Impowered with statute, privilege, and mandate,
T'assume an art, and after understand it,
Like bills of store for taking a degree,
With all the learning to it custom-free;
And own professions, which they never took
So much delight in, as to read one book:
Like princes had prerogative to give
Convicted malefactors a reprieve;

And having but a little paltry wit

More than the world, reduced and governed it,
But scorned, as soon as 'twas but understood,
As better is a spiteful foe to good;

And now has nothing left for its support,
But what the darkest times provided for❜t.
Man has a natural desire to know,

But th' one half is for interest, th' other show:
As scriveners take more pains to learn the sleight
Of making knots, than all the hands they write:
So all his study is not to extend

The bounds of knowledge, but some vainer end;
Τ' appear, and pass for learned, though his claim
Will hardly reach beyond the empty name.
For most of those that drudge and labour hard,
Furnish their understandings by the yard,
As a French library by the whole is,
So much an ell for quartos, and for folios;
To which they are but indexes themselves,
And understand no further than the shelves;
But smatter with their titles and editions,
And place them in their classical partitions;
When all a student knows of what he reads
Is not in's own, but under general heads
Of common-places, not in his own power,
But like a Dutchman's money i' th' Cantore,
Where all he can make of it, at the best,
Is hardly three per cent. for interest;
And whether he will ever get it out
Into his own possession is a doubt:

Affects all books of past and modern ages,
But reads no further than the title-pages,
Only to con the authors' names by rote,

Or, at the best, those of the books they quote,
Enough to challenge intimate acquaintance
With all the learned moderns, and the ancients.
As Roman noblemen were wont to greet,
And compliment the rabble in the street,
Had nomenclators in their trains, to claim
Acquaintance with the meanest by his name;
And by so mean contemptible a bribe
Trepanned the suffrages of every tribe;

So learned men, by authors' names unknown,
Have gained no small improvement to their own.;
And he's esteemed the learned'st of all others,
That has the largest catalogue of authors.

FRAGMENTS OF AN INTENDED SECOND PART
OF THE FOREGOING SATIRE.*

MEN'S talents grow more bold and confident,
The further they're beyond their just extent,
As smatterers prove more arrogant and pert,
The less they truly understand an art;
And, where they've least capacity to doubt,
Are wont t' appear most perempt'ry and stout;
While those, that know the mathematic lines,
Where nature all the wit of man confines,
And when it keeps within its bounds, and where
It acts beyond the limits of its sphere,

Enjoy an absoluter free command

O'er all, they have a right to understand,

*These fragments were fairly written out, and several times, with some little variations, transcribed by Butler, but never connected, or reduced into any regular form. They may be considered as the principal parts of a curious edifice, each separately finished, but not united into one general design.'- T.

Than those, that falsely venture to encroach
Where nature has denied them all approach;
And still the more they strive to understand,
Like great estates, run furthest behind hand;
Will undertake the universe to fathom,
From infinite down to a single atom ;
Without a geometric instrument,
To take their own capacity's extent;
Can tell us easy how the world was made,
As if they had been brought up to the trade,
And whether chance, necessity, or matter,
Contrived the whole establishment of nature;
When all their wits to understand the world
Can never tell, why a pig's tail is curled;
Or give a rational account, why fish,
That always use to drink, do never piss.*

WHAT mad fantastic gambols have been played By th' ancient Greek forefathers of the trade, That were not much inferior to the freaks

Of all our lunatic fanatic sects?

The first and best philosopher of Athens

Was cracked, and ran stark-staring mad with patience;
And had no other way to show his wit,

But when his wife was in her scolding fit;
Was after in the Pagan inquisition,
And suffered martyrdom for no religion.t
Next him, his scholar striving to expel
All poets his poetic commonweal,

This couplet occurs also in the continuation of The Elephant in the Moon.-See ante, p. 50.

There is no room to doubt that Socrates believed in the immortality of the soul. According to Xenophon, he held that the soul was allied to the Divine Being by a similarity of nature, and that the existence of good men would be continued in a future state, in which they would receive the rewards of their virtue. Plato testifies to the same effect; and the language of Socrates before his death confirms the doctrine. He said to his friends, As soon as I shall have drank the poison, I shall not remain longer with you, but depart immediately to the seats of the blessed.'

Exiled himself, and all his followers,
Notorious poets, only bating verse.*
The Stagyrite, unable to expound

The Euripus, leapt into 't, and was drowned.†
So he, that put his eyes out to consider,

And contemplate on natural things the steadier, ‡
Did but himself for idiot convince,

Though reverenced by the learnèd ever since.
Empedocles, to be esteemed a god,

Leapt into Etna, with his sandals shod,
That being blown out discovered what an ass
The great philosopher and juggler was,
That to his own new deity sacrificed,
And was himself the victim, and the priest. §
The Cynic coined false money, and for fear
Of being hanged for 't, turned philosopher;||
Yet with his lantern went by day, to find
One honest man i̇' th' heap of all mankind;
An idle freak, he needed not have done,
If he had known himself to be but one.
With swarms of maggots of the self-same rate,
The learned of all ages celebrate

*This banter upon Plato and his Republic assumes that poets had no place in a system based upon strict reasoning, while it insinuates that Plato's disciples were no better after all than mere idealists, who, looking after an imaginary and unattainable perfection, might be compared to poets in all respects except the verse.

† Butler avails himself here of the licence of satire, by adopting one of the idle tales related of the manner of Aristotle's death, which really took place at Colchis, where he died from the effects of severe study, and vexation at the persecutions to which philosophy was at that period exposed in Athens.

The allusion is to a story in the Noctes Atticæ, of Aulus Gellius, of a philosopher who put out his eyes in order that he might not be distracted by external objects. • Democritum philosophum in monimentis Historiæ Græcæ scriptum est, virum præter alios venerandum, authoritateque antiquâ præditum, luminibus oculorum suâ sponte se privasse; quia existimaret cogitationes, commentationesque animi sui in contemplandis naturæ rationibus vegetiores et exactiores fore, si eas videndi illecebris et oculorum impedimentis liberasset.'-AULI GELLII, X. 17.

§ See vol. ii. p. 46, note ‡.

Apparently for the sake of the epigram with which this description terminates, Butler transfers to Diogenes the offence committed by

Things that are properer for Knightsbridge college,*
Than th' authors and originals of knowlege;
More sottish, than the two fanatics trying
To mend the world by laughing, or by crying; t
Or he that laughed until he choked his whistle,
To rally on an ass, that ate a thistle;

That th' antique sage, that was gallant t' a goose, ‡
A fitter mistress could not pick, and choose,
Whose tempers, inclinations, sense, and wit,
Like two indentures, did agree so fit.

THE ancient sceptics constantly denied

What they maintained, and thought they justified;
For when th' affirmed, that nothing's to be known,
They did but what they said before disown;
And, like polemics of the Post, § pronounce
The same thing to be true and false at once.
These follies had such influence on the rabble,
As to engage them in perpetual squabble;
Divided Rome and Athens into clans
Of ignorant mechanic partisans ;

That, to maintain their own hypotheses,

Broke one another's blockheads, and the peace;
Were often set by officers i' th' stocks
For quarrelling about a paradox:

When pudding-wives were launched in cockquean ||
For falling foul on oyster-women's schools. T [stools,

his father, a banker, who was convicted of debasing the public coin, and obliged to leave his country in consequence.

See vol. ii. p. 165, note t.

+ Democritus and Heraclitus, commonly called, with remarkable inappropriateness, the former the Laughing, and the latter the Crying, Philosopher.

The allusion is, probably, to a marvellous story, related by Pliny and others, of a goose that fell in love with a young Grecian, named Amphilochus. Butler again introduces this curious legend in his ballads on the Parliament.-See post, p. 131.

§ Knights of the Post.-See vol. i. p. 68, note .

Cockquean-a beggar or cheat Altered to 'cucking stools' in Ed. of 1822.

See vol. i. p. 202, note *.