diminish'd by young Hopeful's debts;
Weighs well and wisely what to sell or buy,
Complete in all life's lessons--but to die;
Peevish and spiteful, doting, hard to please,
Commending every time save times like these;
Crazed, querulous, forsaken, half forgot,
Expires unwept, is buried--let him rot!"

In speaking of the opera, he says:--

"Hence the pert shopkeeper, whose throbbing ear
Aches with orchestras which he pays to hear,
Whom shame, not sympathy, forbids to snore,
His anguish doubled by his own 'encore!'
Squeezed in 'Fop's Alley,' jostled by the beaux,
Teased with his hat, and trembling for his toes,
Scarce wrestles through the night, nor tastes of ease
Till the dropp'd curtain gives a glad release:
Why this and more he suffers, can ye guess?--
Because it costs him dear, and makes him dress!"

The concluding couplet of the following lines is amusingly
characteristic of that mixture of fun and bitterness with which their
author sometimes spoke in conversation;--so much so, that those who knew
him might almost fancy they hear him utter the words:--

"But every thing has faults, nor is't unknown
That harps and fiddles often lose their tone,
And wayward voices at their owner's call,
With all his best endeavours, only squall;
Dogs blink their covey, flints withhold the spark,
And double barrels (damn them) miss their mark!"[11]

One more passage, with the humorous note appended to it, will complete
the whole amount of my favourable specimens:--

"And that's enough--then write and print so fast,--
If Satan take the hindmost, who'd be last?
They storm the types, they publish one and all,
They leap the counter, and they leave the stall:--
Provincial maidens, men of high command,
Yea, baronets, have ink'd the bloody hand!
Cash cannot quell them--Pollio play'd this prank:
(Then Phoebus first found credit in a bank;)
Not all the living only, but the dead
Fool on, as fluent as an Orpheus' head!
Damn'd all their days, they posthumously thrive,
Dug up from dust, though buried when alive!
Reviews record this epidemic crime,
Those books of martyrs to the rage for rhyme
Alas! woe worth the scribbler, often seen
In Morning Post or Monthly Magazine!
There lurk his earlier lays, but soon, hot-press'd,
Behold a quarto!--tarts must tell the rest!
Then leave,