Nay, ’tis clear
That your Damon there’s fond of a flea in his ear,
And, if no one else furnished them gratis, on tick
He would buy some himself, just to hear the old click;
Why, I honestly think, if some fool in Japan
Should turn up his nose at the “Poems on Man,”
(Which contain many verses as fine, by the bye,
As any that lately came under my eye,)
Your friend there by some inward instinct would know it,
Would get it translated, reprinted, and show it;
As a man might take off a high stock to exhibit 440
The autograph round his own neck of the gibbet;
Nor would let it rest so, but fire column after column,
Signed Cato, or Brutus, or something as solemn,
By way of displaying his critical crosses,
And tweaking that poor transatlantic proboscis,
His broadsides resulting (this last there’s no doubt of)
In successively sinking the craft they’re fired out of. 
Now nobody knows when an author is hit,
If he have not a public hysterical fit;
Let him only keep close in his snug garret’s dim ether, 450
And nobody’d think of his foes—­or of him either;
If an author have any least fibre of worth in him,
Abuse would but tickle the organ of mirth in him;
All the critics on earth cannot crush with their ban
One word that’s in tune with the nature of man.’

’Well, perhaps so; meanwhile I have brought you a book,
Into which if you’ll just have the goodness to look,
You may feel so delighted (when once you are through it)
As to deem it not unworth your while to review it,
And I think I can promise your thoughts, if you do, 460
A place in the next Democratic Review.’

’The most thankless of gods you must surely have thought me,
For this is the forty-fourth copy you’ve brought me;
I have given them away, or at least I have tried,
But I’ve forty-two left, standing all side by side
(The man who accepted that one copy died),—­
From one end of a shelf to the other they reach,
“With the author’s respects” neatly written in each. 
The publisher, sure, will proclaim a Te Deum,
When he hears of that order the British Museum 470
Has sent for one set of what books were first printed
In America, little or big,—­for ’tis hinted
That this is the first truly tangible hope he
Has ever had raised for the sale of a copy. 
I’ve thought very often ’twould be a good thing
In all public collections of books, if a wing
Were set off by itself, like the seas from the dry lands,
Marked Literature suited to desolate islands,
And filled with such books as could never be read
Save by readers of proofs, forced to do it for bread,—­ 480
Such books as one’s wrecked on in small country taverns,
Such as hermits might mortify over in caverns,
Such as Satan, if printing had then been invented,
As the climax of woe, would to Job have presented.