They strip the living, but these rob the dead;
  Dare with the mummies of the Muses play,
  And make love to them the Egyptian way; 30
  Or, as a rhyming author would have said,
  Join the dead living to the living dead. 
  Such men in poetry may claim some part: 
  They have the licence, though they want the art;
  And might, where theft was praised, for Laureates stand,—­
  Poets, not of the head, but of the hand. 
  They make the benefits of others’ studying,
  Much like the meals of politic Jack-Pudding,
  Whose dish to challenge no man has the courage;
  ’Tis all his own, when once he has spit in the porridge. 40
  But, gentlemen, you’re all concern’d in this;
  You are in fault for what they do amiss: 
  For they their thefts still undiscover’d think,
  And durst not steal unless you please to wink. 
  Perhaps you may award, by your decree,
  They should refund; but that can never be. 
  For should your letters of reprisal seal,
  These men write that which no man else would steal.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 67:  An old play written by one Tomkins, four years, however, after Jonson’s “Alchymist,” and resuscitated in 1668.]

* * * * *

XLVII.

AN EPILOGUE.

  You saw our wife was chaste, yet thoroughly tried,
  And, without doubt, ye are hugely edified;
  For, like our hero, whom we show’d to-day,
  You think no woman true, but in a play. 
  Love once did make a pretty kind of show: 
  Esteem and kindness in one breast would grow: 
  But ’twas Heaven knows how many years ago. 
  Now some small chat, and guinea expectation,
  Gets all the pretty creatures in the nation: 
  In comedy your little selves you meet; 10
  ’Tis Covent Garden drawn in Bridges Street. 
  Smile on our author then, if he has shown
  A jolly nut-brown bastard of your own. 
  Ah! happy you, with ease and with delight,
  Who act those follies, Poets toil to write! 
  The sweating Muse does almost leave the chase;
  She puffs, and hardly keeps your Protean vices pace. 
  Pinch you but in one vice, away you fly
  To some new frisk of contrariety. 
  You roll like snow-balls, gathering as you run, 20
  And get seven devils, when dispossess’d of one. 
  Your Venus once was a Platonic queen;
  Nothing of love beside the face was seen;
  But every inch of her you now uncase,
  And clap a vizard-mask upon the face. 
  For sins like these, the zealous of the land,
  With little hair, and little or no band,
  Declare how circulating pestilences
  Watch, every twenty years, to snap offences.