If Covent-Garden’s virtues are unknown,
Adopt the reigning mode, and praise your own;
Warton, in Pope, presents us nothing new,
Pert Boswell brings all Johnson to our view,
In quarto see the man of star and ribbon
Sedately usher in the works of Gibbon;
Erskine, self-fancy’d scourger of the throne,
Now pleads his client’s cause, and now his own.
Holman plays Hotspur: Shakespear, with a groan,
Sees Percy, and scarce knows him for his own!
Think you for foreign benefit they strive?
Shakespear is dead, but Holman is alive;[7]
Self prompts the player, self fills the tedious page,
Alike or in the closet or the stage.