While feeble Woodcock let his anger loose,
And fix’d the theft on harmless Mother Goose!!!
But say, my muse, and then I’ll cry farewell!
Who stole the cake?—“Indeed I cannot tell!
And this I swear, in accents strong and slow,
I cannot tell!—because I do not know!”
A volume of poems by T. Flatman, published in 1674, contains a poem entitled A Thought on Death from which Pope must have borrowed his ode “The Dying Christian to his Soul:”—
“Vital spark of heavenly flame!
Quit, oh quit this mortal frame!