———————————Now you who aim,
 With fading power, at bright immortal fame;
 Ambitious monarchs, all whom glory warms,
 Cease your vain toil, throw down your conquering arms;
 Your active souls confine, since you must die
 Like vulgar men, your names and actions lie
 Where Trojan heroes, had not Homer lived,
 Had lain forgot, nor ruined Troy survived;
 No more their glories I can e’er retrieve,
 For nature can no second Dryden give.

Terpsichore, a Lyric Muse, by Mrs L. D. ex tempore. Albeit a lyric muse, Terpsichore laments in hexameters:

Just as the gods were listening to my strains,
 And thousand loves danced o’er the etherial plains,
 With my own radiant hair my harp I strung,
 And in glad concert all my sisters sung:
 An universal harmony above
 Inspired us all with gaiety and love;
 A horrid sound dashed our immortal mirth,
 Wafted by sighs from the unlucky earth,
 Et cætera, et cætera.

Polyhymnia, the Muse of Rhetoric, by Mrs D. E. This lady concludes the volume thus:

Incessant groans be all my rhetoric now!
 My immortality I would forego,
 Rather than drag this chain of endless woe.
 O mighty Father, hear a daughter’s prayer,
 Cure me by death from deathless sad despair!

These extracts are taken from the presentation copy of this rare book, in the library of Mr Bindley, of Somerset-House, whose liberality I have had already repeated occasion to acknowledge.

No. XIII.
VERSES
IN PRAISE OF MR DRYDEN.
To Mr Dryden, by Jo. Addison, Esq.

How long, great poet, shall thy sacred lays
 Provoke our wonder, and transcend our praise!
 Can neither injuries of time, or age,
 Damp thy poetic heat, and quench thy rage?
 Not so thy Ovid in his exile wrote;
 Grief chilled his breast, and checked his rising thought;
 Pensive and sad, his drooping muse betrays
 The Roman genius in its last decays.
 Prevailing warmth has still thy mind possest,
 And second youth is kindled in thy breast.
 Thou mak’st the beauties of the Romans known,
 And England boasts of riches not her own:
 Thy lines have heightened Virgil’s majesty,
 And Horace wonders at himself in thee.
 Thou teachest Persius to inform our isle
 In smoother numbers, and a clearer style:
 And Juvenal, instructed in thy page,
 Edges his satire, and improves his rage.
 Thy copy casts a fairer light on all,
 And still outshines the bright original.
 Now Ovid boasts the advantage of thy song,
 And tells his story in the British tongue;
 Thy charming verse, and fair translations show
 How thy own laurel first began to grow;
 How wild Lycaon, changed by angry Gods,
 And frighted at himself, ran howling through the woods.
 O may’st thou still the noble tale prolong,
 Nor age, nor sickness interrupt thy song!
 Then may we wond’ring read, how human limbs
 Have watered kingdoms, and dissolved in streams,
 Of those rich fruits that on the fertile mould
 Turned yellow by degrees, and ripened into gold:
 How some in feathers, or a ragged hide,
 Have lived a second life, and different natures tried
 Then will thy Ovid, thus transformed, reveal
 A nobler change than he himself can tell.

Mag. Coll. Oxon. June 2, 1693.

INDEX.