Men without hearts, and women without hose:  30
  Each bring his love a Bogland captive home;
  Such proper pages will long trains become;
  With copper collars, and with brawny backs,
  Quite to put down the fashion of our blacks. 
  Then shall the pious Muses pay their vows,
  And furnish all their laurels for your brows;
  Their tuneful voice shall raise for your delights;
  We want not poets fit to sing your flights. 
  But you, bright beauties! for whose only sake
  Those doughty knights such dangers undertake, 40
  When they with happy gales are gone away,
  With your propitious presence grace our play;
  And with a sigh their empty seats survey: 
  Then think, on that bare bench my servant sat;
  I see him ogle still, and hear him chat;
  Selling facetious bargains, and propounding
  That witty recreation, call’d dumfounding. 
  Their loss with patience we will try to bear;
  And would do more, to see you often here;
  That our dead stage, revived by your fair eyes, 50
  Under a female regency may rise.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 65:  This prologue was forbid by the Earl of Dorset, then Lord Chamberlain, after the first day of its being spoken.]

[Footnote 66:  King William was at this time prosecuting the war in Ireland.]

* * * * *

XLIV.

PROLOGUE TO “THE MISTAKES.”

BY JOSEPH HARRIS, COMEDIAN, 1690. (WRITTEN BY SOME OTHER.)

Enter Mr Bright.

Gentlemen, we must beg your pardon; here’s no Prologue to be had to-day; our new play is like to come on, without a frontispiece; as bald as one of you young beaux, without your periwig.  I left our young poet, snivelling and sobbing behind the scenes, and cursing somebody that has deceived him.

Enter Mr Bowen.

  Hold your prating to the audience:  here is honest Mr Williams,

just come in, half mellow, from the Rose Tavern.  He swears he is
inspired with claret, and will come on, and that extempore too,
either with a prologue of his own or something like one.  Oh,
here he comes to his trial, at all adventures:  for my part I
wish him a good deliverance.

[Exeunt Mr Bright and Mr Bowen.

Enter Mr Williams.

  Save ye, sirs, save ye!  I am in a hopeful way. 

I should speak something in rhyme, now, for the play: 
But the deuce take me, if I know what to say. 
I’ll stick to my friend the author, that I can tell ye,
To the last drop of claret in my belly. 
So far I’m sure ’tis rhyme—­that