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But let our slaves be present there; lest they
Accuse their masters, and for gain betray.-
Such were the whispers of those jealous times,
About Sejanus' punishment and crimes.

Now, tell me truly, wouldst thou change thy fate, To be, like him, first minister of state? To have thy levees crowded with resort, Of a depending, gaping, servile court; Dispose all honours of the sword and gown, Grace with a nod, and ruin with a frown; To hold thy prince in pupillage, and sway That monarch, whom the mastered world obey? While he, intent on secret lusts alone, Lives to himself, abandoning the throne; Cooped in a narrow isle, observing dreams With flattering wizards, and erecting schemes! I well believe thou wouldst be great as he, For every man's a fool to that degree: All wish the dire prerogative to kill;

*

Even they would have the power, who want the will:
But wouldst thou have thy wishes understood,
To take the bad together with the good?
Wouldst thou not rather choose a small renown,
To be the mayor of some poor paltry town;
Bigly to look, and barbarously to speak;

To pound false weights, and scanty measures break?
Then, grant we that Sejanus went astray
In every wish, and knew not how to pray;
For he, who grasped the world's exhausted store,
Yet never had enough, but wished for more,

* The island of Caprea, which lies about a league out at sea from the Campanian shore, was the scene of Tiberius's pleasures in the latter part of his reign. There he lived, for some years, with diviners, soothsayers, and worse company; and from thence dispatched all his orders to the senate.

Raised a top-heavy tower, of monstrous height, Which, mouldering, crushed him underneath the weight.

What did the mighty Pompey's fall beget, And ruined him, who, greater than the Great,* The stubborn pride of Roman nobles broke, And bent their haughty necks beneath his yoke: What else but his immoderate lust of power, Prayers made and granted in a luckless hour? For few usurpers to the shades descend By a dry death, or with a quiet end.

The boy, who scarce has paid his entrance down
To his proud pedant, or declined a noun,
(So small an elf, that, when the days are foul,
He and his satchel must be borne to school,)
Yet prays, and hopes, and aims at nothing less,
To prove a Tully, or Demosthenes :

But both those orators, so much renowned,
In their own depths of eloquence were drowned: †
The hand and head were never lost of those
Who dealt in doggrel, or who punned in prose.
"Fortune foretuned the dying notes of Rome,
"Till I, thy consul sole, consoled thy doom."‡
His fate had crept below the lifted swords,
Had all his malice been to murder words.

* Julius Cæsar, who got the better of Pompey, that was styled, The Great.

+ Demosthenes and Tully both died for their oratory: Demosthenes gave himself poison, to avoid being carried to Antipater, one of Alexander's captains, who had then made himself master of Athens. Tully was murdered by M. Antony's order, in return for those invectives he made against him.

The Latin of this couplet is a famous verse of Tully's, in which he sets out the happiness of his own consulship, famous for the vanity and the ill poetry of it; for Tully, as he had a good deal of the one, so he had no great share of the other.

I rather would be Mævius, thrash for rhymes
Like his, the scorn and scandal of the times,
Than that Philippic*, fatally divine,

Which is inscribed the second, should be mine.
Nor he, the wonder of the Grecian throng,
Who drove them with the torrent of his tongue,
Who shook the theatres, and swayed the state
Of Athens, found a more propitious fate.
Whom, born beneath a boding horoscope,
His sire, the blear-eyed Vulcan of a shop,
From Mars his forge, sent to Minerva's schools,
To learn the unlucky art of wheedling fools.
With itch of honour, and opinion vain,
All things beyond their native worth we strain;
The spoils of war, brought to Feretrian Jove,
An empty coat of armour hung above

The conqueror's chariot, and in triumph borne,
A streamer from a boarded galley torn,
A chap-fallen beaver loosely hanging by
The cloven helm, an arch of victory ;
On whose high convex sits a captive foe,
And, sighing, casts a mournful look below; †-
Of every nation each illustrious name,
Such toys as these have cheated into fame;
Exchanging solid quiet, to obtain

The windy satisfaction of the brain.

So much the thirst of honour fires the blood;
So many would be great, so few be good:
For who would Virtue for herself regard,
Or wed, without the portion of reward?
Yet this mad chace of fame, by few pursued,
Has drawn destruction on the multitude;

*The orations of Tully against M. Antony were styled by him "Philippics," in imitation of Demosthenes; who had given that name before to those he made against Philip of Macedon.

This is a mock account of a Roman triumph.

This avarice of praise in times to come,
Those long inscriptions crowded on the tomb;
Should some wild fig-tree take her native bent,
And heave below the gaudy monument,
Would crack the marble titles, and disperse
The characters of all the lying verse.

For sepulchres themselves must crumbling fall
In time's abyss, the common grave of all.
Great Hannibal within the balance lay,
And tell how many pounds his ashes weigh;
Whom Afric was not able to contain,

Whose length runs level with the Atlantic main,
And wearies fruitful Nilus, to convey
His sun-beat waters by so long a way;
Which Ethiopia's double clime divides,
And elephants in other mountains hides.
Spain first he won, the Pyreneans past,
And steepy Alps, the mounds that nature cast;
And with corroding juices, as he went,
A passage through the living rocks he rent:
Then, like a torrent rolling from on high,
his headlong rage on Italy,

pours

He
In three victorious battles over-run;

Yet, still uneasy, cries,-There's nothing done,
Till level with the ground their gates are laid,
And Punic flags on Roman towers displayed.
Ask what a face belonged to this high fame,
His picture scarcely would deserve a frame:
A sign-post dauber would disdain to paint
The one-eyed hero on his elephant.
Now, what's his end, O charming Glory! say,
What rare fifth act to crown this huffing play?
In one deciding battle overcome,

He flies, is banished from his native home;
Begs refuge in a foreign court, and there
Attends, his mean petition to prefer ;

Repulsed by surly grooms, who wait before
The sleeping tyrant's interdicted door.

What wonderous sort of death has heaven designed,

Distinguished from the herd of human kind,
For so untamed, so turbulent a mind?

Nor swords at hand, nor hissing darts afar,
Are doomed to avenge the tedious bloody war;
But poison, drawn through a ring's hollow plate,
Must finish him-a sucking infant's fate.
Go, climb the rugged Alps, ambitious fool,
To please the boys, and be a theme at school.
One world sufficed not Alexander's mind;
Cooped up, he seemed in earth and seas confined,
And, struggling, stretched his restless limbs about
The narrow globe, to find a passage out:
Yet entered in the brick-built town,* he tried
The tomb, and found the strait dimensions wide.
Death only this mysterious truth unfolds,
The mighty soul how small a body holds.

Old Greece a tale of Athos would make out, †
Cut from the continent, and sailed about;
Seas hid with navies, chariots passing o'er
The channel, on a bridge from shore to shore:

* Babylon, where Alexander died.

+ Xerxes is represented in history after a very romantic manner affecting fame beyond measure, and doing the most extravagant things to compass it. Mount Athos made a prodigious promontory in the Ægean Sea; he is said to have cut a channel through it, and to have sailed round it. He made a bridge of boats over the Hellespont, where it was three miles broad; and ordered a whipping for the winds and seas, because they had once crossed his designs; as we have a very solemn account of it in Herodotus. But, after all these vain boasts, he was shamefully beaten by Themistocles at Salamis; and returned home, leaving most of his fleet behind him.

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