And each imprison’d hero quaked for fear. 
  Now from all parts the swelling kennels flow,
And bear their trophies with them as they go: 
Filth of all hues and odour, seem to tell
What street they sail’d from, by their sight and smell. 
They, as each torrent drives with rapid force,
From Smithfield to St. Pulchre’s shape their course,
And in huge confluence join’d at Snowhill ridge,
Fall from the conduit prone to Holborn bridge.[7]
Sweeping from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
Drown’d puppies, stinking sprats, all drench’d in mud,
Dead cats, and turnip-tops, come tumbling down the flood.

[Footnote 1:  Swift was very proud of the “Shower,” and so refers to it in the Journal to Stella.  See “Prose Works,” vol. ii, p. 33:  “They say ’tis the best thing I ever writ, and I think so too.  I suppose the Bishop of Clogher will show it you.  Pray tell me how you like it.”  Again, p. 41:  “there never was such a Shower since Danaee’s,” etc.—­W.  E. B.]

[Footnote 2:  “Aches” is two syllables, but modern printers, who had lost the right pronunciation, have aches as one syllable; and then to complete the metre have foisted in “aches will throb.”  Thus, what the poet and the linguist wish to preserve, is altered and finally lost.  See Disraeli’s “Curiosities of Literature,” vol. i, title “Errata,” p. 81, edit. 1858.  A good example occurs in “Hudibras,” Part III, canto 2, line 407, where persons are mentioned who
  “Can by their Pangs and Aches find
  All turns and changes of the wind.”—­W.  E. B.]

[Footnote 3:  “’Twas doubtful which was sea and which was sky.”  GARTH’S Dispensary.]

[Footnote 4:  Originally thus, but altered when Pope published the
“Miscellanies”: 
  “His only coat, where dust confused with rain,
  Roughens the nap, and leaves a mingled stain.”—­Scott.]

[Footnote 5:  Alluding to the change of ministry at that time.]

[Footnote 6:  Virg., “Aeneid,” lib. ii.—­W.  E. B.]

[Footnote 7:  Fleet Ditch, in which Pope laid the famous diving scene in “The Dunciad”; celebrated also by Gay in his “Trivia.”  There is a view of Fleet Ditch as an illustration to “The Dunciad” in Warburton’s edition of Pope, 8vo, 1751.—­W.  E. B.]

ON THE LITTLE HOUSE BY THE CHURCHYARD OF CASTLENOCK 1710

Whoever pleases to inquire
Why yonder steeple wants a spire,
The grey old fellow, Poet Joe,[1]
The philosophic cause will show. 
Once on a time a western blast,
At least twelve inches overcast,
Reckoning roof, weathercock, and all,
Which came with a prodigious fall;
And, tumbling topsy-turvy round,
Lit with its bottom on the ground: 
For, by the laws of gravitation,
It fell into its proper station. 
  This is the little strutting pile
You see just by the churchyard stile;