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""Tis all the aid my present power supplies:
No court informer can these arms accuse;
These arms may sons against their fathers use.
And 'tis my wish, the next successor's reign
May make no other Israelite complain."
Youth, beauty, graceful action seldom fail;
But common interest always will prevail;
And pity never ceases to be shown

To him who makes the people's wrongs his own.
The crowd that still believe their kings oppress,
With lifted hands their young Messiah bless:
Who now begins his progress to ordain

With chariots, horsemen, and a numerous train;
From east to west his glories he displays,
And, like the sun, the promised land surveys.
Fame runs before him as the morning star,
And shouts of joy salute him from afar;
Each house receives him as a guardian god,
And consecrates the place of his abode.
But hospitable treats did most commend
Wise Issachar, his wealthy western friend.1
This moving court that courts the people's eyes,
And seemed but pomp, did other ends disguise;
Achitophel had formed it, with intent
To sound the depths, and fathom, where it went,
The people's hearts, distinguish friends from foes;
And try their strength before they came to blows.
Yet all was coloured with a smooth pretence
Of specious love, and duty to their prince.
Religion, and redress of grievances

(Two names that always cheat, and always please),
Are often urged; and good King David's life
Endangered by a brother and a wife.

After comment upon the political situation, Dryden goes on with sketches of the friends of David. Barzillai, who stands first, was the old Duke of Ormond, in 1681 Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, as he had been before the Civil War in Charles I.'s reign.

Now what relief can righteous David bring;
How fatal 'tis to be too good a king!
Friends he has few, so high the madness grows;
Who dare be such must be the people's foes.
Yet some there were, e'en in the worst of days;
Some let me name, and naming is to praise.
In this short file Barzillai first appears;
Barzillai, crowned with honour and with years.
Long since the rising rebels he withstood
In regions waste beyond the Jordan's flood:
Unfortunately brave to buoy the state;
But sinking underneath his master's fate:
In exile with his godlike prince he mourned;
For him he suffered, and with him returned.
The court he practised, not the courtier's art:
Large was his wealth, but larger was his heart,
Which well the noblest objects knew to choose,
The fighting warrior, and recording muse.

There follows a lament for the death of the duke's son skilfully woven into the main theme of the poem; then Zadoc, William Sancroft, Archbishop of Canterbury,

1 Mr. Thomas Thynne, of Longleate Hall.

-whom, shunning power and place, His lowly mind advanced to David's grace;

and others-Henry Compton, Bishop of London; John Dolben, Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster; John Sheffield, Earl of Mulgrave; George Savile, Marquis of Halifax; Viscount Hyde.

These were the chief, a small but faithful band
Of worthies, in the breach who dared to stand,
And tempt the united fury of the land.
With grief they viewed such powerful engines bent,
To batter down the lawful government.

A numerous faction, with pretended frights,
In Sanhedrims to plume the regal rights;
The true successor from the court removed;
The plot, by hireling witnesses, improved.
These ills they saw, and, as their duty bound,
They showed the king the danger of the wound;
That no concessions from the throne would please,
But lenitives fomented the disease:

That Absalom, ambitious of the crown,
Was made the lure to draw the people down :
That false Achitophel's pernicious hate
Had turned the plot to ruin church and state:
The council violent, the rabble worse;
That Shimei taught Jerusalem to curse.

With all these loads of injuries opprest,
And long revolving in his careful breast
The event of things, at last, his patience tired,
Thus, from his royal throne, by Heaven inspired,
The godlike David spoke; with awful fear
His train their Maker in the master hear.

"Thus long have I, by native mercy swayed,
My wrongs dissembled, my revenge delayed;
So willing to forgive the offending age;
So much the father did the king assuage.
But now so far my clemency they slight,
The offenders question my forgiving right,
That one was made for many, they contend;
But 'tis to rule; for that's a monarch's end.
They call my tenderness of blood, my fear;
Though manly tempers can the longest bear.
Yet since they will divert my native course,
'Tis time to show I am not good by force.
Those heaped affronts, that haughty subjects bring,
Are burdens for a camel, not a king.
Kings are the public pillars of the state,
Born to sustain and prop the nation's weight:

[ If my young Samson will pretend a call
To shake the column, let him share the fall:
But oh, that yet he would repent and live!
How easy 'tis for parents to forgive!]
With how few tears a pardon might be won
From nature, pleading for a darling son!
Poor, pitied youth, by my paternal care

Raised up to all the height his frame could bear!
Had God ordained his fate for empire born,
He would have given his soul another turn:
Gulled with a patriot's name, whose modern sense
Is one that would by law supplant his prince;
The people's brave, the politician's tool;
Never was patriot yet, but was a fool.

2 The lines between square brackets [ ] were added in the second edition.

Whence comes it, that religion and the laws
Should more be Absalom's than David's cause?
His old instructor, ere he lost his place,
Was never thought indued with so much grace.
Good heavens, how faction can a patriot paint!
My rebel ever proves my people's saint.
Would they impose an heir upon the throne?
Let Sanhedrims be taught to give their own.
A king's at least a part of government;
And mine as requisite as their consent:
Without my leave a future king to choose,
Infers a right the present to depose.

True, they petition me to approve their choice:
But Esau's hands suit ill with Jacob's voice.
My pious subjects for my safety pray;
Which to secure, they take my power away.
From plots and treasons Heaven preserve my years,
But save me most from my petitioners!
Unsatiate as the barren womb, or grave;
God cannot grant so much as they can crave.
What then is left, but with a jealous eye
To guard the small remains of royalty?
The law shall still direct my peaceful sway
And the same law teach rebels to obey:
Votes shall no more established power control,-
Such votes, as make a part exceed the whole.
No groundless clamours shall my friends remove,
Nor crowds have power to punish ere they prove;
For gods, and godlike kings, their care express,
Still to defend their servants in distress.
Oh, that my power to saving were confined!
Why am I forced, like Heaven, against my mind
To make examples of another kind?

Must I at length the sword of justice draw?

Oh, curst effects of necessary law!

How ill my fear they by my mercy scan!
Beware the fury of a patient man.

Law they require; let Law then show her face.
They could not be content to look on Grace
Her hinder parts, but with a daring eye
To tempt the terror of her front, and die.
By their own arts 'tis righteously decreed
Those dire artificers of death shall bleed.
Against themselves their witnesses will swear,
Till, viper-like, their mother-plot they tear,
And suck for nutriment that bloody gore,
Which was their principle of life before.
Their Belial with their Beelzebub will fight,
Thus on my foes, my foes shall do me right.
Nor doubt the event; for factious crowds engage
In their first onset all their brutal rage.
Then let them take an unresisted course;
Retire, and traverse, and delude their force.
But when they stand all breathless, urge the fight,
And rise upon them with redoubled might:
For lawful power is still superior found;
When long driven back at length it stands the ground."
He said the Almighty, nodding, gave consent;
And peals of thunder shook the firmament.
Henceforth a series of new time began,
The mighty years in long procession ran;
Once more the godlike David was restored,

And willing nations knew their lawful lord.

So ends the pleading; the speech given to David in the poem being based upon passages in a speech really made by the king at Oxford.

CHAPTER XVI.

GARTH'S "DISPENSARY," JOHN PHILIPS'S "CYDER," AND POPE'S "RAPE OF THE LOCK."

AT the time of the English Revolution, French influence upon English literature was fully established, and the beginning of the reaction of our higher intellect against it, though not slow in coming, was to come. There were some gains to set against loss by the predominance of a new critical influence which submitted past extravagances to a discipline of good sense. This was sound enough in some respects, in other respects unsound, because it was, in most cases, the good sense of men essentially unpoetical. Course of events and change of times produced the new conditions. The genius shown in France by Boileau when he began to wage a war in rhyme on behalf of good sense, and against extravagance of the Italian influence in its decay, was itself only the chief intellectual expression of the movement of thought in his day. But the genius of Boileau bred a host of petty imitators, who applied his principles without discretion, and set up as a servile herd of imitators of the great critical master. Men prosed about rhyme and rhymed about prose; adored Virgil and the Latins of the Augustan age; tried to write, like Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics; followed Horace, or Boileau his follower, with Satires or Arts of Poetry. Boileau had written a mockheroic, "Le Lutrin," therefore it was in the fashion to write mock-heroics. For a time poets cared less to think deeply of the essentials of life than to write wittily upon its accidents. The deeper tone begins to be heard again in the reign of George II.; but in 1699, one of the best poems of its day was Dr. Garth's "Dispensary," and in 1712, or, as reproduced in its present form in 1714, there was nothing so good as the daintiest of mock-heroics, Pope's 'Rape of the Lock." Pope was a greater poet than even Boileau, but he was trained in Boileau's school, and the "Rape of the Lock," as well as the "Dispensary," is one of the small family of poems of which Boileau's "Lutrin" was the father.

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Samuel

First, there is Garth's "Dispensary." Garth was born in the year of the Restoration, when in this country the flowing in of the tide of French influence began. He graduated at Cambridge as a physician, and became, at the age of 33, a Fellow of the College of Physicians. He was then a fashionable London doctor. He was known for a rare union of good-nature with wit. One day, when his carriage was stopped by the crowd gathered about two women fighting in Covent Garden, a poor old woman, taking advantage of the pause, hobbled up to him out of her cellar, and asked him, while he was kept waiting, to see her sick husband. She made bold, she said, because she had heard that he was "a cute doctor and a sweet-tempered gentleman.” He went down into the cellar, saw that hunger was the cause of broken health, and, by way of prescription, wrote an order on his banker for ten pounds. Garth was convivial, too. Once in the Kit Kat Club, of which he was a member, he declared that he must leave, for he had many patients still to visit. Good

wine and good company detained him nevertheless; and when Steele reminded him presently of his patients, he took out the list, looked through it, and said, "It's no great matter whether I see them tonight or not. There are fifteen. Nine have such bad constitutions that all the physicians in the world can't cure them, and the other six have such good constitutions that all the physicians in the world can't kill them." The permanent record of Garth's wit is in his poem, "The Dispensary," published in 1699. The College of Physicians had required its members to give unpaid help to the poor. The expense of medicines interfered with the beneficent working of this plan. Therefore the Physicians

SAMUEL GARTH.

From the Portrait Engraved for his "Dispensary."

set up, in 1696, a Dispensary within their College, maintained by a subscription amongst themselves. Here the gratuitous prescriptions were made up at a charge limited to the first cost of the drugs used. This touched the pockets of the Apothecaries, and a lively quarrel over the "Dispensary" between the Physicians and Apothecaries was satired by Garth's poem. Garth's poem was avowedly an imitation of "Le Lutrin," published five-and-twenty years earlier (in 1674) by Boileau as a mock-heroic satire on a dispute over the position of a pulpit in the Sainte Chapelle at Paris. Dr. Samuel Garth was not knighted until the accession of George I. He died in 1719.

THE DISPENSARY

is in six cantos. The First Canto opens with Invocation, and a picture of the College of Physicians in Warwick Lane as a place which the God of Sloth had chosen for his home. Then comes unwonted activity, when the Dispensary is being formed within the College.

As at full length the pampered monarch lay
Battening in ease and slumbering life away,

A spiteful noise his downy chains unties, Hastes forward, and increases as it flies.

First, some to cleave the stubborn flint engage, Till urged by blows, it sparkles into rage, Some temper lute, some spacious vessels move; These furnaces erect, and those approve. Here phials in nice discipline are set; There gallipots are ranged in alphabet. In this place, magazines of pills you spy; In that, like forage, herbs in bundles lie. While lifted pestles brandished in the air Descend in peals, and civil wars declare. Loud strokes, with pounding spice, the fabric rend, And aromatic clouds in spires ascend.

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So when the Cyclops o'er their anvils sweat, And swelling sinews echoing blows repeat; From the volcanoes gross eruptions rise, And curling sheets of smoke obscure the skies.

The slumbering god amazed at this new din, Thrice strove to rise, and thrice sunk down again. Listless he stretched, and gaping rubbed his eyes, Then faltered thus betwixt half words and sighs:

"How impotent a deity am I!

With god-head born, but cursed, that cannot die!
Through my indulgence, mortals hourly share
A grateful negligence, and ease from care.
Lulled in my arms, how long have I withheld
The Northern monarchs from the dusty field.
How have I kept the British fleet at ease
From tempting the rough dangers of the seas.
Hibernia owns the mildness of my reign,

And my divinity's adored in Spain.

I swains to sylvan solitudes convey,

Where stretched on mossy beds, they waste away,

In gentle joys the night, in vows the day.
What marks of wondrous clemency I have shown,
Some reverend worthies of the gown can own.
Triumphant plenty, with a cheerful grace,
Basks in their eyes, and sparkles in their face.
How sleek their looks, how goodly is their mien,
When big they strut behind a double chin.
Each faculty in blandishment they lull,
Aspiring to be venerably dull.

No learned debates molest their downy trance,
Or discompose their pompous ignorance:
But undisturbed, they loiter life away,
So wither green, and blossom in decay.
Deep sunk in down, they, by my gentle care,
Avoid the inclemencies of morning air,

And leave to tattered crape the drudgery of prayer."

After more satire, to which the character of the speaker gives occasion, the God of Sloth summons his darling phantom to seek Envy out (with some satirical suggestion of the places in which Envy is most likely to be found).

"Tell the bleak Fury what new projects reign
Among the homicides of Warwick Lane,
And what the event, unless she straight inclines
To blast their hopes and baffle their designs."
More he had spoke, but sudden vapours rise,
And with their silken cords tie down his eyes.

CANTO II.

Soon as the evening veiled the mountain heads,
And winds lay hushed in subterranean beds;
Whilst sickening flowers drink up the silver dew,
And beaux, for some assembly, dress anew;
The city saints to prayers and play-house haste;
The rich to dinner, and the poor to rest:
Officious phantom then prepared with care
To slide on tender pinions through the air,
Oft he attempts the summit of a rock,
And oft the hollow of some blasted oak;
At length approaching where bleak Envy lay,
The hissing of her snakes proclaimed the way.

Envy's haunt is described. She is banished to it, because England is under happy rule, but she accepts the invitation brought to her.

"Since by no arts I therefore can defeat

The happy enterprises of the great,

I'll calmly stoop to more inferior things;

And try if my loved snakes have teeth or stings."

She said; and straight shrill Colon's person took,

In morals loose, but most precise in look.
Black Friars annals lately pleased to call
Him Warden of Apothecaries' Hall.
And, when so dignified, did not forbear
That operation which the learned declare
Gives colics ease, and makes the ladies fair.
In trifling show his tinsel talent lies,
And form the want of intellects supplies.
In aspect grand and goodly he appears,
Revered as patriarchs in primeval years.
Hourly his learned impertinence affords
A barren superfluity of words;

The patient's ears remorseless he assails,
Murders with jargon where his medicine fails.

The Fury thus assuming Colon's grace,
So slung her arms, so shuffled in her pace.
Onward she hastens to the famed abodes,
Where Horoscope invokes the infernal gods;
And reached the mansion where the vulgar run
For ruin throng, and pay to be undone.

Then follows a lively sketch of the visit to a famous astrological apothecary and dealer in charms and philtres. To him Envy speaks in the voice and person of Colon:

"Forbear, forbear, thy vain amusements cease,
Thy woodcocks from their gins a while release;
And to that dire misfortune listen well,
Which thou shouldst fear to know, or I to tell.
"Tis true, thou ever wast esteemed by me
The great Alcides of our company.
When we with noble scorn resolved to ease
Ourselves from all parochial offices;
And to our wealthier patients left the care,
And draggled dignity of scavenger.

Such zeal in that affair thou didst express,

Nought could be equal but the great success.
Now call to mind thy generous prowess past,

Be what thou shouldst, by thinking what thou wast.
The Faculty of Warwick Lane design,

If not to storm, at least to undermine :

Their gates each day ten thousand night-caps crowd,
And mortars utter their attempts aloud.
If they should once unmask our mystery,
Each nurse, ere long, would be as learned as we;
Our art exposed to every vulgar eye,

And none, in complaisance to us, would die.
What if we claim their right to assassinate,
Must they needs turn Apothecaries straight?
Prevent it, gods! all stratagems we try,
To crowd with new inhabitants your sky.
'Tis we who wait the destinies' command,
To purge the troubled air, and weed the land.
And dare the College insolently aim

To equal our fraternity in fame ?

Then let crabs' eyes with pearl for virtue try,
Or Highgate Hill with lofty Pindus vie :
So glow-worms may compare with Titan's beams,
And Hare-Court pump with Aganippe's streams.

Our manufactures now they meanly sell,
And their true value treacherously tell :
Nay, they discover too (their spite is such),

That health, than crowns more valued, costs not much.
Whilst we must steer our conduct by these rules,
To cheat as tradesmen, or to starve as fools."

At this famed Horoscope turned pale, and straight In silence tumbled from his chair of state. The crowd in great confusion sought the door, And left the Magus fainting on the floor. Whilst in his breast the Fury breathed a storm, Then sought her cell, and reassumed her form. Thus from the sore although the insect flies, It leaves a brood of maggots in disguise.

Horoscope is revived by his shopman Squirt, and in the Third Canto spends the night in restless thought. The canto follows, in satire, the course of his night's thoughts. In the morning he bids Squirt swiftly bid the Beadle summon all the Company of the Apothecaries to their Hall. Then, left alone, the Magus, with mystic incantations, burns drugs on an altar raised to Disease, propitious power, "to us your vassals only kind.”

"If, in return, all diligence we pay To fix your empire, and confirm your sway, Far as the weekly bills can reach around, From Kent Street end to famed St. Giles's Pound; Behold this poor libation with a smile, And let auspicious light break through the pile."

He spoke; and on the pyramid he laid Bay leaves and vipers' hearts, and thus he said; "As these consume in this mysterious fire, So let the cursed Dispensary expire; And as those crackle in the flames, and die, So let its vessels burst, and glasses fly." But a sinister cricket straight was heard, The altar fell, the offering disappeared. As the famed wight the omen did regret, Squirt brought the news the Company was met.

Nigh where Fleet Ditch descends in sable streams,

To wash his sooty Naiads in the Thames;
There stands a structure on a rising hill,
Where tyros take their freedom out to kill.

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""Tis with concern, my friends, I meet you here;

No grievance you can know, but I must share.

'Tis plain my interest you've advanced so long, Each fee, though I was mute, would find a tongue.

And in return, though I have strove to rend
Those statutes, which on oath I should defend;

Such arts are trifles to a generous mind,
Great services as great returns should find.

Oxford and all her passing bells can tell,
By this right arm what mighty numbers fell.
Whilst others meanly asked whole months to slay,

I oft dispatched the patient in a day :

With pen in hand I pushed to that degree,

I scarce had left a wretch to give a fee.

Some fell by laudanum, and some by steel,
And death in ambush lay in every pill.
For save or slay, this privilege we claim,
Though credit suffers, the reward's the same.

What though the art of healing we pretend,
He that designs it least, is most a friend.
Into the right we err, and must confess
To oversights we often owe success.
Thus Bessus got the battle in the play,
His glorious cowardice restored the day.
So the famed Grecian piece owed its desert
To chance, and not the laboured strokes of art.
Physicians, if they're wise, should never think
Of any arms but such as pen and ink:
But the enemy, at their expense, shall find,
When honour calls, I'll scorn to stay behind."

He said; and sealed the engagement with a kiss, Which was returned by Younger Ascaris; Who thus advanced: "Each word, sir, you impart, Has something killing in it, like your art. How much we to your boundless friendship owe,

Our files can speak, and your prescriptions show.

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came from her home in the Essex marshes, and delivered a short lecture on the graces of the modern poets of that day. Did Garth really attribute to Disease the taste of his day for criticism? If so, perhaps he was not altogether in the wrong. If not-and I think not-this odd way of intruding literary criticism may be taken as symptom of an ailment that weakened literature in his time. At the close of the lecture, which ended with praise of the "rich vein of Montague,"

The Fury paused, till with a frightful sound

A rising whirlwind burst the unhallowed ground.
Then she the deity we Fortune call,

Though distant, rules and influences all,

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