To tax your poets as they tax your plate. 50
Exempt from both, my useless life I’d close,
Use humbler ware, and correspond in prose.—
Yet, if it pleased your Grace, I’d now and then
Employ a grateful, but a lazy, pen,
To paint these laughing scenes that round me shine—
Scenes worthy thee, and then to call them thine;
Nor vainly then the Village Squire should charm,
The buried Cottage [or] the busy Farm;
Nor then unpaid the blooming banks should die,