“Rise, Britons, rise, and rising nobly raise
Your joyful Pæans to great Nathan’s praise;
Nathan, whose powers all glorious heights can reach,
Now charm an ague,—now a Sermon preach;—
Nathan, who late, as time and cause seem’d fit,
Despatch’d a letter to great premier Pitt.
Showing how quick the public in a dash
Might change their spoons and platters into cash;
And now with zeal, attach’d to name nor party,
Thunders out vengeance ’gainst great Buonaparte;
Zeal that no rival bard shall e’er exceed;
To prove your judgment, quickly buy and read.”
Soon after the publication of his “Sermon,” Nathan became more sensible to the infirmities of “threescore years and ten.” And the epitaph on his wife having been duly appropriated, for in good time she died, he removed to Liverpool, where he had a daughter married and settled, and there, in her arms, about the year 1815, he breathed his last at the age of eighty.—Requiescat in pace.
K.
PETER AND MARY.
Dr. Soams, master of Peterhouse, Cambridge, towards the close of the sixteenth century, by a whimsical perverseness deprived the college over which he presided of a handsome estate. Mary, the widow of Thomas Ramsey, lord mayor of London, in 1577, after conferring several favours on that foundation, proffered to settle five hundred pounds a year (a very large income at that period) upon the house, provided that it might be called “The college of Peter and Mary.” “No!” said the capricious master, “Peter, who has lived so long single, is too old now for a female partner.” Fuller says it was “a dear jest by which to lose so good a benefactress.” The lady, offended by the doctor’s fantastic scruple, turned the stream of her benevolence to the benefit of other public foundations.
Garrick Plays.
No. XXXII.
[From “Love’s Metamorphosis,” a Comedy, by John Lily, M. A. 1601.]