How many blotted lines; I know it,
You’d have compassion for the poet. 
  Now, to describe the way I think,
I take in hand my pen and ink;
I rub my forehead, scratch my head,
Revolving all the rhymes I read. 
Each complimental thought sublime,
Reduced by favourite Pope to rhyme,
And those by you to Oxford writ,
With true simplicity and wit. 
Yet after all I cannot find
One panegyric to my mind. 
Now I begin to fret and blot,
Something I schemed, but quite forgot;
My fancy turns a thousand ways,
Through all the several forms of praise,
What eulogy may best become
The greatest dean in Christendom. 
At last I’ve hit upon a thought——­
Sure this will do——­ ’tis good for nought——­
This line I peevishly erase,
And choose another in its place;
Again I try, again commence,
But cannot well express the sense;
The line’s too short to hold my meaning: 
I’m cramp’d, and cannot bring the Dean in. 
O for a rhyme to glorious birth! 
I’ve hit upon’t——­The rhyme is earth——­
But how to bring it in, or fit it,
I know not, so I’m forced to quit it. 
  Again I try—­I’ll sing the man—­
Ay do, says Phoebus, if you can;
I wish with all my heart you would not;
Were Horace now alive he could not: 
And will you venture to pursue,
What none alive or dead could do? 
Pray see, did ever Pope or Gay
Presume to write on his birth-day;
Though both were fav’rite bards of mine,
The task they wisely both decline. 
  With grief I felt his admonition,
And much lamented my condition: 
Because I could not be content
Without some grateful compliment,
If not the poet, sure the friend
Must something on your birth-day send. 
  I scratch’d, and rubb’d my head once more: 
“Let every patriot him adore.” 
Alack-a-day, there’s nothing in’t—­
Such stuff will never do in print. 
  Pray, reader, ponder well the sequel;
I hope this epigram will take well. 
  In others, life is deem’d a vapour,
In Swift it is a lasting taper,
Whose blaze continually refines,
The more it burns the more it shines. 
  I read this epigram again,
’Tis much too flat to fit the Dean. 
  Then down I lay some scheme to dream on
Assisted by some friendly demon. 
I slept, and dream’d that I should meet
A birth-day poem in the street;
So, after all my care and rout,
You see, dear Dean, my dream is out.

EPIGRAMS
OCCASIONED BY DR. SWIFT’S INTENDED HOSPITAL
FOR IDIOTS AND LUNATICS

I

The Dean must die—­our idiots to maintain! 
Perish, ye idiots! and long live the Dean!

II