.
This is only one instance. In many others he named the corrupt persons. But, Pope was called a “libeller;” and, in his preface to that part of his inestimable works, from which the above extract is made, he observes, that “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.” He says, that the clamour raised on some of his former writings, induced him to bring before the public the writings of Horace and Dr. Donne. With a similar view I now appeal to him, who exceeded them both in genius, and yielded to neither in any estimable quality. Having shown the public with what freedom those authors wrote, he next gives us his own sentiments upon what was, by the venal tribe of his day, called libellous, gross, coarse, filthy, brutal, personal and seditious; and one cannot help being struck with the exact similarity in the clamours of that day and the clamours of this; though, indeed, there is nothing wonderful in it, seeing that profligacy and corruption, being always the same in nature, must always have the same antipathies, as surely as vipers of the present day inherit the fears as well as the poison of their progenitors of a century ago.
Here, in the following extracts, we have all the old grounds of clamour, together with the refutation and exposure. I beseech the public to abstract themselves from the poetry and the wit, and fix their attention wholly upon the reasoning. In it they will find an answer to all the cavilling and clamouring now in use by the conspirators against the real freedom of the press; and, I trust, they will join with me in sentiments of profound gratitude to the memory of the matchless author.
Friend.
’Tis all a libel, Paxton, Sir, will say.
Pope.
Not yet, my friend! to-morrow, ’faith, it may;
And for that very cause I print to-day.
How should I fret to mangle ev’ry line,
In rev’rence to the sons of Thirty-nine!
Vice with such giant strides comes on amain,
Invention strives to be before in vain;
Feign what I will, and paint it e’er so strong,
Some rising genius sins up to my song.
Fr.
Yet none but you by name the guilty lash;
Ev’n Guthry saves half Newgate by a dash.
Spare then the person, and expose the vice.
Po.
How, Sir! not damn the sharper, but the dice?
Come on then, Satire! gen’ral, unconfin’d,
Spread thy broad wing, and souse on all the kind.
Ye statesmen, priests, of one religion all!
Ye tradesmen, vile, in army, court, or hall!
Ye rev’rend atheists.
Fr.
Scandal! name them. Who?
Po.
Why that’s the thing you bid me not to do.
Who starved a sister, who forswore a debt,
I never nam’d; the town’s inquiring yet.
The pois’ning dame——
Fr.
You mean——
Po.
I don’t.
Fr.
You do.
Po.
See, now I keep the secret, and not you!
The bribing statesman——
Fr.
Hold, too high you go.
Po.
The brib’d elector——
Fr.
There you stoop too low.
Po.
I fain would please you, if I knew with what;
Tell me, which knave is lawful game, which not?
Must great offenders, once escap’d the crown,
Like royal harts, be never more run down?
Admit your law
