OFT has our poet wifh'd, this happy feat He fought for quiet, and content of mind; 5 And only in the shades like laurels grow. show, Your peace to value more, and better know? "Tis all we can return for favours paft, Whofe holy memory fhall ever last, 10 For patronage from him whofe care prefides 15 Bathurst, a name the learn'd with reverence know, And scarcely more to his own Virgil owe; In yours, as dwelt in the firft Grecian breafts, As, had there been no laws, we need not fear, 30 PROLOGUE TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. DISCORD and plots, which have undone our age, With the fame ruin have o'erwhelm'd the stage. Our house has fuffer'd in the common woe, We have been troubled with Scotch rebels too. Our brethren are from Thames to Tweed departed, 5 And of our fifters, all the kinder-hearted, One nymph, to whom fat Sir John Falstaff's lean, 10 There with her fingle perfon fills the scene. 15 Tack but a copper-lace to drugget fuit, It might perhaps a new rebellion bring; 20 The Scot, who wore it, would be chosen king. Such as, 30 like Cain, were branded with dif grace, And had their country ftamp'd upon their face. When strollers durft presume to pick your purse, We humbly thought our broken troop not worfe, How ill foe'er our action may deferve, Oxford's a place where wit can never starve, 35 PROLOGUE TO THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD. THOUGH actors cannot much of learning boaft, Of all who want it, we admire it most: ༔ We fpeak our poet's wit, and trade in ore, Ver. 8. why, our poems take :] The pleasure properly to be expected from a good tragedy is "the pleasure that arifes from pity and terror." Has Pope in the first lines of his famous prologue to Cato touched on this pleafure? or made this the effential bufinefs of tragedy? It is obfervable that in Greece the Drama was perfected in half a century; in Europe it took up 400 years to bring it to any perfection. Ariftotle in the poetics, complains of the effeminacy of the Athenian tafte, in forcing their poets to foften fome of their most striking catastrophes, and diminishing the terror and To Bepov of their pieces. In the Trachiniæ of Sophocles, Deianira utters a fentiment that was Solon's years before Solon lived. Sophocles alfo ufes the word ne, long before it was framed at Athens. But the defcription of the chariot race at the Ifthmian games is the greatest anachronism. Dr. J. WARTON. |