Yet lest you think I rally more than teach,
Or praise malignly arts I cannot reach,
Let me for once presume t’ instruct the times
To know the poet from the man of rhymes: 
’Tis he who gives my breast a thousand pains,
Can make me feel each passion that he feigns;
Enrage, compose, with more than magic art,
With pity, and with terror, tear my heart;
And snatch me, o’er the earth, or through the air,
To Thebes, to Athens, when he will, and where.

  FROM THE EPILOGUE TO THE SATIRES

  [THE POWER OF THE SATIRIST]

  Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see
  Men not afraid of God, afraid of me: 
  Safe from the bar, the pulpit, and the throne,
  Yet touched and shamed by ridicule alone. 
  O sacred weapon! left for truth’s defense,
  Sole dread of folly, vice, and insolence! 
  To all but Heaven-directed hands denied,
  The Muse may give thee, but the gods must guide: 
  Reverent I touch thee! but with honest zeal,
  To rouse the watchmen of the public weal;
  To virtue’s work provoke the tardy hall,
  And goad the prelate slumbering in his stall,
  Ye tinsel insects! whom a court maintains,
  That counts your beauties only by your stains,
  Spin all your cobwebs, o’er the eye of day! 
  The Muse’s wing shall brush you all away.

  FROM THE DUNCIAD

  [THE COLLEGE OF DULNESS]

  Close to those walls where Folly holds her throne,
  And laughs to think Monroe would take her down,
  Where o’er the gates, by his famed father’s hand,
  Great Cibber’s brazen brainless brothers stand,
  One cell there is, concealed from vulgar eye. 
  The cave of Poverty and Poetry. 
  Keen, hollow winds howl through the bleak recess,
  Emblem of music caused by emptiness. 
  Hence bards, like Proteus long in vain tied down,
  Escape in monsters, and amaze the town. 
  Hence Miscellanies spring, the weekly boast
  Of Curll’s chaste press and Lintot’s rubric post;
  Hence hymning Tyburn’s elegiac lines;
  Hence Journals, Medleys, Mercuries, Magazines,
  Sepulchral lies, our holy walls to grace,
  And New-year odes, and all the Grub Street race. 
  In clouded majesty here Dulness shone. 
  Four guardian Virtues, round, support her throne: 
  Fierce champion Fortitude, that knows no fears
  Of hisses, blows, or want, or loss of ears;
  Calm Temperance, whose blessings those partake
  Who hunger and who thirst for scribbling sake;
  Prudence, whose glass presents th’ approaching jail;
  Poetic Justice, with her lifted scale,
  Where, in nice balance, truth with gold she weighs,
  And solid pudding against empty praise. 
  Here she beholds the chaos dark and deep,
  Where nameless somethings in their causes sleep,
  Till genial Jacob or a warm third day
  Call forth each mass, a poem or a play: