[8]
"_If any author of prolific brains
In this good company feels labour-pains;
If any gentle poet big with rhyme
Has run his reckoning out and gone his time:
Know such that at our hospital of muses
He may lie-in in private if he chuses;
We've single lodgings there for secret sinners
With good encouragement for your beginners._"
Prologue to the FASHIONABLE LOVER.
It is indeed now plain enough that ROSCIUS has given great
encouragement to _secret sinners_; but I would advise none of our
poets to lie in again in private; but to remember the fate of a late
tragedy and farce. Poor _Clementina_, and the lady _An hour before
marriage_, both privately lay-in and miscarried.
[9] The Jesuit Ruæus begins the argument of Virgil's second Eclogue
with the following explicit declaration, _Amabat Virgilius puerum_.
The gay Petronius, sophists, wits and bards,
Of old, bestow'd on youth their soft regards;
In modish dalliance pass'd their harmless time
Ev'n modish now in soft Italia's clime.
Could lightenings ever issue from above
To blast poor men for such a crime as love;
When the lewd daughters of incestuous Lot
Were both with child by their own father got?
Poor goody Lot indeed might be in fault,
And justly turn'd to monumental salt:
The matrimonial emblem of a wife:
Needs must be salt a dish to keep for life!
A fable Sodom's fate: in Heav'n above
All is made up of harmony and love;
That such its vengeance I believe not, I;
Historians err and Hebrew Jews will lie.
Sing then, my Muse, a more engaging strain
To lure my NYKY back to Drury-lane.
Tell him the fancied danger all is o'er;
Home he may come and love as heretofore.