Doeg, though without knowing how or why,
  Made still a blundering kind of melody;
  Spurr’d boldly on, and dash’d through thick and thin,
  Through sense and nonsense, never out nor in;
  Free from all meaning, whether good or bad,
  And, in one word, heroically mad: 
  He was too warm on picking-work to dwell,
  But fagoted his notions as they fell,
  And if they rhymed and rattled, all was well. 420
  Spiteful he is not, though he wrote a satire,
  For still there goes some thinking to ill-nature: 
  He needs no more than birds and beasts to think,
  All his occasions are to eat and drink. 
  If he call rogue and rascal from a garret,
  He means you no more mischief than a parrot;
  The words for friend and foe alike were made,
  To fetter them in verse is all his trade. 
  For almonds he’ll cry whore to his own mother: 
  And call young Absalom king David’s brother. 430
  Let him be gallows-free by my consent,
  And nothing suffer, since he nothing meant. 
  Hanging supposes human soul and reason—­
  This animal’s below committing treason: 
  Shall he be hang’d who never could rebel? 
  That’s a preferment for Achitophel. 
  The woman....... 
  Was rightly sentenced by the law to die;
  But ’twas hard fate that to the gallows led
  The dog that never heard the statute read. 440
  Railing in other men may be a crime,
  But ought to pass for mere instinct in him: 
  Instinct he follows, and no further knows,
  For to write verse with him is to transpose. 
  ’Twere pity treason at his door to lay,
  Who makes heaven’s gate a lock to its own key:[75]
  Let him rail on, let his invective muse
  Have four and twenty letters to abuse,
  Which, if he jumbles to one line of sense,
  Indict him of a capital offence. 450
  In fireworks give him leave to vent his spite—­
  Those are the only serpents he can write;
  The height of his ambition is, we know,
  But to be master of a puppet-show;
  On that one stage his works may yet appear,
  And a month’s harvest keeps him all the year.

   Now stop your noses, readers, all and some,
  For here’s a tun of midnight work to come;
  Og, from a treason-tavern rolling home,
  Round as a globe, and liquor’d every chink, 460
  Goodly and great he sails behind his link;
  With all this bulk there’s nothing lost in Og,
  For every inch that is not fool is rogue: 
  A monstrous mass of foul corrupted matter,
  As all the devils had spued to make the batter. 
  When wine has given him courage to blaspheme,
  He curses God, but God before cursed him;
  And if man could have reason, none has more,
  That made his paunch so rich, and him so poor. 
  With wealth he was not trusted, for Heaven