Go, work, hunt, exercise! (he thus began)'
Then scorn a homely dinner, if you can.
Your wine locked up, your butler strolled abroad,
Or fish denied (the river yet unthawed),

If then plain bread and milk will do the feat,
The pleasure lies in you and not the meat.
Preach as I please, I doubt our curious men
Will choose a pheasant still before a hen;
Yet hens of Guinea full as good I hold,
Except you eat the feathers green and gold.
Of carps and mullets why prefer the great,
(Though cut in pieces ere my lord can eat,)
Yet for small turbots such esteem profess?
Because God made these large, the other less.
Oldfield with more than harpy throat endued,"
Cries, "Send me, gods! a whole hog barbecued!""
Oh, blast it, south-winds! till a stench exhale
Rank as the ripeness of a rabbit's tail.
By what criterion do ye eat, d'ye think,
If this is prized for sweetness, that for stink?
When the tired glutton labours through a treat,
He finds no relish in the sweetest meat;
He calls for something bitter, something sour,
And the rich feast concludes extremely poor:*

Richard Oldfield was after the publication of this Satire, returned M.P. for Windsor by a double return, with Lord Vere Beauclerk, who had vacated on being made a Lord of the Admiralty. In a very full house the

Ministerial member was seated on the 27th of November, 1738.-CROKER. He is mentioned again in Imitations of Horace, Epistle ii. 2, 87.

3 A West Indian term of gluttony; a hog roasted whole, stuffed with spice, and basted with Madeira wine. -POPE.

4 Two miserable lines; which you would hardly match for poverty in

Cheap eggs, and herbs, and olives still we see ;
Thus much is left of old simplicity!

The robin red-breast till of late had rest,
And children sacred held a martin's nest,'

Till beccaficos sold so devilish dear

;

To one that was, or would have been, a peer.
Let me extol a cat, on oysters fed,
I'll have a party at the Bedford-head;"
Or e'en to crack live crawfish recommend
I'd never doubt at court to make a friend.
'Tis yet in vain, I own, to keep a pother
About one vice, and fall into the other :
Between excess and famine lies a mean;

Plain, but not sordid; though not splendid, clean.
Avidien, or his wife (no matter which,'

For him you'll call a dog, and her a bitch,)"

the most arrant of his Dunces. WAKEFIELD.

1 In Halliwell's Popular Rhymes there is the following from Essex :

The robin and the red-breast,
The robin and the wren,
If ye take out o' their nest,
Ye'll never thrive agen!
The robin and the red-breast,

The martin and the swallow,
If ye touch one o' their eggs

Bad luck will sure to follow.

35

40

45

50

It was a tavern in Southampton Street, Covent Garden. Pope mentions it again in the Sober Advice : When sharp with hunger, scorn you to be fed,

Except on pea-chicks at the Bedford Head?

4 Edward Wortley Montagu and his wife, as appears from a letter of Horace Walpole to Sir H. Mann, dated January 27, 1748. "Old Avidien is dead-worth half a mil

And there is another country rhyme : lion," and he explains in a note that

The martin and the swallow Are God Almighty's birds to hollow. in which "to hollow" is believed to be the same as 'to hallow," to hold sacred.

The robin appears to be sometimes eaten. Mr. Hayward, in his Essay on the Art of Dining, quotes from the Almanach des Gourmands: "Cet aimable oiseau se mange à la broche et en salmi."

2 The beccafico is one of the rarest of British birds. It is chiefly found on the coast of Sussex, near Worthing, where fig trees abound.

A famous eating-house.-POPE.

the name refers to the Wortley Montagues. They are satirised for their avarice in several other passages as "Shylock and his wife." See Moral Essays, iii. 94, 115, and First Imitation of Horace, 103.

5 There is no allusion to Avidienus' wife in the original; and Pope's interpolation is gross. He might have learned better of the Tatler, which even in its own light style thought that "the feminine gender of dogs has so harsh a sound that we know not how to name it." Tatler, 68.CROKER.

The point of the couplet, such as it

Sell their presented partridges and fruits,'
And humbly live on rabbits and on roots:

One half-pint bottle serves them both to dine,
And is at once their vinegar and wine.

But on some lucky day (as when they found

A lost bank-bill, or heard their son was drowned),"
At such a feast, old vinegar to spare,

Is what two souls so generous cannot bear :
Oil, though it stink, they drop by drop impart,
But souse the cabbage with a bounteous heart.

He knows to live, who keeps the middle state,
And neither leans on this side nor on that;
Nor stops, for one bad cork, his butler's
pay,
Swears, like Albutius, a good cook away;
Nor lets, like Nævius, every error pass,
The musty wine, foul cloth, or greasy glass.

Now hear what blessings temperance can bring:
(Thus said our friend, and what he said I sing:)
First health the stomach (crammed from every dish,
A tomb of boiled and roast, and flesh and fish,
Where bile, and wind, and phlegm, and acid jar,
And all the man is one intestine war,)
Remembers oft the school-boy's simple fare,
The temperate sleeps, and spirits light as air.
How pale each worshipful and reverend guest
Rise' from a clergy, or a city feast!

is, lies in the fact that Avidienus is said by Horace to have had the nickname of "Canis." Pope suggests that this may be translated so as to apply equally well, though for different reasons, either to Wortley Montagu or to his wife.

1 Compare Imitation of Epistle ii., Book ii. 234:

All Worldly's hens, nay partridge sold to town.

It seems almost too extravagant a

stroke to make Avidien charge his friends for the game which he sent them as presents.

2 Edward Wortley Montagu when a boy ran away to sea three times. It was probably on one of these occasions that the report of his death by drowning reached his parents. See Nichols' Literary Anecdotes, vol. iv. pp. 626-8.

3 A strange instance of false grammar and false English in using rise for rises.-WARTON.

Warton seems to overlook the fact

What life in all that ample body, say?
What heavenly particle inspires the clay?
The soul subsides, and wickedly inclines
To seem but mortal, even in sound divines.1

On morning wings how active springs the mind
That leaves the load of yesterday behind!
How easy every labour it pursues!

How coming to the poet every Muse!

Not but we may exceed, some holy time,'

Or tired in search of truth, or search of rhyme;
Ill health some just indulgence may engage,
And more the sickness of long life, old age:"
For fainting age what cordial drop remains,
If our intemperate youth the vessel drains?

Our fathers praised rank venison. You suppose,
Perhaps, young men! our fathers had no nose.
Not so a buck was then a week's repast,
And 'twas their point, I ween, to make it last;
More pleased to keep it till their friends could come,
Than eat the sweetest by themselves at home.
Why had not I in those good times my birth,
Ere coxcomb-pics or coxcombs were on earth?

4

that Pope meant to indicate two sets of guests, aldermen and clergymen ; "each worshipful and each reverend guest."

Horace was an Epicurean, and laughed at the immortality of the soul. And, therefore, to render the doctrine more ridiculous, he describes that languor of mind proceeding from intemperance, on the idea, and in the terms of Plato: "affigit humo divinæ particulam auræ. To this his ridicule is pointed. Our poet, with more sobriety and judgment, has turned the ridicule from the doctrine which he believed, upon those preachers of it whose feasts and compotations in

taverns did not edify him and so has added surprising humour and spirit to the easy elegance of the original.— WARBURTON.

2 Pope frequently exceeded. Dr. King (Anecdotes, p. 12) after telling a story of him at a dinner at the Earl of Burlington's, says: "Pope's frame of body did not promise long life, but he certainly hastened his death by feeding much on highseasoned dishes, and drinking spirits."

3 This thought is taken from Terence, Phormio, ver. 1, 9. Senectus ipsa est morbus: "Old age is itself a disease."-WAKEFIELD.

4 Cockscombs were an ingredient in

Unworthy he, the voice of fame to hear,
That sweetest music to an honest ear;

(For 'faith, Lord Fanny! you are in the wrong,
The world's good word is better than a song,)'
Who has not learned fresh sturgeon and ham-pie 2
Are no rewards for want and infamy!
When luxury has licked up all thy pelf,
Cursed by thy neighbours, thy trustees, thyself,
To friends, to fortune, to mankind a shame,
Think how posterity will treat thy name;
And buy a rope, that future times may tell
Thou hast at least bestowed one penny well.

66

'Right," cries his Lordship, "for a rogue in need

To have a taste is insolence indeed:

100

105

110

In me 'tis noble, suits my birth and state,

My wealth unwieldy, and my heap too great."
Then, like the sun, let bounty spread her ray,
And shine that superfluity away.'

115

Oh impudence of wealth! with all thy store,
How darest thou let one worthy man be poor?
Shall half the new-built churches round thee fall ?*
Make quays, build bridges, or repair Whitehall:

120

the ham-pies of which Dartineuf was so fond. See Imitation of Satire i. v. 46.

1 He would appear to be quoting some cynical song or saying of Lord Hervey's. Cynicism is a vein which Lord Hervey in his Memoirs loves to display.

2 Compare Imitation of Satire i. ver. 46.

3 The imagery is elegant, and is finely conducted by a continuity of appropriate diction. It proceeds on the modern theory, which also was the doctrine of the Epicureans, that luminous bodies produce their effects by a continual emission of particles

from their surfaces, and of consequence by a shining away or decrease of their quantity. But the praise of originality must be paid to Sheffield, from whose Ode to Brutus our poet seems to have derived it:

But Truth, unveiled, like a bright sun appears,

To shine away this heap of seventeen hundred years.—WAKEFIELD.

4 Compare Moral Essays, iv. 198. He refers to the dangerous state of the churches built in Queen Anne's time, some of which were founded on boggy land, and others were badly executed through the frauds of the contractors.