With all the horrors of prophetic dread,
  That rack his bosom while the mail is read. 160
  Safe from the road, untainted by the school,
  A judge by birth, by destiny a fool,
  While the young lordling struts in native pride,
  His party-colour’d tutor by his side,
  Pleased, let me own the pious mother’s care,
  Who to the brawny sire commits her heir. 
  Fraught with the spirit of a Gothic monk,
  Let Rich, with dulness and devotion drunk,
  Enjoy the peal so barbarous and loud,
  While his brain spews new monsters to the crowd; 170
  I see with joy the vaticide deplore
  A hell-denouncing priest and ... whore;
  Let every polish’d dame and genial lord,
  Employ the social chair and venal board;
  Debauch’d from sense, let doubtful meanings run,
  The vague conundrum, and the prurient pun,
  While the vain fop, with apish grin, regards
  The giggling minx half-choked behind her cards: 
  These, and a thousand idle pranks, I deem
  The motley spawn of Ignorance and Whim. 180
  Let Pride conceive, and Folly propagate,
  The fashion still adopts the spurious brat: 
  Nothing so strange that fashion cannot tame;
  By this, dishonour ceases to be shame: 
  This weans from blushes lewd Tyrawley’s face,
  Gives Hawley[6] praise, and Ingoldsby disgrace,
  From Mead to Thomson shifts the palm at once,
  A meddling, prating, blundering, busy dunce! 
  And may, should taste a little more decline,
  Transform the nation to a herd of swine. 190

  FRIEND.

  The fatal period hastens on apace. 
  Nor will thy verse the obscene event disgrace;
  Thy flowers of poetry, that smell so strong,
  The keenest appetites have loathed the song,
  Condemn’d by Clark, Banks, Barrowby, and Chitty,
  And all the crop-ear’d critics of the city: 
  While sagely neutral sits thy silent friend,
  Alike averse to censure or commend.

  POET.

  Peace to the gentle soul that could deny
  His invocated voice to fill the cry! 200
  And let me still the sentiment disdain
  Of him who never speaks but to arraign,
  The sneering son of Calumny and Scorn,
  Whom neither arts, nor sense, nor soul adorn;
  Or his, who, to maintain a critic’s rank,
  Though conscious of his own internal blank,
  His want of taste unwilling to betray,
  ’Twixt sense and nonsense hesitates all day,
  With brow contracted hears each passage read,
  And often hums, and shakes his empty head, 210
  Until some oracle adored pronounce
  The passive bard a poet or a dunce;
  Then in loud clamour echoes back the word,
  ’Tis bold, insipid—­soaring, or absurd. 
  These, and the unnumber’d shoals of smaller fry,
  That nibble round, I pity and defy.