[109] This satire is wound up with a well-turned apology for the folly, but even here a dart must be hurled at the Duke.—The dart recoils, and returns to him who threw it; for although his Grace was vainly ostentatious, and absurdly extravagant, he was kind-hearted and beneficent to a fault:—
"Yet hence the poor are cloth'd, the hungry fed:
Health to himself, and to his infants bread,
The lab'rer bears: what his hard heart denies,
His charitable vanity supplies.
Another age shall see the golden ear
Embrown the slope, and nod on the parterre;
Deep harvests bury all his pride has plann'd,
And laughing Ceres re-assume the land."
It is a singular circumstance that the prophecy in the last four lines (for a prophecy it must be called) should be fulfilled, I had almost said in the poet's lifetime. A very few years after his death, when Hallet the upholsterer purchased Canons, the park was ploughed up and sown with corn.