Nor ever did ambitious rage Make him into a painted cage, Or the false forest of a well-hung room, For honour and preferment, come. Now, blessings on you all, ye heroic race, Who keep your primitive powers and rights so well, Though men and angels fell!

Of all material lives the highest place

To you is justly given;

And ways

and walks the nearest heaven.

Whilst wretched we, yet vain and proud, think fit
To boast, that we look up to it.
Even to the universal tyrant, Love,

You homage pay but once a-year:
None so degenerous and unbirdly prove,
As his perpetual yoke to bear;
None, but a few unhappy household fowl,
Whom human lordship does control;

Who from their birth corrupted were
By bondage, and by man's example here.

He's no small prince, who every day

Thus to himself can say:

Now will I sleep, now eat, now sit, 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 man and I will presently go ride

(For we, before, have nothing to provide,

Nor, after, are to render an account)
To Dover, Berwick, or the Cornish mount.
If thou but a short journey take,

As if thy last thou wert to make,

Business must be dispatch'd, ere thou canst part,

Nor canst thou stir, unless there be

A hundred horse and men to wait on thee,
And many a mule, and many a cart;

What an unwieldy man thou art!
The Rhodian Colossus so

A journey, too, might go.

Where honour, or where conscience does not bind,

No other law shall shackle me;

Slave to myself I will not be,

Nor shall my future actions be confined

By my own present mind.

Who by resolves and vows engaged does stand
For days that yet belong to Fate,
Does, like an unthrift, mortgage his estate
Before it falls into his hand:

The bondman of the cloister so,

All that he does receive, does always owe;

And still as time comes in, it

goes away Not to enjoy, but debts to pay..

Unhappy slave, and pupil to a bell,

Which his hours-work, as well as hours, does tell! Unhappy, till the last, the kind releasing knell.

If life should a well-order'd poem be

(In which he only hits the white

Who joins true profit with the best delight),
The more heroic strain let others take,
Mine the Pindaric way I'll make ;

The matter shall be grave, the numbers loose and
It shall not keep one settled pace of time, [free;
In the same tune it shall not always chime,
Nor shall each day just to his neighbour rhyme;

VOL. III.

A thousand liberties it shall dispense,

all without offence

And yet
shall manage
Or to the sweetness of the sound or greatness of the
Nor shall it never from one subject start, [sense;
Nor seek transitions to depart,

Nor its set way o'er stiles and bridges make,
Nor thorough lanes a compass take,
As if it fear'd some trespass to commit,
When the wide air's a road for it.
So the imperial eagle does not stay
Till the whole carcass he devour,
That's fallen into its power:

As if his generous hunger understood
That he can never want plenty of food,
He only sucks the tasteful blood;

And to fresh game flies cheerfully away; [prey.
To kites, and meaner birds, he leaves the mangled

II.

OF SOLITUDE.

"NUNQUAM minus solus, quam cum solus," is now become a very vulgar saying. Every man, and almost every boy, for these seventeen hundred has had it in his mouth. But it was years, at first spoken by the excellent Scipio, who was without question a most eloquent and witty person, as well as the most wise, most worthy, most happy, and the greatest of all mankind. His meaning, no doubt, was this, that he found more satisfaction to his mind, and more improvement of it, by solitude than by company; and, to show

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', passed the remainder of his glorious life no less gloriously. This house Seneca went to see so long after with great veneration; and, among other things, describes his baths to have been of so mean a structure, that now, says he, the basest 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 wisdom as was learned by Scipio from the highest prosperities. This would be no wonder, if it were as truly as it is colourably and wittily said by Monsieur de Montaigne," that ambition itself might teach us to love solitude; there is nothing does so much hate to have companions." It is true, it loves to have its elbows free, it detests to have company on either side; but it delights above all things in a train behind, ay, and ushers too before it. But the greatest part of men are so far from the opinion of that noble Roman, that, if they chance at any time to be without company, they are like a becalmed ship; they never move but by the wind of other men's breath, and have no oars of their own to steer withal. It is very fantastical and contradictory in human nature, that men should love themselves above all the rest of the world, and yet never endure to be with themSeneca, Epist. lxxxvi.

selves. When they are in love with a mistress, all other persons are importunate and burthensome to them. "Tecum vivere amem, tecum obeam lubens," they would live and die with her alone.

"Sic ego secretis possum bene vivere sylvis,
Quà nulla humano sit via trita pede.
Tu mihi curarum requies, tu nocte vel atrå

Lumen, & in solis tu mihi turba locis"."

With thee for ever I in woods could rest,

Where never human foot the ground has press'd. Thou from all shades the darkness canst exclude, And from a desert banish solitude.

And yet our dear self is so wearisome to us, that we can scarcely support its conversation for an hour together. This is such an odd temper of mind, as Catullus expresses towards one of his mistresses, whom we may suppose to have been of a very unsociable, humour 3.

"Odi, et amo: quare id faciam fortasse requiris.

Nescio; sed fieri sentio, et excrucior."

I hate, and yet I love thee too;

How can that be? I know not how ;

Only that so it is I know;

And feel with torment that 'tis so.

It is a deplorable condition this, and drives a man sometimes to pitiful shifts, in seeking how to avoid himself.

The truth of the matter is, that neither he who is a fop in the world is a fit man to be alone; nor he who has set his heart much upon the world 3 De amore suo, lxxxiii.

2 4 Tibull. xiii. 9.