Will thrust a dagger at your breast
And tell you, 'twas a special jest,

By way of balm for healing.

Beware of tattlers; keep your ear
Close stopp'd against the tales they bear;
Fruits of their own invention;
The separation of chief friends

Is what their kindness most intends;
Their sport is your dissension.

Friendship that wantonly admits
A joco-serious play of wits
In brilliant altercation,

Is union such as indicates,
Like hand-in-hand insurance-plates,
Danger of conflagration.

! Some fickle creatures boast a soul
True as the needle to the pole ;

Yet shifting, like the weather,
The needle's constancy forego
For any novelty, and show

Its variations rather

Insensibility makes some
Unseasonably deaf and dumb,

When most you need their pity;
"Tis waiting till the tears shall fall
From Gog and Magog in Guildhall,
Those playthings of the city.

The great and small but rarely meet
On terms of amity complete:

Th' attempt would scarce be madder, from the bottom, hope At one huge stride to reach the top

Should any,

Courtier and patriot cannot mix
Their het'rogeneous politicks

Without an effervescence,
Such as of salts with lemon juice
But which is rarely known t' induce,
Like that, a coalescence.

Religion should extinguish strife,
And make a calm of human life.
But even those who differ
Only on topicks left at large,
How fiercely will they meet and charge
No combatants are stiffer.

To prove, alas! my main intent,
Needs no great cost of argument,
No cutting and contriving;
Seeking a real friend, we seem
T'adopt the chymist's golden dream
With still less hope of thriving.

Then judge, or ere you choose your mar.
As circumspectly as you can,
And, having made election,

See that no disrespect of yours,
Such as a friend but ill endures,
Enfeeble his affection.

It is not timber, lead, and stone,
An architect requires alone,
To finish a great building;

The palace were but half complete,
Could he by any chance forget
The carving and the gilding,

As similarity of mind,

Or something not to be defin'd,

First rivets our attention;

So, manners decent and polite,

The same we practis'd at first sight,
Must save it from declension.

The man who hails you Tom-or Jack,
And proves by thumping on your back
His sense of your great merit,
Is such a friend, that one had need
Be very much his friend indeed,
To pardon, or to bear it.

Some friends make this their prudent plan"Say little, and hear all you can ?"

Safe policy, but hateful.

So barren sands imbibe the show'r,
But render neither fruit nor flow'r
Unpleasant and ungrateful

They whisper trivial things, and small;
But, to communicate at all

Things serious, deem improper;
Their feculence and froth they show,
But keep their best contents below,
Just like a simm'ring copper.

These samples (for alas! at last
These are but samples, and a taste
Of evils yet unmentioned)
May prove the task, a task indeed,
In which 'tis much, if we succeed,
However well-intention'd.

Pursue the theme, and you shall find
A disciplin'd and furnish'd mind
To be at least expedient,

And after summing all the rest,
Religion ruling in the breast
A principal ingredient.

True friendship has, in short, a grace
More than terrestrial in its face,*

That proves it heav'n-descended:
Man's love of woman not so pure,
Nor, when sincerest, so secure
To last till life is ended.

ON THE LOSS OF THE ROYAL GEORGE.

[To the March in Scipio.]

WRITTEN WHEN THE NEWS ARRIVED

[September, 1782.]

TOLL for the brave!

The brave that are no more,

All sunk beneath the wave,

Fast by their native shore!

Eight hundred of the brave,

Whose courage well was tried,

Had made the vessel heel,

And laid her on her side.

A land breeze shook the shrouds,
And she was overset;

Down went the Royal George,
With all her crew complete.

Toll for the brave!

Brave Kempenfelt is gone;

His last sea-fight is fought;

His work of glory done.

It was not in the battle;

No tempest gave the shock;
She sprang no fatal leak ;
She ran upon no rock.

His sword was in his sheath;
His fingers held the pen,
When Kempenfelt went down,
With twice four hundred men.

Weigh the vessel up,

Once dreaded by our foes!

And mingle with our cup,

The tear that England owes.

Her timbers yet are sound,

And she may float again, Full-charg'd with England's thunder,

And plough the distant main.

But Kempenfelt is gone,

His victories are o'er ;

And he and his eight hundred,

Shall plough the wave no more. 10*