WHAT Greece, when learning flourished, only knew | |
| Athenian judges, you this day renew. | |
| Here too are annual rites to Pallas done, | |
| And here poetic prizes lost or won. | |
| Methinks I see you, crowned with olives, sit, | 5 |
| And strike a sacred horror from the pit. | |
| A day of doom is this of your decree, | |
| Where even the best are but by mercy free; | |
| A day, which none but Jonson durst have wished to see. | |
| Here they who long have known the useful stage, | 10 |
| Come to be taught themselves to teach the age. | |
| As your commissioners our poets go, | |
| To cultivate the virtue which you sow; | |
| In your Lyceum first themselves refined, | |
| And delegated thence to human-kind. | 15 |
| But as ambassadors, when long from home, | |
| For new instructions to their princes come, | |
| So poets, who your precepts have forgot, | |
| Return, and beg they may be better taught: | |
| Follies and faults elsewhere by them are shown, | 20 |
| But by your manners they correct their own. | |
| The illiterate writer, empiric-like, applies | |
| To minds diseased, unsafe, chance remedies: | |
| The learned in schools, where knowledge first began | |
| Studies with care the anatomy of man; | 25 |
| Sees virtue, vice, and passions in their cause, | |
| And fame from science, not from fortune, draws. | |
| So poetry, which is in Oxford made | |
| An art, in London only is a trade. | |
| There haughty dunces, whose unlearned pen | 30 |
| Could ne’er spell grammar, would be reading men. | |
| Such build their poems the Lucretian way; | |
| So many huddled atoms make a play; | |
| And if they hit in order by some chance, | |
| They call that nature, which is ignorance. | 35 |
| To such a fame let mere town-wits aspire, | |
| And their gay nonsense their own cits admire. | |
| Our poet, could he find forgiveness here, | |
| Would wish it rather than a plaudit there. | |
| He owns no crown from those Prætorian bands, | 40 |
| But knows that right is in this Senate’s hands. | |
| Not impudent enough to hope your praise, | |
| Low at the Muses’ feet his wreath he lays, | |
| And, where he took it up, resigns his bays. | |
| Kings make their poets whom themselves think fit, | 45 |
| But ’tis your suffrage makes authentic wit. | |
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