Horrent with arms, that fought with headlong rage,
Nor asked the trumpet's signal, to engage.-
But mark the end! the fire, derived, at first,
From a small sparkle, by your folly nurst,
Blown to a flame, on all around it preys,
And wraps you in the universal blaze.
So the young lion rent, with hideous roar,

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His keeper's trembling limbs, and drank his gore.

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Tush! I am safe," you cry; "Chaldæan seers

Have raised my Scheme, and promised length of years."

But has your son subscribed?" will he await
The lingering distaff of decrepit Fate ?
No;-his impatience will the work confound,
And snap the vital thread, ere half unwound.
Even now your long and stag-like age annoys
His future hopes, and palls his present joys.
Fly then, and bid Archigenes prepare
An antidote, if life be worth your care;
If you would see another autumn close,
And pluck another fig, another rose :—
Take mithridate, rash man, before your meat,
A FATHER, you? and without medicine eat!

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Come, my Fuscinus, come with me, and view
A scene more comic than the stage e'er knew.
Lo! with what toil, what danger, wealth is sought,
And to the fane of watchful Castor brought;
Since MARS THE Avenger slumbered, to his cost,
And, with his helmet, all his credit lost!

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Quit then the plays! the FARCE OF LIFE supplies

A scene more comic in the sage's eyes.

For who amuses most ?-the man who springs,

Light, through the hoop, and on the tight-rope swings;

Or he, who, to a fragile bark confined,

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Dwells on the deep, the sport of wave and wind?

Fool-hardy wretch! scrambling for every bale
Of stinking merchandise, exposed to sale;
And proud to Crete, for ropy wine, to rove,
And jars, the fellow citizens of Jove!
THAT skips along the rope, with wavering tread,
Dangerous dexterity, which brings him bread;
THIS ventures life, for wealth too vast to spend,
Farm joined to farm, and villas without end!

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Lo, every harbour thronged and every bay,
And half mankind upon the watery way!
For, where he hears the attractive voice of gain,
The merchant hurries, and defies the main.-

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Nor will he only range the Libyan shore,

But, passing Calpé, other worlds explore;

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See Phoebus, sinking in the Atlantic, lave
His fiery car, and hear the hissing wave.
And all for what? O glorious end! to come,
His toils o'erpast, with purse replenished, home,
And, with a traveller's privilege, vent his boasts,
Of unknown monsters seen on unknown coasts.
What varying forms in madness may we trace!—
Safe in his loved Electra's fond embrace,
Orestes sees the avenging Furies rise,

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And flash their bloody torches in his eyes;

390

While Ajax strikes an ox. and, at the blow,
Hears Agamemnon or Ulysses low:

And surely he (though, haply, he forbear,

Like these, his keeper and his clothes to tear)

Is just as mad, who to the water's brim

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Loads his frail bark-a plank 'twixt death and him!

When all this risk is but to swell his store

With a few coins, a few gold pieces more.

Heaven lours, and frequent, through the muttering air, The nimble lightning glares, or seems to glare:

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Weigh! weigh!" the impatient man of traffic cries, "These gathering clouds, this rack that dims the skies, Are but the pageants of a sultry day;

A thunder shower, that frowns, and melts away."

Deluded wretch! dashed on some dangerous coast,
This night, this hour, perhaps, his bark is lost;

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While he still strives, though whelmed beneath the wave,

His darling purse with teeth or hand to save.
Thus he, who sighed, of late, for all the gold

Down the bright Tagus and Pactolus rolled,

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Now bounds his wishes to one poor request,

A scanty morsel and a tattered vest;

And shows, where tears, where supplications fail,

A daubing of his melancholy tale!

Wealth, by such dangers earned, such anxious pain,

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Requires more care to keep it, than to gain:

Whate'er my miseries, make me not, kind Fate,

The sleepless Argus of a vast estate!

The slaves of Licinus, a numerous band,

Watch through the night, with buckets in their hand,

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While their rich master trembling lies, afraid

Lest fire his ivory, amber, gold, invade.

The naked Cynic mocks such restless cares,
His earthen tub no conflagration fears;
If cracked, to-morrow he procures a new,
Or, coarsely soldering, makes the old one do.
Even Philip's son, when, in his little cell
Content, he saw the mighty master dwell,

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Owned, with a sigh, that he, who nought desired,
Was happier far, than he who worlds required,
And whose ambition certain dangers brought,
Vast, and unbounded, as the object sought.-
Fortune, advanced to heaven by fools alone,
Would lose, were wisdom ours, her shadowy throne.
"What call I, then, ENOUGH?" What will afford

A decent habit, and a frugal board;

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What Epicurus' little garden bore,

And Socrates sufficient thought, before:

These squared by Nature's rules their blameless life-
Nature and Wisdom never are at strife.

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You think, perhaps, these rigid means too scant,

And that I ground philosophy on want;

Take then, (for I will be indulgent now,

And something for the change of times allow,)
As much as Otho for a knight requires :-
If this, unequal to your wild desires,
Contract your brow; enlarge the sum, and take
As much as two,-as much as three-will make.
If yet, in spite of this prodigious store,
Your craving bosom yawn, unfilled, for more,
Then, all the wealth of Lydia's king, increast
By all the treasures of the gorgeous East,
Will not content you; no, nor all the gold

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Of that proud slave, whose mandate Rome controlled,

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Who swayed the Emperor, and whose fatal word
Plunged in the Empress' breast the lingering sword!

SATIRE XV.

TO VOLUSIUS BITHYNICUS.

Who knows not to what monstrous gods, my friend,
The mad inhabitants of Egypt bend?—

The snake-devouring ibis, these enshrine,
Those think the crocodile alone divine;

Others, where Thebes' vast ruins strew the ground,
And shattered Memnon yields a magic sound,

Set up a glittering brute of uncouth shape,
And bow before the image of an ape!
Thousands regard the hound with holy fear,
Not one, Diana: and 'tis dangerous here,
To violate an onion, or to stain
The sanctity of leeks with tooth profane.
O holy nations! Sacro-sanct abodes!
Where every garden propagates its gods!
They spare the fleecy kind, and think it ill,
The blood of lambkins, or of kids, to spill:
But, human flesh-O! that is lawful fare,
And you may eat it without scandal there.

When, at the amazed Alcinous' board, of old,
Ulysses of so strange an action told,

He moved of some the mirth, of more the gall,
And, for a lying vagrant, passed with all.
"Will no one plunge this babbler in the waves,
(Worthy a true Charybdis,)—while he raves
Of monsters seen not since the world began,
Cyclops and Læstrigons, who feed on man!
For me I less should doubt of Scylla's train,
Of rocks that float and jostle in the main,
Of bladders filled with storms, of men, in fine,
By magic changed, and driven to grunt with swine,
Than of his cannibals :-the fellow feigns,
As if he thought Phæacians had no brains."

Thus, one, perhaps, more sober than the rest,
Observed, and justly, of their travelled guest,
Who spoke of prodigies till then unknown;
Yet brought no attestation but his own.
-I bring my wonders, too; and I can tell,
When Junius, late, was consul, what befell,
Near Coptus' walls; tell of a people stained
With deeper guilt than tragedy e'er feigned:
For, sure, no buskined bard, from Pyrrha's time,
E'er taxed a whole community with crime;
Take then a scene yet to the stage unknown,
And, by a nation, acted-IN OUR OWN!

Between two neighbouring towns a deadly hate,
Sprung from a sacred grudge of ancient date,
Yet burns; a hate no lenients can assuage,
No time subdue, a rooted, rancorous rage!
Blind bigotry, at first, the evil wrought:
For each despised the other's gods, and thought
Its own the true, the genuine, in a word,
The only deities to be adored!

And now the Ombite festival drew near:
When the prime Tent'rites, envious of their cheer,
Resolved to seize the occasion, to annoy
Their feast, and spoil the sacred week of joy.—
It came the hour the thoughtless Ombites greet,
And crowd the porches, crowd the public street,
With tables richly spread; where, night and day,
Plunged in the abyss of gluttony, they lay:
(For savage as the nome appears, it vies
In luxury, if I MAY TRUST MY EYES,

With dissolute Canopus :) Six were past,

Six days of riot, and the seventh and last

Rose on the feast; and now the Tent'rites thought,
A cheap, a bloodless victory might be bought,
O'er such a helpless crew; nor thought they wrong,
Nor could the event be doubtful, where a throng

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Of drunken revellers, stammering, reeling-ripe,
And capering to a sooty minstrel's pipe,

Coarse unguents, chaplets, flowers, on this side fight;
On that, keen hatred, and deliberate spite!

At first both sides, though eager to engage,
With taunts and jeers, the heralds of their rage,
Blow up their mutual fury; and anon,
Kindled to madness, with loud shouts rush on;

Deal, though unarmed, their vengeance blindly round,
And with clenched fists print many a ghastly wound.
Then might you see, amid the desperate fray,
Features disfigured, noses torn away,

Hands, where the gore of mangled eyes yet reeks,
And jaw-bones starting through the cloven cheeks!
But this is sport, mere children's play, they cry—
As yet beneath their feet no bodies lie,

And, to what purpose should such armies fight
The cause of heaven, if none be slain outright?
Roused at the thought, more fiercely they engage,
With stones, the weapons of intestine rage;
Yet not precisely such, to tell

you true,
As Turnus erst, or mightier Ajax, threw:
Nor quite so large as that two-handed stone,
Which bruised Æneas on the huckle-bone;
But such as men, in our degenerate days,
Ah, how unlike to theirs! make shift to raise.
Even in his time, Mæonides could trace
Some diminution of the human race:
Now, earth, grown old and frigid, rears with pain
A pigmy brood, a weak and wicked train;
Which every god, who marks their passions vile,
Regards with laughter, though he loathes the while.
But to our tale. Enforced with armed supplies,
The zealous Tent'rites feel their courage rise,
And wave their swords, and, kindling at the sight,
Press on, and with fell rage renew the fight.
The Ombites flee; they follow :-in the rear,
A luckless wretch, confounded by his fear,

Trips and falls headlong; with loud yelling cries,

The pack rush in, and seize him as he lies.
And now the conquerors, none to disappoint

Of the dire banquet, tear him joint by joint,

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And dole him round; the bones yet warm, they gnaw,

And champ the flesh that heaves beneath their jaw.
They want no cook to dress it-'twould be long,
And appetite is keen, and rage is strong.

And here, Volusius, I rejoice at least,

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That fire was unprofaned by this cursed feast,

Fire, rapt from heaven! and you will, sure, agree
To greet the element's escape, with me.