[Footnote 1:  See Gulliver’s Travels, “Prose Works,” ii, 40.  Also my “Wit and Wisdom of Lord Chesterfield” and “Life of Lord Chesterfield” for a ballad on the order.—­W.  E. B.]

EPIGRAM ON WOOD’S BRASS MONEY

Carteret was welcomed to the shore
First with the brazen cannon’s roar;
To meet him next the soldier comes,
With brazen trumps and brazen drums;
Approaching near the town he hears
The brazen bells salute his ears: 
But when Wood’s brass began to sound,
Guns, trumpets, drums, and bells, were drown’d.

A SIMILE ON OUR WANT OF SILVER, AND THE ONLY WAY TO REMEDY IT. 1725

As when of old some sorceress threw
O’er the moon’s face a sable hue,
To drive unseen her magic chair,
At midnight, through the darken’d air;
Wise people, who believed with reason
That this eclipse was out of season,
Affirm’d the moon was sick, and fell
To cure her by a counter spell. 
Ten thousand cymbals now begin,
To rend the skies with brazen din;
The cymbals’ rattling sounds dispel
The cloud, and drive the hag to hell. 
The moon, deliver’d from her pain,
Displays her silver face again. 
Note here, that in the chemic style,
The moon is silver all this while. 
  So (if my simile you minded,
Which I confess is too long-winded)
When late a feminine magician,[1]
Join’d with a brazen politician,[2]
Exposed, to blind the nation’s eyes,
A parchment[3] of prodigious size;
Conceal’d behind that ample screen,
There was no silver to be seen. 
But to this parchment let the Drapier
Oppose his counter-charm of paper,
And ring Wood’s copper in our ears
So loud till all the nation hears;
That sound will make the parchment shrivel
And drive the conjurors to the Devil;
And when the sky is grown serene,
Our silver will appear again.

[Footnote 1:  The Duchess of Kendal, who was to have a share of Wood’s profits.—­Scott.]

[Footnote 2:  Sir Robert Walpole, nicknamed Sir Robert Brass, vol. i, p. 219.—­W.  E. B.]

[Footnote 3:  The patent for coining halfpence.]

WOOD AN INSECT. 1725

By long observation I have understood,
That two little vermin are kin to Will Wood. 
The first is an insect they call a wood-louse,
That folds up itself in itself for a house,
As round as a ball, without head, without tail,
Enclosed cap a pie, in a strong coat of mail. 
And thus William Wood to my fancy appears
In fillets of brass roll’d up to his ears;
And over these fillets he wisely has thrown,
To keep out of danger, a doublet of stone.[1]
The louse of the wood for a medicine is used
Or swallow’d alive, or skilfully bruised. 
And, let but our mother Hibernia contrive