How hints, like spawn, scarce quick in embryo lie;
  How new-born nonsense first is taught to cry;
  Maggots, half formed, in rhyme exactly meet,
  And learn to crawl upon poetic feet. 
  Here one poor word an hundred clenches makes,
  And ductile Dulness new meanders takes;
  There motley images her fancy strike,
  Figures ill paired, and similes unlike. 
  She sees a mob of metaphors advance,
  Pleased with the madness of the mazy dance;
  How Tragedy and Comedy embrace;
  How Farce and Epic get a jumbled race;
  How Time himself stands still at her command,
  Realms shift their place, and ocean turns to land. 
  Here gay description Egypt glads with showers,
  Or gives to Zembla fruits, to Barca flowers;
  Glittering with ice here hoary hills are seen,
  There painted valleys of eternal green;
  In cold December fragrant chaplets blow,
  And heavy harvests nod beneath the snow. 
  All these and more the cloud-compelling queen
  Beholds through fogs, that magnify the scene: 
  She, tinselled o’er in robes of varying hues,
  With self-applause her wild creation views;
  Sees momentary monsters rise and fall,
  And with her own fools-colours gilds them all.

* * * * *

  [CIBBER AS DULNESS’S FAVOURITE SON]

  In each she marks her image full expressed,
  But chief In Bays’s monster-breeding breast;
  Bays, formed by nature stage and town to bless,
  And act, and be, a coxcomb with success. 
  Dulness with transport eyes the lively dunce,
  Rememb’ring she herself was Pertness once. 
  Now (shame to Fortune!) an ill run at play
  Blanked his bold visage, and a thin third day: 
  Swearing and supperless the hero sate,
  Blasphemed his gods, the dice, and damned his fate;
  Then gnawed his pen, then dashed it on the ground,
  Sinking from thought to thought, a vast profound! 
  Plunged for his sense, but found no bottom there;
  Yet wrote and floundered on in mere despair. 
  Round him much embryo, much abortion lay,
  Much future ode, and abdicated play;
  Nonsense precipitate, like running lead,
  That slipped through cracks and zigzags of the head;
  All that on Folly Frenzy could beget,
  Fruits of dull heat, and sooterkins of wit. 
  Next o’er his books his eyes began to roll,
  In pleasing memory of all he stole—­
  How here he sipped, how there he plundered snug,
  And sucked all o’er like an industrious bug. 
  Here lay poor Fletcher’s half-eat scenes, and here
  The frippery of crucified Moliere;
  There hapless Shakespeare, yet of Tibbald sore,
  Wished he had blotted for himself before.

* * * * *

[THE RESTORATION OF NIGHT AND CHAOS]