Your secret kept, your poem sunk,
And sent in quires to line a trunk,
If still you be disposed to rhyme,
Go try your hand a second time. 
Again you fail:  yet Safe’s the word;
Take courage and attempt a third. 
But first with care employ your thoughts
Where critics mark’d your former faults;
The trivial turns, the borrow’d wit,
The similes that nothing fit;
The cant which every fool repeats,
Town jests and coffeehouse conceits,
Descriptions tedious, flat, and dry,
And introduced the Lord knows why: 
Or where we find your fury set
Against the harmless alphabet;
On A’s and B’s your malice vent,
While readers wonder whom you meant: 
A public or a private robber,
A statesman, or a South Sea jobber;
A prelate, who no God believes;
A parliament, or den of thieves;
A pickpurse at the bar or bench,
A duchess, or a suburb wench: 
Or oft, when epithets you link,
In gaping lines to fill a chink;
Like stepping-stones, to save a stride,
In streets where kennels are too wide;
Or like a heel-piece, to support
A cripple with one foot too short;
Or like a bridge, that joins a marish
To moorlands of a different parish. 
So have I seen ill-coupled hounds
Drag different ways in miry grounds. 
So geographers, in Afric maps,
With savage pictures fill their gaps,
And o’er unhabitable downs
Place elephants for want of towns. 
  But, though you miss your third essay,
You need not throw your pen away. 
Lay now aside all thoughts of fame,
To spring more profitable game. 
From party merit seek support;
The vilest verse thrives best at court. 
And may you ever have the luck
To rhyme almost as ill as Duck;[6]
And, though you never learn’d to scan verse
Come out with some lampoon on D’Anvers. 
A pamphlet in Sir Bob’s defence
Will never fail to bring in pence: 
Nor be concern’d about the sale,
He pays his workmen on the nail.[7]
Display the blessings of the nation,
And praise the whole administration. 
Extol the bench of bishops round,
Who at them rail, bid ——­ confound;
To bishop-haters answer thus: 
(The only logic used by us)
What though they don’t believe in ——­
Deny them Protestants—­thou lyest. 
  A prince, the moment he is crown’d,
Inherits every virtue round,
As emblems of the sovereign power,
Like other baubles in the Tower;
Is generous, valiant, just, and wise,
And so continues till he dies: 
His humble senate this professes,
In all their speeches, votes, addresses. 
But once you fix him in a tomb,
His virtues fade, his vices bloom;
And each perfection, wrong imputed,
Is fully at his death confuted. 
The loads of poems in his praise,
Ascending, make one funeral blaze: 
His panegyrics then are ceased,
He grows a tyrant, dunce, or beast. 
As soon as you can hear his knell,