WHAT I shall leave thee none can tell,
But all shall say I wish thee well;
I wish thee far before all wealth,
Both bodily and ghostly health;
Not too much wealth nor wit come to thee,
So much of either may undo thee.
I wish thee learning, not for show,
Enough for to instruct and know;
Not such as gentlemen require,
To prate at table or at fire.
I wish thee all thy mother's graces,
Thy father's fortunes, and his places;
I wish thee friends, and one at court,
Not to build on, but support;
To keep thee, not in doing many
Oppressions, but from suffering any.
I wish thee peace in all thy ways,
Nor lazy, nor contentious days;
And, when thy soul and body part,
As innocent as now thou art.-Richard Corbet.
Take this in good part, whatsover thou be,
And wish me no worse than I wish unto thee.
My wishes are but few,
All easy to fulfil:
I make the limits of my power,
The bounds unto my will.
I fear no care for gold,
Well-doing is my wealth;
My mind to me an empire is,
While grace affordeth health.
Look around the habitable world, how few
Know their own good, or knowing it, pursue!
How void of reason are our hopes and fears!
What in the conduct of our life appears
So well design'd, so luckily begun,
But, when we have our wish, we wish undone.
Dryden, from Juvenal.
THIS fellow picks up wit, as pigeons pease,
And utters it again when Jove doth please;
He is wit's pedlar, and retails his wares.-Shakspere.
You can't expect that they should be great wits,
Who have small purses, they usually
Sympathize together; wit is expensive,
It must be dieted with delicacies,
It must be suckled with the richest wines,
Or else it will grow flat and dull.
Wit is much talked of, not to be defined,
He that pretends to most, too, has least share.
True wit is nature to advantage dress'd;
What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd;
Something whose truth convinc'd at sight we find,
That gives us back the image of our mind.
As shades more sweetly recommend the light,
So modest plainness sets off sprightly wit;
For works may have more wit than does 'em good,
As bodies perish through excess of blood.
There are, whom heaven has bless'd with store of wit Yet want as much again to manage it;
For wit and judgment ever are at strife,
Though meant each other's, and like man and wife.
Wits are a despicable race of men,
If they confine their talents to the pen.
When the man shocks us, while the writer shines,
Our scorn in life, our envy in his lines.
Yet, proud of parts, with prudence some dispense,
And play the fool because they're men of sense.
What instances bleed recent in each thought,
Of men to ruin by their genius brought;
Against their wills, what numbers ruin shun,
Purely through want of wit to be undone:
Nature has shown, by making it so rare,
That wit's a jewel which we need not wear.—
Prudence protects and guides us; wit betrays;
A splendid source of ill ten thousand ways,
A certain snare to miseries immense,
A gay prerogative from common sense;
Unless strong judgment that wild thing can tame, And break to paths of virtue and of fame.— Young.
The rays of wit gild wheresoe'er they strike,
But are not therefore fit for all alike;
They charm the lively, but the grave offend,
And raise a foe as often as a friend:
Like the resistless beams of blazing light,
That cheer the strong and pain the weakly sight.
Stillingfleet.
True wit is everlasting, like the sun,
Which, though sometimes behind a cloud retir'd.
Breaks out again, and is by all admir'd:
A flame that glows amidst conceptions fit,
E'en something of divine, and more than wit,
Itself unseen, yet all things by it shown,
Describing all men, but described by none.
All wit does but divert men from the road
In which things vulgarly are understood,
And force mistake and ignorance to own
A better sense than commonly is known.
WITH-WITHOUT.
FARE thee well! yet think awhile,
Of one whose bosom bleeds to doubt thee;
Who now would rather trust that smile,
And die with thee, than live without thee.
In all thy humours, whether grave or mellow,
Thou 'rt such a touchy, testy, pleasant fellow,
Hast so much wit, and mirth, and spleen about thee,
There is no living with thee, nor without thee.
HE whose days
The grace of his Creator doth despise,
That will not use his gifts for thankless niggardize.
So many miseries have crazed my voice,
That my woe-stricken tongue is still.-Shakspere.
From the low prayer of want, and plaint of woe,
Oh, never, never turn away thine ear!
Forlorn in this bleak wilderness below,
Ah! what were man should heaven refuse to hear?
To others do, (the law is not severe,)
What to thyself thou wishest to be done;
Forgive thy foes, and love thy parents dear,
And friends, and native land; nor these alone,
All human woe and weal learn thou to make thine own.
But what strange art, what magic can dispose
The troubled mind to change its native woes.
Can it be true that day's refulgent orb,
Throned in his life of light, the placid moon,
Or silent stars, or aught that dwells in heaven,
In human woe rejoices? No! it is man,
Who, with unhallowed lips, would make the gods
Bear the iniquity his heart conceived.
Alas! there is no chord in human life,
Whose natural tone breathes not of woe!-there seems
Even in boyhood, when the world is rife
With buds and birds, with flowers and sunny beams
Along our being's course, wherein it streams
Some haunting fever of decay-some shade
From whose destructive taint no aid redeems.
The mind of man when agonized with woe,
Is like the raging billows of the sea,
Torn and distracted-rolling to and fro
Tumultuously.
Aye, as the glasses where they view themselves;
Which are as easy broke as they make forms.
Women!-Help heaven! Men their creation mar
In profiting by them. Nay, call us ten times frail;
For we are soft as our complexions are,
And credulous to false prints.
Such is the fate unhappy women find,
And such the curse entailed upon our kind,
That man, the lawless libertine, may rove
Free and unquestion'd through the wilds of love;
While woman, sense and nature's easy fool,
If poor weak woman swerve from virtue's rule,
If strongly charmed, she leave the thorny way,
And in the softer paths of pleasure stray,
Ruin ensues; reproach and endless shame;
And one false step entirely damns her fame.
In vain with tears the loss she may deplore;
In vain look back to what she was before;
She sets, like stars that fall, to rise no more.
What story is not full of woman's falsehood?
The sex is all a sea of wide destruction:
We are vent'rous barks, that leave our home
For those sure dangers which their smiles conceal.
At first they draw us in with flattering looks
Of summer calms, and a soft gale of sighs:
Sometimes, like Syrens, charm us with their songs,
Dance on the waves, and show their golden locks;
But when the tempest comes, then, then they leave us,
Or rather help the new calamity!
And the whole storm is one injurious woman!
The lightning, follow'd with a thunderbolt,
Is marble-hearted woman. All the shelves,
The faithless winds, blind rocks, and sinking sands,
Are woman all! the wreck of wretched men.
The world was sad, the garden was a wild,
And man, the hermit, sighed till woman smiled.
|