y wits.

Your delicate bits will not serve me a meal,
But my master each day gives me bread;
You'll fly, when you get what you came here to steal,
And I must be hang'd in your stead.

The stockjobber thus from 'Change Alley goes down,
And tips you the freeman a wink;
Let me have but your vote to serve for the town,
And here is a guinea to drink.

Says the freeman, your guinea to-night would be spent!
Your offers of bribery cease:
I'll vote for my landlord to whom I pay rent,
Or else I may forfeit my lease.

From London they come, silly people to chouse,
Their lands and their faces unknown:
Who'd vote a rogue into the parliament-house,
That would turn a man out of his own?

A DIALOGUE[1] BETWEEN MAD MULLINIX AND TIMOTHY
1728

_M_.
I own, 'tis not my bread and butter,
But prithee, Tim, why all this clutter?
Why ever in these raging fits,
Damning to hell the Jacobites?
When if you search the kingdom round,
There's hardly twenty to be found;
No, not among the priests and friars----
_T_. 'Twixt you and me, G--d d--n the liars!
_M_. The Tories are gone every man over
To our illustrious house of Hanover;
From all their conduct this is plain;
And then----
_T_. G--d d--n the liars again!
Did not an earl but lately vote,
To bring in (I could cut his throat)
Our whole accounts of public debts?
_M_. Lord, how this frothy coxcomb frets! [_Aside._
_T_. Did not an able statesman bishop
This dangerous horrid motion dish up
As Popish craft? did he not rail on't?
Show fire and fagot in the tail on't?
Proving the earl a grand offender;
And in a plot for the Pretender;
Whose fleet, 'tis all our friends' opinion,
Was then embarking at Avignon?
_M_. These wrangling jars of Whig and Tory,
Are stale and worn as Troy-town story:
The wrong, 'tis certain, you were both in,
And now you find you fought for nothing.
Your faction, when their game was new,
Might want such noisy fools as you;
But you, when all the show is past,
Resolve to stand it out the last;
Like Martin Marall,[2] gaping on,
Not minding when the song is done.
When all the bees are gone to settle,
You clatter still your brazen kettle.
The leaders whom you listed under,
Have dropt their arms, and seized the plunder;
And when the war is past, you come
To rattle in their ears your drum:
And as that hateful hideous Grecian,
Thersites,[3] (he was your relation,)
Was more abhorr'd and scorn'd by those
With whom he served, tha