Henley. "What, you thank God for your ignorance, do you?"
Gentleman (in a violent rage). "I do, sir. What then?"
Henley. "Sir, you have a great deal to be thankful for."
[116] These lines are from Banckes' Poems, p. 87, in which a contracted copy of the print is placed as the headpiece of an epistle to the painter. This good gentleman, with true poetic vanity, pathetically exclaims,
"Alas! that pictures should decay;
That words alone can wit convey:
But words remain—Oh, may this verse
Remain, etc. etc."
Little did this rival of Stephen Duck imagine that the words "which alone can wit convey," would not have preserved his two volumes from the trunkmaker, to whom every verse had been long since consigned, had not this little print, and another copy from the same artist, sometimes induced a collector to purchase the volumes.
The concluding lines of his poem are not, however, so contemptible: