These o’er their proper districts govern,
Of wit and humour judges sovereign. 
In every street a city bard
Rules, like an alderman, his ward;
His undisputed rights extend
Through all the lane, from end to end;
The neighbours round admire his shrewdness
For songs of loyalty and lewdness;
Outdone by none in rhyming well,
Although he never learn’d to spell. 
  Two bordering wits contend for glory;
And one is Whig, and one is Tory: 
And this, for epics claims the bays,
And that, for elegiac lays: 
Some famed for numbers soft and smooth,
By lovers spoke in Punch’s booth;
And some as justly fame extols
For lofty lines in Smithfield drolls. 
Bavius[16] in Wapping gains renown,
And Maevius[16] reigns o’er Kentish town: 
Tigellius[17] placed in Phooebus’ car
From Ludgate shines to Temple-bar: 
Harmonious Cibber entertains
The court with annual birth-day strains;
Whence Gay was banish’d in disgrace;[18]
Where Pope will never show his face;
Where Young must torture his invention
To flatter knaves or lose his pension.[19]
  But these are not a thousandth part
Of jobbers in the poet’s art,
Attending each his proper station,
And all in due subordination,
Through every alley to be found,
In garrets high, or under ground;
And when they join their pericranies,
Out skips a book of miscellanies. 
Hobbes clearly proves, that every creature
Lives in a state of war by nature.[20]
The greater for the smaller watch,
But meddle seldom with their match. 
A whale of moderate size will draw
A shoal of herrings down his maw;
A fox with geese his belly crams;
A wolf destroys a thousand lambs;
But search among the rhyming race,
The brave are worried by the base. 
If on Parnassus’ top you sit,
You rarely bite, are always bit: 
Each poet of inferior size
On you shall rail and criticise,
And strive to tear you limb from limb;
While others do as much for him. 
  The vermin only teaze and pinch
Their foes superior by an inch. 
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ’em,
And so proceed ad infinitum. 
Thus every poet, in his kind,
Is bit by him that comes behind: 
Who, though too little to be seen,
Can teaze, and gall, and give the spleen;
Call dunces, fools, and sons of whores,
Lay Grub Street at each other’s doors;
Extol the Greek and Roman masters,
And curse our modern poetasters;
Complain, as many an ancient bard did,
How genius is no more rewarded;
How wrong a taste prevails among us;
How much our ancestors outsung us: 
Can personate an awkward scorn
For those who are not poets born;
And all their brother dunces lash,
Who crowd the press with hourly trash. 
  O Grub Street! how do I bemoan thee,
Whose graceless children scorn to own thee!