The style of forty-one our poets write,
  And you are grown to judge like forty-eight,[56]
  Such censures our mistaking audience make,
  That ’tis almost grown scandalous to take. 
  They talk of fevers that infect the brains; 20
  But nonsense is the new disease that reigns. 
  Weak stomachs, with a long disease oppress’d,
  Cannot the cordials of strong wit digest. 
  Therefore thin nourishment of farce ye choose,
  Decoctions of a barley-water Muse: 
  A meal of tragedy would make ye sick,
  Unless it were a very tender chick. 
  Some scenes in sippets would be worth our time;
  Those would go down; some love that’s poach’d in rhyme: 
  If these should fail—­ 30
  We must lie down, and, after all our cost,
  Keep holiday, like watermen in frost;
  While you turn players on the world’s great stage,
  And act yourselves the farce of your own age.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 56:  ‘Forty-one, forty-eight:’  referring to the Puritan era, which some were then seeking to revive.]

* * * * *

XXVIII.

PROLOGUE[57] TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD,

1681.

  The famed Italian Muse, whose rhymes advance
  Orlando and the Paladins of France,
  Records, that, when our wit and sense is flown,
  ’Tis lodged within the circle of the moon,
  In earthen jars, which one, who thither soar’d,
  Set to his nose, snuff’d up, and was restored. 
  Whate’er the story be, the moral’s true;
  The wit we lost in town, we find in you. 
  Our poets their fled parts may draw from hence,
  And fill their windy heads with sober sense. 10
  When London votes with Southwark’s disagree,
  Here may they find their long-lost loyalty. 
  Here busy senates, to the old cause inclined,
  May snuff the votes their fellows left behind: 
  Your country neighbours, when their grain grows dear,
  May come, and find their last provision here: 
  Whereas we cannot much lament our loss,
  Who neither carried back, nor brought one cross. 
  We look’d what representatives would bring;
  But they help’d us, just as they did the king. 20
  Yet we despair not; for we now lay forth
  The Sibyl’s books to those who know their worth;
  And though the first was sacrificed before,
  These volumes doubly will the price restore. 
  Our poet bade us hope this grace to find,
  To whom by long prescription you are kind. 
  He whose undaunted Muse, with loyal rage,
  Has never spared the vices of the age,
  Here finding nothing that his spleen can raise,
  Is forced to turn his satire into praise. 30