You saw your wife was chaste, yet throughly tried, <br />And, without doubt, you are hugely edified; <br />For, like our hero, whom we showed to-day, <br />You think no woman true, but in a play. <br />Love once did make a pretty kind of show; <br />Esteem and kindness in one breast would grow; <br />But 'twas heaven knows how many years ago. <br />Now some small chat, and guinea expectation, <br />Gets all the pretty creatures in the nation. <br />In comedy your little selves you meet; <br />'Tis Covent Garden drawn in Bridges Street. <br />Smile on our author then, if he has shown <br />A jolly nut-brown bastard of your own. <br />Ah! happy you, with ease and with delight, <br />Who act those follies, poets toil to write! <br />The sweating Muse does almost leave the chase; <br />She puffs, and hardly keeps your Protean vices pace. <br />Pinch you but in one vice, away you fly <br />To some new frisk of contrariety. <br />You roll like snow-balls, gathering as you run, <br />And get seven devils, when dispossessed of one. <br />Your Venus once was a Platonic queen, <br />Nothing of love beside the face was seen; <br />But every inch of her you now uncase, <br />And clap a vizard-mask upon the face; <br />For sins like these, the zealous of the land, <br />With little hair, and little or no band, <br />Declare how circulating pestilences <br />Watch, every twenty years, to snap offences. <br />Saturn, e'en now, takes doctoral degrees; <br />He'll do your work this summer without fees. <br />Let all the boxes, Phœbus, find thy grace, <br />And, ah, preserve the eighteen-penny place! <br />But for the pit confounders, let them go, <br />And find as little mercy as they show! <br />The actors thus, and thus thy poets pray; <br />For every critic saved, thou damn'st a play.<br /><br />John Dryden<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/an-epilogue-3/
