Prologue to the University of Oxford

SPOKEN BY MR HART, AT THE ACTING OF "THE SILENT WOMAN."

  What Greece, when learning flourish'd, only knew,
  Athenian judges, you this day renew;
  Here too are annual rites to Pallas done,
  And here poetic prizes lost or won.
  Methinks I see you, crown'd with olives, sit,
  And strike a sacred horror from the pit.
  A day of doom is this of your decree,
  Where even the best are but by mercy free:
  A day, which none but Jonson durst have wish'd to see.
  Here they, who long have known the useful stage,                    10
  Come to be taught themselves to teach the age.
  As your commissioners our poets go,
  To cultivate the virtue which you sow;
  In your Lycaeum first themselves refined,
  And delegated thence to human-kind.
  But as ambassadors, when long from home,
  For new instructions to their princes come;
  So poets, who your precepts have forgot,
  Return, and beg they may be better taught:
  Follies and faults elsewhere by them are shown,                     20
  But by your manners they correct their own.
  The illiterate writer, empiric-like, applies
  To minds diseased unsafe, chance remedies:
  The learn'd in schools, where knowledge first began,
  Studies with care the anatomy of man;
  Sees virtue, vice, and passions in their cause,
  And fame from science, not from fortune, draws.
  So Poetry, which is in Oxford made
  An art, in London only is a trade.
  There haughty dunces, whose unlearned pen                           30
  Could ne'er spell grammar, would be reading men.
  Such build their poems the Lucretian way;
  So many huddled atoms make a play;
  And if they hit in order, by some chance,
  They call that nature, which is ignorance.
  To such a fame let mere town wits aspire,
  And their gay nonsense their own cits admire.
  Our poet, could he find forgiveness here,
  Would wish it rather than a plaudit there.
  He owns no crown from those Prætorian bands,                        40
  But knows that right is in the senate's hands;
  Not impudent enough to hope your praise,
  Low at the Muses' feet his wreath he lays,
  And, where he took it up, resigns his bays.
  Kings make their poets whom themselves think fit,
  But 'tis your suffrage makes authentic wit.
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