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