[Footnote 1:  “Mingere cum bombis res est saluberrima lumbis.”  A precept to be found in the “Regimen Sanitatis,” or “Schola Salernitana,” a work in rhyming Latin verse composed at Salerno, the earliest school in Christian Europe where medicine was professed, taught, and practised.  The original text, if anywhere, is in the edition published and commented upon by Arnaldus de Villa Nova, about 1480.  Subsequently above one hundred and sixty editions of the “Schola Salernitana” were published, with many additions.  A reprint of the first edition, edited by Sir Alexander Croke, with woodcuts from the editions of 1559, 1568, and 1573, was published at Oxford in 1830.—­W.  E. B.]

APOLLO; OR, A PROBLEM SOLVED 1731

Apollo, god of light and wit,
Could verse inspire, but seldom writ,
Refined all metals with his looks,
As well as chemists by their books;
As handsome as my lady’s page;
Sweet five-and-twenty was his age. 
His wig was made of sunny rays,
He crown’d his youthful head with bays;
Not all the court of Heaven could show
So nice and so complete a beau. 
No heir upon his first appearance,
With twenty thousand pounds a-year rents,
E’er drove, before he sold his land,
So fine a coach along the Strand;
The spokes, we are by Ovid told,
Were silver, and the axle gold: 
I own, ’twas but a coach-and-four,
For Jupiter allows no more. 
  Yet, with his beauty, wealth, and parts,
Enough to win ten thousand hearts,
No vulgar deity above
Was so unfortunate in love. 
  Three weighty causes were assign’d,
That moved the nymphs to be unkind. 
Nine Muses always waiting round him,
He left them virgins as he found them. 
His singing was another fault;
For he could reach to B in alt: 
And, by the sentiments of Pliny,[1]
Such singers are like Nicolini. 
At last, the point was fully clear’d;
In short, Apollo had no beard.

[Footnote 1:  “Bubus tantum feminis vox gravior, in alio omni genere exilior quam maribus, in homine etiam castratis.”—­“Hist.  Nat.,” xi, 51.  “A condicione castrati seminis quae spadonia appellant Belgae,” ib. xv.—­W.  E. B.]

THE PLACE OF THE DAMNED 1731

All folks who pretend to religion and grace,
Allow there’s a HELL, but dispute of the place: 
But, if HELL may by logical rules be defined
The place of the damn’d—­I’ll tell you my mind. 
Wherever the damn’d do chiefly abound,
Most certainly there is HELL to be found: 
Damn’d poets, damn’d critics, damn’d blockheads, damn’d knaves,
Damn’d senators bribed, damn’d prostitute slaves;
Damn’d lawyers and judges, damn’d lords and damn’d squires;
Damn’d spies and informers, damn’d friends and damn’d liars;
Damn’d villains, corrupted in every station;
Damn’d time-serving priests all over the nation;
And into the bargain I’ll readily give you
Damn’d ignorant prelates, and counsellors privy. 
Then let us no longer by parsons be flamm’d,
For we know by these marks the place of the damn’d: 
And HELL to be sure is at Paris or Rome. 
How happy for us that it is not at home!