The lady's pleased, just as she likes her friend.
No song! no dance! no show! he fears you'll say:
You love all naked beauties, but a play.
He much mistakes your methods to delight;
And, like the French, abhors our target-fight:
But those damned dogs can ne'er be in the right.
True English hate your Monsieur's paltry arts,
For you are all silk-weavers in your hearts[1].
Bold Britons, at a brave Bear-Garden fray,
Are roused: And, clattering sticks, cry,--Play, play, play![2]
Meantime, your filthy foreigner will stare,
And mutters to himself,--_Ha! gens barbare!_
And, gad, 'tis well he mutters; well for him;
Our butchers else would tear him limb from limb.
'Tis true, the time may come, your sons may be
Infected with this French civility:
But this, in after ages will be done:
Our poet writes an hundred years too soon.
This age comes on too slow, or he too fast:
And early springs are subject to a blast!
Who would excel, when few can make a test
Betwixt indifferent writing and the best?
For favours, cheap and common, who would strive,
Which, like abandoned prostitutes, you give?
Yet, scattered here and there, I some behold,
Who can discern the tinsel from the gold:
To these he writes; and, if by them allowed,
'Tis their prerogative to rule the crowd.
For he more fears, like a presuming man,
Their votes who cannot judge, than theirs who can.

Footnotes:
1. Enemies, namely, like the English silk-weavers to the manufactures
of France.

2. Alluding to the prize-fighting with broad-swords at the
Bear-Garden: an amusement sufficiently degrading, yet more manly,
and less brutal than that of boxing, as now practised. We have
found, in the lowest deep, a lower still.

* * * * *

ALL FOR LOVE;

OR,

THE WORLD WELL LOST.

A

TRAGEDY.

ALL FOR LOVE.

The prologue to the preceding play has already acquainted us, that
Dryden's taste for Rhyming, or Heroic Plays, was then upon the wane;
and, accordingly "Aureng-Zebe" was the last tragedy which he formed
upon that once admired model. "Henceforth a series of new times
began," for, when given up by the only writer, whose command of
flowing and powerful numbers had re