The monster comes, severe and slow,
His eyes with arrowy lightnings glow,
Takes up the book, surveys it o'er,
Exclaims, "damn'd stuff!"—but says no more:
The book is damn'd by his decree,
And what he says must gospel be!
But was there nothing to his taste?—
Was all my work a barren waste—
Was not one bright idea sown,
And not one image of my own?—
Its doom was just, if this be true:
But Zoilus shall be sweated too.
Give me a cane of mighty length,
A staff proportion'd to my strength,
Like that, by whose destructive aid
The man of Gath his conquests made;
Like that, which once on Etna's shore
The shepherd of the mountain bore:
For wit traduc'd at such a rate
To other worlds I'll send him, straight,
Where all the past shall nothing seem,
Or just be imag'd, like a dream;
Where new vexations are design'd,
No dull quietus for the mind!
Arm'd with a staff of such a size
Who would not smite this man of lies:
Here, scribbler, help me! seize that pen
With which he blasts all rhyming men:
His goose-quill must not with him go
To persecute the bards below.—
How vast a change an hour may bring!
How abject lies this snarling thing!
No longer wit to him shall bow,
To him the world is nothing now;
And all he writ, and all he read
Is, with himself, in silence laid!
Dead tho' he be—(not sent to rest)
No keen remorse torments my breast:
Yet, something in me seems to tell
I might have let him live, as well;—
'Twas his to snarl, and growl, and grin,
And life had, else, a burthen been.
[322] This was first published in the Freeman's Journal, Oct 11, 1786, though it undoubtedly was written before the poet left Philadelphia. It was republished in the 1788 edition under the title "The Pamphleteer and the Critic." The text follows the 1795 edition.