His voice is quite untrained, but still, I think,
You’ll like his singing, as you sit and drink. 
Excuse professions; they’re but stale affairs,
Which chapmen use for getting off their waves. 
I’m quite indifferent if you buy or no: 
Though I’m but poor, there’s nothing that I owe. 
No dealer’d use you thus; nay, truth to tell,
I don’t treat all my customers so well. 
He loitered once, and fearing whipping, did
As boys will do, sneaked to the stairs and hid. 
So, if this running off be not a, vice
Too bad to pardon, let me have my price.” 
The man would get his money, I should say,
Without a risk of having to repay. 
You make the bargain knowing of the flaw;
’Twere mere vexatiousness to take the law.

’Tis so with me; before you left, I said
That correspondence was my rock ahead,
Lest, when you found that ne’er an answer came
To all your letters, you should call it shame. 
But where’s my vantage if you won’t agree
To go by law, because the law’s with me? 
Nay more, you say I’m faithless to my vow
In sending you no verses.  Listen now: 

A soldier of Lucullus’s, they say,
Worn out at night by marching all the day,
Lay down to sleep, and, while at ease he snored,
Lost to a farthing all his little hoard. 
This woke the wolf in him;—­’tis strange how keen
The teeth will grow with but the tongue between;—­
Mad with the foe and with himself, off-hand
He stormed a treasure-city, walled and manned,
Destroys the garrison, becomes renowned,
Gets decorations and two hundred pound. 
Soon after this the general had in view
To take some fortress, where I never knew;
He singles out our friend, and makes a speech
That e’en might drive a coward to the breach: 
“Go, my fine fellow! go where valour calls! 
There’s fame and money too inside those walls.” 
“I’m not your man,” returned the rustic wit: 
“He makes a hero who has lost his kit.”

At Rome I had my schooling, and was taught
Achilles’ wrath, and all the woes it brought;
At classic Athens, where I went erelong,
I learnt to draw the line ’twixt right and wrong,
And search for truth, if so she might be seen,
In academic groves of blissful green;
But soon the stress of civil strife removed
My adolescence from the scenes it loved,
And ranged me with a force that could not stand
Before the might of Caesar’s conquering hand. 
Then when Philippi turned me all adrift
A poor plucked fledgeling, for myself to shift,
Bereft of property, impaired in purse,
Sheer penury drove me into scribbling verse: 
But now, when times are altered, having got
Enough, thank heaven, at least to boil my pot,
I were the veriest madman if I chose
To write a poem rather than to doze.