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| HOW wisdom and Folly meet, mix, and unite, | |
| How Virtue and Vice blend their black and their white, | |
| How Genius, th’ illustrious father of fiction, | |
| Confounds rule and law, reconciles contradiction, | |
| I sing: If these mortals, the critics, should bustle, | 5 |
| I care not, not I—let the Critics go whistle! | |
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| But now for a Patron whose name and whose glory, | |
| At once may illustrate and honour my story. | |
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| Thou first of our orators, first of our wits; | |
| Yet whose parts and acquirements seem just lucky hits; | 10 |
| With knowledge so vast, and with judgment so strong, | |
| No man with the half of ’em e’er could go wrong; | |
| With passions so potent, and fancies so bright, | |
| No man with the half of ’em e’er could go right; | |
| A sorry, poor, misbegot son of the Muses, | 15 |
| For using thy name, offers fifty excuses. | |
| Good L—d, what is Man! for as simple he looks, | |
| Do but try to develop his hooks and his crooks; | |
| With his depths and his shallows, his good and his evil, | |
| All in all he’s a problem must puzzle the devil. | 20 |
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| On his one ruling passion Sir Pope hugely labours, | |
| That, like th’ old Hebrew walking-switch, eats up its neighbours: | |
| Mankind are his show-box—a friend, would you know him? | |
| Pull the string, Ruling Passion the picture will show him, | |
| What pity, in rearing so beauteous a system, | 25 |
| One trifling particular, Truth, should have miss’d him; | |
| For, spite of his fine theoretic positions, | |
| Mankind is a science defies definitions. | |
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| Some sort all our qualities each to its tribe, | |
| And think human nature they truly describe; | 30 |
| Have you found this, or t’other? There’s more in the wind; | |
| As by one drunken fellow his comrades you’ll find. | |
| But such is the flaw, or the depth of the plan, | |
| In the make of that wonderful creature called Man, | |
| No two virtues, whatever relation they claim. | 35 |
| Nor even two different shades of the same, | |
| Though like as was ever twin brother to brother, | |
| Possessing the one shall imply you’ve the other. | |
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| But truce with abstraction, and truce with a Muse | |
| Whose rhymes you’ll perhaps, Sir, ne’er deign to peruse: | 40 |
| Will you leave your justings, your jars, and your quarrels, | |
| Contending with Billy for proud-nodding laurels? | |
| My much-honour’d Patron, believe your poor poet, | |
| Your courage, much more than your prudence, you show it: | |
| In vain with Squire Billy for laurels you struggle: | 45 |
| He’ll have them by fair trade, if not, he will smuggle: | |
| Not cabinets even of kings would conceal ’em, | |
| He’d up the back stairs, and by G—, he would steal ’em, | |
| Then feats like Squire Billy’s you ne’er can achieve ’em; | |
| It is not, out-do him—the task is, out-thieve him! | 50 |
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