This fiery game your active youth maintained,
Not yet by years extinguished, though restrained;
You season still with sports your serious hours,
For age but tastes of pleasures, youth devours.
The hare in pastures or in plains is found,
Emblem of human life; who runs the round,
And, after all his wandering ways are done,
His circle fills and ends where he begun,
Just as the setting meets the rising sun.

Thus princes ease their cares; but happier he,
Who seeks not pleasure through necessity,
Than such as once on slippery thrones were placed,
And, chasing, sigh to think themselves are chased.

So lived our sires, ere doctors learned to kill,
And multiplied with theirs the weekly bill.
The first physicians by debauch were made;
Excess began, and sloth sustains the trade.
Pity the generous kind their cares bestow*
To search forbidden truths (a sin to know),
To which if human science could attain,

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55

70

75

The doom of death, pronounced by God, were vain.
In vain the leech would interpose delay;

Fate fastens first, and vindicates the prey.

What help from art's endeavours can we have?

Guibbons but guesses, nor is sure to save;

But Maurus sweeps whole parishes, and peoples every grave,

And no more mercy to mankind will use

Than when he robbed and murdered Maro's muse.

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Wouldst thou be soon dispatched, and perish whole,

Trust Maurus with thy life, and Milbourn§ with thy soul.

By chase our long-lived fathers earned their food ;

Toil strung the nerves and purified the blood :
But we their sons, a pampered race of men,

Are dwindled down to threescore years and ten.
Better to hunt in fields for health unbought
Than fee the doctor for a nauseous draught.

The meaning is, "It is a pity that the generous kind," &c.

90

+ Dr. Guibbons, a celebrated physician of the day. He is mentioned by Dryden, in conjunction with Hobbes, in his Postscript to the Translation of Virgil. "That to have recovered, in some measure, the health which I had lost by application to this work, is owing, next to God's mercy, to the skill of Dr. Guibbons and Dr. Hobbes, the two ornaments of their profession, which I can only pay by this acknowledgment." He is Mirmillo the famed Opifer" in Garth's "Dispensary." 1 Maurus, Sir Richard Blackmore, a poet and physician, who had attacked Dryden in print, and whom here and elsewhere he pillories in revenge. Quack Maurus" Dryden calls him in his Prologue to "The Pilgrim :"

"Quack Maurus, though he never took degrees
In either of our Universities."

Blackmore was a Master of Arts at Oxford, but he had his medical diploma from the University

of Padua.

See

§ The Rev. Luke Milbourn, who had published an offensive criticism on Dryden's Virgil. the conclusion of the Preface to the Fables, where Dryden again lashes Blackmore and Milbourn together.

The wise for cure on exercise depend;
God never made his work for man to mend.

The tree of knowledge, once in Eden placed,
Was easy found, but was forbid the taste;
O, had our grandsire walked without his wife,
He first had sought the better plant of life!
Now both are lost: yet wandering in the dark,
Physicians for the tree have found the bark;
They, labouring for relief of human kind,
With sharpened sight some remedies may find;
The apothecary-train is wholly blind.
From files a random recipe they take,
And many deaths of one prescription make.

Garth,* generous as his Muse, prescribes and gives;
The shopman sells, and by destruction lives:
Ungrateful tribe ! who, like the viper's brood,
From Medicine issuing, suck their mother's blood!
Let these obey, and let the learned prescribe,
That men may die without a double bribe;

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100

105

110

Let them, but under their superiors, kill,

When doctors first have signed the bloody bill:

He scapes the best, who, nature to repair,

115

Draws physic from the fields in draughts of vital air.
You hoard not health for your own private use,
But on the public spend the rich produce.

When, often urged, unwilling to be great,

Your country calls you from your loved retreat,

120

And sends to senates, charged with common care,
Which none more shuns, and none can better bear:
Where could they find another formed so fit
To poise with solid sense a sprightly wit?
Were these both wanting, (as they both abound,)
Where could so firm integrity be found?

125

Well-born and wealthy, wanting no support,
You steer betwixt the country and the court;
Nor gratify whate'er the great desire,
Nor grudging give what public needs require.
Part must be left, a fund when foes invade ;
And part employed to roll the watery trade;
Even Canaan's happy land, when worn with toil,
Required a sabbath-year to mend the meagre soil.

Good senators (and such are † you) so give,
That kings may be supplied, the people thrive;
And he, when want requires, is truly wise,
Who slights not foreign aids nor over-buys,

But on our native strength in time of need relies.

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135

* Garth: the celebrated physician, Sir Samuel Garth, author of "The Dispensary." Garth's establishment of the dispensary for supplying advice and medicines gratuitously to the poor is the generosity alluded to. This dispensary was opposed by many doctors, which led Garth to write his witty satire.

↑ Such as is printed in Scott's and other editions, incorrectly.

Munster was bought, we boast not the success;

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Who fights for gain for greater makes his peace.+

Our foes, compelled by need, have peace embraced;

The peace both parties want is like to last;

The rest besieged, but we constrained the town :‡
We saw the event that followed our success ;

France, though pretending arms, pursued the peace,
Obliged by one sole treaty to restore

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What twenty years of war had won before.
Enough for Europe has our Albion fought :
Let us enjoy the peace our blood has bought.
When once the Persian king was put to flight,
The weary Macedons refused to fight:
Themselves their own mortality confessed,

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And left the son of Jove to quarrel for the rest.
Even victors are by victories undone :

Thus Hannibal, with foreign laurels won,

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To Carthage was recalled, too late to keep his own.

While sore of battle, while our wounds are green,

May neither overflow, for then they drown the land.
When both are full, they feed our blessed abode,
Like those that watered once the Paradise of God.
Some overpoise of sway by turns they share;
In peace the people, and the prince in war :

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*The Bishop of Munster, who joined England in consideration of a large subsidy in Charles II.'s first Dutch war, and afterwards deserted us and made a separate peace with Holland. This is referred to in "Annus Mirabilis," stanza 37:

"Let Munster's prelate ever be accurst,

See the note on that passage.

+ The Peace of Ryswick.

In whom we seek the German faith in vain."

The taking of Namur by William III. in 1695, after a siege of one month. Here probably Dryden introduced the lines reflecting on Dutch valour, which he told Montague he had omitted by the advice of his cousin.

Consuls of moderate power in calms were made;
When the Gauls came, one sole Dictator swayed.

Patriots in peace assert the people's right,
With noble stubbornness resisting might:
No lawless mandates from the court receive,
Nor lend by force, but in a body give.

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Such was your generous grandsire, free to grant

In parliaments that weighed their Prince's want:

But so tenacious of the common cause

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As not to lend the king against his laws;

And, in a loathsome dungeon doomed to lie,

In bonds retained his birth-right liberty,

And shamed oppression, till it set him free.*

O true descendant of a patriot line,

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Who, while thou sharest their lustre, lendst them thine,

Vouchsafe this picture of thy soul to see;

'Tis so far good as it resembles thee.

The beauties to the original I owe,

Which when I miss, my own defects I show.
Nor think the kindred Muses thy disgrace;
A poet is not born in every race.
Two of a house few ages can afford,
One to perform, another to record.

Praiseworthy actions are by thee embraced;
And 'tis my praise to make thy praises last.

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205

For even when death dissolves our human frame,
The soul returns to Heaven from whence it came,
Earth keeps the body, verse preserves the fame.

Scott, following Malone, has explained this as referring to John Driden's maternal grandfather, Sir Robert Bevile, who, it is said, "appears to have been imprisoned in the time of Charles I. for resisting some irregular levy of money:" but this is apparently a conjecture The laborious and accurate Mr. Holt resting exclusively on this passage of Dryden's poem.

White, in his MS. notes, ascertained that Sir Erasmus Dryden, the common grandfather of the two cousins, is referred to; and he refers to a list in Rushworth's "Historical Collections" (i. 473) where occurs the name of Sir Erasmus Draiton, as one of those sent to prison on account of the loan-money, and liberated on the eve of the general election for Charles I.'s third parliament, 1628. Sir Erasmus Dryden died May 22, 1632.