[6] See the Tyburn Chronicle and Newgate lamentations _pro tempore_;
particularly that famous ballad, entitled A merry song about murder,
beginning with, "In Tyburn-road there liv'd a man," &c.
Yet slight the cause of NYKY's late mishap;
NYK but mistook the colour of the cap:
A common errour, frequent in the Park,
Where love is apt to stumble in the dark.
Why rais'd the haughty female head so high,
With the tall caps of grenadiers to vie?
Why does it like tremendous figure make,
To subject purblind lovers to mistake?[7]
Or rather why, in these enlighten'd times,
Should rigid Nature call such errours crimes?
"Thou Nature art my goddess," saith the play;
But even Shakespeare's text hath had its day.
More gentle custom no such rigour knows;
And custom into second nature grows.
Let vulgar passions move the vulgar mind,
Superior souls feel motives more refin'd:
Among the low-bred English slow advance
Th' Italian _gusto_ and _bon ton_ of France.
Strange to the classic lore of Greece and Rome,
And rudely nurs'd in ignorance at home,
The tasteless herd e'en construe into sin,
That poets should in metaphor lie in,
While I, their best man-midwife, must be sham'd,
Whene'er the Fashionable Lover's nam'd.