There were historic works for graver hours,
And lighter verse to spur the languid powers;
There metaphysics, logic there had place;
But of devotion not a single trace -
Save what is taught in Gibbon’s florid page,
And other guides of this inquiring age.
There Hume appear’d, and near a splendid book
Composed by Gay’s “good lord of Bolingbroke:”
With these were mix’d the light, the free, the vain,
And from a corner peep’d the sage Tom Paine;