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Full in the middle way there stood a lake

Which Curll's Corinna 13 chanced that morn to make: (Such was her wont, at early dawn to drop

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Her evening cates before his neighbour's shop)

Here fortuned Curll to slide; loud shout the band,

And Bernard! Bernard! rings through all the Strand.
Obscene with filth the miscreant lies bewray'd,14

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Fallen in the plash his wickedness had laid:
Then first (if poets aught of truth declare)
The caitiff vatici de conceived a prayer.

Hear, Jove! whose name my bards and I adore.

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As much at least as any god's, or more;
And him and his, if more devotion warms,
Down with the Bible, up with the Pope's arms.1

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A place there is, betwixt earth, air, and seas,16
Where, from Ambrosia, Jove retires for ease.
There in his seat two spacious vents appear,
On this he sits, to that he leans his ear,
And hears the various vows of fond mankind;
Some beg an eastern, some a western wind:
All vain petitions, mounting to the sky,
With reams abundant this abode supply;
Amused he reads, and then returns the bills
Sign'd with that ichor which from gods distils.17

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18 [Mrs. Thomas. See Notes.]

14 Though this incident may seem too low and base for the dignity of an Epic poem, the learned very well know it to be but a copy of Homer and Virgil; the very words voos and fimus are used by them, though our poet (in compliance with modern nicety) has remarkably enriched and coloured his language, as well as raised the versification, in this episode, and in the following one of Eliza.

15 The Bible, Curll's sign; the Cross Keys, Lintot's.

16 See Lucian's Icaro-Menippus; where this fiction is more extended :"Orbe locus medio est, inter terrasque, fretumque, Cœlestesque plagas."-Ovid, Met. xii.

17 Alludes to Homer, Iliad v.

ῥέε δ' άμβροτον αἷμα Θέοιο,

Ιχώρ, οἷος πέρ τε ῥέει μακάρεσσι Θεοίσιν.

A stream of nect'rous humour issuing flow'd,

Sanguine, such as celestial sp'rits may bleed."-Milton.

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And ministers to Jove with purest hands.

Forth from the heap she pick'd her votary's prayer,
And placed it next him, a distinction rare!
Oft had the goddess heard her servant's call,
From her black grottos near the Temple-wall,
Listening delighted to the jest unclean
Of link-boys vile, and watermen obscene;
Where as he fish'd her nether realms for wit,
She oft had favour'd him, and favours yet.
Renew'd by ordure's sympathetic force,
As oil'd by magic juices for the course,1
Vigorous he rises; from the effluvia strong
Imbibes new life, and scours and stinks along;
Repasses Lintot, vindicates the race,

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Nor heeds the brown dishonours of his face.20
And now the victor stretch'd his eager hand
Where the tall Nothing stood, or seem'd to stand;
A shapeless shade, it melted from his sight,21
Like forms in clouds, or visions of the night.
To seize his papers, Curll, was next thy care;
His papers light, fly diverse, toss'd in air; 22
Songs, sonnets, epigrams, the winds uplift,
And whisk them back to Evans, Young, and Swift.23
The embroider'd suit at least he deem'd his prey,
That suit an unpaid tailor snatch'd away.

18 The Roman goddess of the common sewers.

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19 Alluding to the opinion that there are ointments used by witches, to enable them to fly in the air, &c.

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Par levibus ventis, volucrique simillima somno."-Virg. Æneid. vi.

"Carmina

turbata volent rapidis ludibria ventis.”—

Virg. Æneid. vi. of the Sibyl's leaves.

28 Some of those persons whose writings, epigrams, or jests he had owned. [Dr. Evans was of St. John's College, Oxford; author of the Apparition, and of an Epistle to Bobart the botanist, entitled Vertumnus. He was a man of remarkable wit and vivacity, and many of his repartees were long remembered and repeated at Oxford. The Apparition was a satire on Tindal. -Warton.]

No rag, no scrap, of all the beau, or wit,
That once so flutter'd, and that once so writ.

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THE STRUGGLE OF THE BOOKSELLERS.

Heaven rings with laughter: of the laughter vain,
Dulness, good queen, repeats the jest again.
Three wicked imps,24 of her own Grub-street choir,
She deck'd like Congreve, Addison, and Prior;
Mears, Warner, Wilkins run: delusive thought!
Breval, Bond, Besaleel, the varlets caught.
Curll stretches after Gay, but Gay is gone,
He grasps an empty Joseph for a John:

So Proteus, hunted in a nobler shape,
Became, when seized, a puppy, or an ape.

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To him the goddess: Son! thy grief lay down,

And turn this whole illusion on the town:

24 [For further notice of these Grub-street "imps," see Notes.]

As the sage dame, experienced in her trade,
By names of toasts retails each batter'd jade;
(Whence hapless Monsieur much complains at Paris
Of wrongs from duchesses and Lady Maries ;) 25
Be thine, my stationer! this magic gift;
Cooke shall be Prior, and Concanen, Swift:
So shall each hostile name become our own,
And we too boast our Garth and Addison.

With that she gave him (piteous of his case,
Yet smiling at his rueful length of face) 26
A shaggy tapestry,27 worthy to be spread
On Codrus' old, or Dunton's modern bed;
Instructive work! whose wry-mouth'd portraiture28
Display'd the fates her confessors endure.

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25 [An allusion to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had some questionable money transactions with M. Ruremonde, a Frenchman, at the time of the South Sea affair, in 1720--21. In the edition of the Dunciad, in Poetical Works, 1735, Pope had the following note on the above couplet. "This passage was thought to allude to a famous lady, who cheated a French wit of £5000 in the South Sea year. But the author meant it in general of all bragging travellers, and of all whores and cheats under the name of ladies." This note was suppressed in the small edition of 1736, and was never again restored by Pope.]

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"Risit pater optimus illi

Me liceat casum misereri insontis amici—

Sic fatus, tergum Gætuli immanæ leonis." &c.-Virg. Æneid. v. 27 A sorry kind of tapestry frequent in old inns, made of worsted or some coarser stuff, like that which is spoken of by Donne, Faces as frightful as theirs who whip Christ in old hangings. The imagery woven in it alludes to the mantle of Cloanthus, in Æneid v.

28 Of Codrus the poet's bed, see Juvenal, describing his poverty very copiously, Sat. iii. ver. 103, &c.

"Codrus had but one bed, so short to boot,

That his short wife's short legs hung dangling out.
His cupboard's head six earthen pitchers graced,
Beneath them was his trusty tankard placed;

And to support this noble plate, there lay
A bending Chiron, cast from honest clay.
His few Greek books a rotten chest contain'd,
Whose covers much of mouldiness complain'd,
Where mice and rats devour'd poetic bread,
And on heroic verse luxuriously were fed.
'Tis true poor Codrus nothing had to boast,

And yet poor Codrus all that nothing lost."-Dryden.

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CURLL TOSSED IN A BLANKET BY THE WESTMINSTER SCHOLARS.

Earless on high, stood unabash'd De Foe,
And Tutchin flagrant from the scourge below.29

But Mr. Concanen, in his dedication of the letters, advertisements, &c., to the author of the Dunciad, assures us, that Juvenal never satirised the poverty of Codrus." John Dunton was a broken bookseller, and abusive scribbler: he wrote Neck or Nothing, a violent satire on some minister of state, a libel on the Duke of Devonshire and the Bishop of Peterborough, &c.

29 John Tutchin, author of some vile verses, and of a weekly paper called The Observator: he was sentenced to be whipped through several towns in the west of England, upon which he petitioned King James 11. to be hanged. When that prince died in exile, he wrote an invective against his memory, occasioned by some humane elegies on his death. He lived to the time of Queen Anne.

[The sentence against Tutchin-passed by the infamous Jeffreys-was imprisonment for seven years, and that he should be flogged through every market town in Dorsetshire, every year. The sentence, as the Clerk of the Arraigns stated in Court, amounted to a whipping once a fortnight for seven years. Tutchin was shortly afterwards seized with the small-pox, and

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