There is something so extremely ingenious in the following lines, and they account too on such rational grounds for a partiality that has puzzled so many able heads, that we cannot forbear transcribing them.
Apostrophizing the exalted personage before alluded to, he says,
Early you read, nor did the advice deride,
Suspicion ne’er should taint a CÆSAR’s bride;
And who in spotless purity so fit
To guard an honest wife’s good fame, as PITT.
The beautiful compliment here introduced to the chastity of our immaculate premier, from the pen of such an author, must give him the most supreme satisfaction. And
O decus Italiæ virgo!!!
Long mayst thou continue to deserve it!!!
From treating of the minister’s virgin innocence, our author, by a very unaccountable transition, proceeds to a family man, namely, the modern MÆCENAS, the CENSOR MORUM, the ARBITER ELEGANTIARUM of Great Britain; in a word, to the most illustrious JAMES CECIL EARL OF SALISBURY, and lord chamberlain to his majesty, whom, in a kind of episode he thus addresses,
Oh! had the gods but kindly will’d it so
That thou had’st lived two hundred years ago:
Had’st thou then rul’d the stage, from sportive scorn
Thy prudent care had guarded peers unborn.
No simple chamberlains had libell’d been,
No OSTRICKS fool’d in SHAKESPEARE’s saucy scene.
But then wisely recollecting this not to be altogether the most friendly of wishes, in as much, that, if his lordship had been chamberlain to QUEEN ELIZABETH, he could not, in the common course of events, have been, as his honour SIR RICHARD PEPPER ARDEN most sweetly sings in his PROBATIONARY ODE,
“The tallest, fittest man to go before the king,”