Ducks to the mandate of resistless fate.”
Temple of Nature, Canto iv.
I have exhibited this couplet at all the assemblages of poetizing brethren in Grub street and St Giles’s, not omitting the inhabitants of the “Wits’ corner, at the Chapter coffee-house, the elevated tenants of the cider cellar in Maiden Lane, and Col. Hanger’s knights of the round table,” all of whom agree in acknowledging the elegance and correctness of the metaphor, and that its beauties are so transcendently exquisite, and beyond the ken of mortal eye, as to be perfectly incomprehensible.
That since “to die is but to sleep.”
“Long o’er the wrecks of lovely life they weep;
Then pleased reflect, to die is but to sleep.”
Temple of Nature, Canto ii.
I suspect that my intimate friend and correspondent Buonaparte, is a full convert to Dr Darwin’s doctrine of death and its consequences. For, when he declared to lord Whitworth his determination to invade England, although there were a hundred chances to one in favor of his going to the bottom, he was undoubtedly calculating on a comfortable nap after the fatigues of government.