’Tis the sour sauce to the sweet meat, 60
  The fine you pay for being great. 
  Nay, here’s a harder imposition,
  Which is indeed the court’s petition,
  That setting worldly pomp aside,
  Which poet has at font denied,
  You would be pleased in humble way
  To write a trifle call’d a play. 
  This truly is a degradation,
  But would oblige the crown and nation
  Next to your wise negotiation. 70
  If you pretend, as well you may,
  Your high degree, your friends will say,
  The Duke St Aignon made a play. 
  If Gallic wit convince you scarce,
  His Grace of Bucks has made a farce,
  And you, whose comic wit is terse all,
  Can hardly fall below rehearsal. 
  Then finish what you have began;
  But scribble faster, if you can: 
  For yet no George, to our discerning, 80
  Has writ without a ten years’ warning.

* * * * *

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 16:  Written to Etherege, then at Ratisbon, in reply to one from Sir George to the Earl of Middleton, at the Earl’s request.]

* * * * *

EPISTLE VIII.

TO MR SOUTHERNE, ON HIS COMEDY CALLED “THE WIVES’ EXCUSE.”

  Sure there’s a fate in plays, and ’tis in vain
  To write, while these malignant planets reign. 
  Some very foolish influence rules the pit,
  Not always kind to sense, or just to wit: 
  And whilst it lasts, let buffoonry succeed
  To make us laugh; for never was more need. 
  Farce, in itself, is of a nasty scent;
  But the gain smells not of the excrement. 
  The Spanish nymph, a wit and beauty too,
  With all her charms, bore but a single show:  10
  But let a monster Muscovite appear,
  He draws a crowded audience round the year. 
  May be thou hast not pleased the box and pit;
  Yet those who blame thy tale applaud thy wit: 
  So Terence plotted, but so Terence writ. 
  Like his thy thoughts are true, thy language clean
  Even lewdness is made moral in thy scene. 
  The hearers may for want of Nokes repine;
  But rest secure, the readers will be thine. 
  Nor was thy labour’d drama damn’d or hiss’d, 20
  But with a kind civility dismiss’d;
  With such good manners, as the Wife[17] did use,
  Who, not accepting, did but just refuse. 
  There was a glance at parting; such a look,
  As bids thee not give o’er, for one rebuke. 
  But if thou wouldst be seen, as well as read,
  Copy one living author, and one dead: 
  The standard of thy style let Etherege be;
  For wit, the immortal spring of Wycherly: 
  Learn, after both, to draw some just design, 30
  And the next age will learn to copy thine.