Yet slight the cause of Nyky's late mishap;
Nyk but mistook the colour of the cap:
A common errour, frequent in the Park,
Where love is apt to stumble in the dark.
Why rais'd the haughty female head so high,
With the tall caps of grenadiers to vie?
Why does it like tremendous figure make,
To subject purblind lovers to mistake?[7]
Or rather why, in these enlighten'd times,
Should rigid Nature call such errours crimes?
"Thou Nature art my goddess," saith the play;
But even Shakespeare's text hath had its day.
More gentle custom no such rigour knows;
And custom into second nature grows.
Let vulgar passions move the vulgar mind,
Superior souls feel motives more refin'd:
Among the low-bred English slow advance
Th' Italian gusto and bon ton of France.
Strange to the classic lore of Greece and Rome,
And rudely nurs'd in ignorance at home,
The tasteless herd e'en construe into sin,
That poets should in metaphor lie in,
While I, their best man-midwife, must be sham'd,
Whene'er the Fashionable Lover's nam'd.
NOTES.

[7] Nyky is near sighted.

But Candour's veil love's foibles still should cover
And Nyk be stil'd a Fashionable Lover.[8]
To polish'd travellers is only known
That taste which makes the ancient arts our own;
Which shares with Rome in every gem antique;
Which blends the modern with the ancient Greek;
Improves on both, and greatly soars above,
In pure philanthropy, Platonic love;
That love which burns with undistinguish'd rage,
And spares in fondness neither sex nor age?
Ah! therefore why in these enlighten'd times
Sould rigid Nature call such errours crimes?
Must not the taste of Attic wits be nice?
Can antient virtue be a modern vice?
The Mantuan bard, or else his scholiast lies,[9]
Virgil the chaste, nay Socrates the wise.
NOTES.

[8]

"If any author of prolific brains
In this good company feels labour-pains;
If any gentle poet big with rhyme
Has run his reckoning out and gone his time:
Know such that at our hospital of muses
He may lie-in in private if he chuses;
We've single lodgings there for secret sinners
With good encouragement for your beginners."
Prologue to the Fashionable Lover.

It is indeed now plain enough that Roscius has given great encouragement to secret sinners; but I would advise none of our poets to lie in again in private; but to remember the fate of a late tragedy and farce. Poor Clementina, and the lady An hour before marriage, both privately lay-in and miscarried.