Calls Heroes to start,
Then the Muse meets a story
Well worthy of Art.
Had her Pindar of old
Known our Cæsar to sing
More rapid his raptures had roll’d,
But;—Never had Greece such a king.
All that Whigs and Cibber’s friends could say for such tuneless and burlesque lines was that he made them so on purpose. Jacobites replied to them less fiercely than Johnson, but yet not without wit. For instance, on seeing a tobacco pipe lit with one of the laureate’s odes:—
While the soft song that warbles George’s praise
From pipe to pipe the living flame conveys,