Just in one instance, be it yet confessed,
  Your people, Sir, are partial in the rest: 
  Foes to all living worth except your own,
  And advocates for folly dead and gone. 
  Authors, like coins, grow dear as they grow old;
  It is the rust we value, not the gold. 
  Chaucer’s worst ribaldry is learned by rote,
  And beastly Skelton heads of houses quote: 
  One likes no language but the Faery Queen;
  A Scot will fight for Christ’s Kirk o’ the Green;
  And each true Briton is to Ben so civil,
  He swears the muses met him at the Devil. 
  Though justly Greece her eldest sons admires,
  Why should not we be wiser than our sires? 
  In every public virtue we excel,
  We build, we paint, we sing, we dance as well. 
  And learned Athens to our art must stoop,
  Could she behold us tumbling through a hoop. 
  If time improves our wit as well as wine,
  Say at what age a poet grows divine? 
  Shall we, or shall we not, account him so,
  Who died, perhaps, a hundred years ago? 
  End all dispute; and fix the year precise
  When British bards begin t’ immortalize? 
  ’Who lasts a century can have no flaw,
  I hold that wit a classic, good in law.’ 
  Suppose he wants a year, will you compound? 
  And shall we deem him ancient, right and sound,
  Or damn to all eternity at once,
  At ninety-nine, a modern and a dunce? 
  ’We shall not quarrel for a year or two;
  By courtesy of England, he may do.’ 
  Then, by the rule that made the horse-tail bare,
  I pluck out year by year, as hair by hair,
  And melt down ancients like a heap of snow: 
  While you, to measure merits, look in Stowe,
  And estimating authors by the year,
  Bestow a garland only on a bier. 
  Shakespeare, (whom you and every play-house bill
  Style the divine, the matchless, what you will,)
  For gain, not glory, winged his roving flight,
  And grew immortal in his own despite. 
  Ben, old and poor, as little seemed to heed
  The life to come, in every poet’s creed. 
  Who now reads Cowley? if he pleases yet,
  His moral pleases, not his pointed wit;
  Forgot his epic, nay Pindaric art,
  But still I love the language of his heart. 
  ’Yet surely, surely, these were famous men! 
  What boy but hears the sayings of old Ben? 
  In all debates where critics bear a part,
  Not one but nods, and talks of Jonson’s art,
  Of Shakespeare’s nature, and of Cowley’s wit;
  How Beaumont’s judgment checked what Fletcher writ;
  How Shadwell hasty, Wycherley was slow;
  But, for the passions, Southern sure and Rowe. 
  These, only these, support the crowded stage,
  From eldest Heywood down to Cibber’s age.’ 
  All this may be; the people’s voice is odd,
  It is, and it is not, the voice of God. 
  To Gammer Gurton if it give the bays,
  And yet deny the Careless Husband praise,