WRITTEN AT LONDON

By poets we are well assured
That love, alas! can ne’er be cured;
A complicated heap of ills,
Despising boluses and pills. 
Ah!  Chloe, this I find is true,
Since first I gave my heart to you. 
Now, by your cruelty hard bound,
I strain my guts, my colon wound. 
Now jealousy my grumbling tripes
Assaults with grating, grinding gripes. 
When pity in those eyes I view,
My bowels wambling make me spew. 
When I an amorous kiss design’d,
I belch’d a hurricane of wind. 
Once you a gentle sigh let fall;
Remember how I suck’d it all;
What colic pangs from thence I felt,
Had you but known, your heart would melt,
Like ruffling winds in cavern pent,
Till Nature pointed out a vent. 
How have you torn my heart to pieces
With maggots, humours, and caprices! 
By which I got the hemorrhoids;
And loathsome worms my anus voids. 
Whene’er I hear a rival named,
I feel my body all inflamed;
Which, breaking out in boils and blains,
With yellow filth my linen stains;
Or, parch’d with unextinguish’d thirst,
Small-beer I guzzle till I burst;
And then I drag a bloated corpus,
Swell’d with a dropsy, like a porpus;
When, if I cannot purge or stale,
I must be tapp’d to fill a pail.

[Footnote 1:  The Dean of St. Paul’s, father to the Bishop.—­H.]

BOUTS RIMEZ[1]

ON SIGNORA DOMITILLA

Our schoolmaster may roar i’ th’ fit,
  Of classic beauty, haec et illa;
Not all his birch inspires such wit
  As th’ogling beams of Domitilla.

Let nobles toast, in bright champaign,
  Nymphs higher born than Domitilla;
I’ll drink her health, again, again,
  In Berkeley’s tar,[2] or sars’parilla.

At Goodman’s Fields I’ve much admired
  The postures strange of Monsieur Brilla;
But what are they to the soft step,
  The gliding air of Domitilla?

Virgil has eternized in song
  The flying footsteps of Camilla;[3]
Sure, as a prophet, he was wrong;
  He might have dream’d of Domitilla.

Great Theodose condemn’d a town
  For thinking ill of his Placilla:[4]
And deuce take London! if some knight
  O’ th’ city wed not Domitilla.

Wheeler,[5] Sir George, in travels wise,
  Gives us a medal of Plantilla;
But O! the empress has not eyes,
  Nor lips, nor breast, like Domitilla.

Not all the wealth of plunder’d Italy,
  Piled on the mules of king At-tila,
Is worth one glove (I’ll not tell a bit a lie)
  Or garter, snatch’d from Domitilla.

Five years a nymph at certain hamlet,
  Y-cleped Harrow of the Hill, a-
—­bused much my heart, and was a damn’d let
  To verse—­but now for Domitilla.

Dan Pope consigns Belinda’s watch
  To the fair sylphid Momentilla,[6]
And thus I offer up my catch
  To the snow-white hands of Domitilla.