Like gnats, which too much heat of fummer brings; But cares do fwarm there, too, and those have stings: As, when the honey does too open lie, A thousand wafps about it fly : Nor will the mafter ev'n to fhare admit; The master stands aloof, and dares not taste of it. 'Tis morning; well; I fain would yet fleep on; To court, or to the noisy hall: And a spring-tide of clients is come in. Make an escape; out at the postern flee, Why, mighty madman, what should hinder thee In all the freeborn nations of the air, Of foaring boldly, up into the sky, When, When, and wherever he thought good, And all his innocent pleasures of the wood, For a more plentiful or conftant food. Nor ever did ambitious rage Make him into a painted cage, Or the false forest of a well-hung room, › Of all material lives the highest place To you is justly given; And ways and walks the nearest heaven. He's no fmall prince, who every day Thus to himfelf can say; Now will I fleep, now eat, now fit, now walk, Now meditate alone, now with acquaintance talk ; This I will do, here I will stay, Or, if my fancy call me away, My My man and I will presently go ride As if thy laft thou wert to make, A hundred horfe and men to wait on thee, What an unwieldy man thou art! The Rhodian Coloffus fo A journey, too, might go. Where honour, or where confcience, does not bind, No other law fhall fhackle me; Slave to myself I will not be, Nor fhall my future actions be confin'd By my own present mind. Who by refolves and vows engag'd does stand Does, like an unthrift, mortgage his estate, Before it falls into his hand :. The bondman of the cloister fo, All that he does receive, does always owe; Unhappy flave, and pupil to a bell, Which his hours-work, as well as hours, does tell! If If life fhould a well-order'd poem be Who joins true profit with the best delight), The matter shall be grave, the numbers loose and free. It fhall not keep one settled pace of time, In the fame tune it shall not always chime, Nor fhall each day just to his neighbour rhyme; A thousand liberties it shall dispense, And yet fhall manage all without offence Or to the sweetness of the found, or greatness of the fense; Nor fhall it never from one fubje&t start, Nor feek transitions to depart, Nor its fet way o'er ftiles and bridges make, As if it fear'd fome trefpafs to commit, When the wide air 's a road for it. So the imperial eagle does not stay Till the whole carcafe he devour, As if his generous hunger understood And to fresh game flies chearfully away; To kites, and meaner birds, he leaves the mangled prey. II. OF SOLITUDE, "NUNQU JAM minus folus, , quam cum folus," is now become a very vulgar saying. Every man, and almost every boy, for these seventeen hundred years, has had it in his mouth. But it was at first spoken by the excellent Scipio, who was without question a moft eloquent and witty perfon, as well as the most wife, most worthy, most happy, and the greatest of all mankind. His meaning, no doubt, was this, that he found more fatisfaction to his mind, and more improvement of it, by folitude than by company; and, to fhew that he spoke not this loosely or out of vanity, after he had made Rome mistress of almost the whole world, he retired himself from it by a voluntary · exile, and at a private house, in the middle of a wood, near Linternum *, paffed the remainder of his glorious life no less gloriously. This house Seneca went to fee fo long after with great veneration; and, among other things, defcribes his baths to have been of fo mean a ftructure, that now, fays he, the bafeft of the people would despise them, and cry out, "Poor Scipio understood not how to live." What an authority is here for the credit of retreat! and happy had it been for Hannibal, if adversity could have taught him as > much wifdom as was learnt by Scipio from the highest * Seneca Epist, Ixxxvi. profperities. |