Like gentle Fanny’s was my flow’ry theme
A painted mistress, or a purling stream.
Hervey, who thought his namby-pamby verses really poetry, was stung to the quick by this contemptuous allusion, and, smarting under the satire, was foolish enough to retaliate upon Pope in a poor effusion addressed “To the Imitator of the Satires of the Second Book of Horace”. It runs:—
Thus, whilst with coward hand you stab a name,
And try at least t’ assassinate our fame;
Like the first bold assassin’s be thy lot;
And ne’er be thy guilt forgiven, or forgot;
But as thou hat’st, be hated by mankind,
And with the emblem of thy crooked mind
Marked on thy back, like Cain, by God’s own hand,