Page:The Works of the Rev. Jonathan Swift, Volume 7.djvu/323

Rh For if to Michaelmas you stay, The new-born flesh will melt away; The 'squire in scorn will fly the house For better game, and look for grouse; But here, before the frost can mar it, We'll make it firm with beef and claret.

S, when a beauteous nymph decays, We say, she's past her dancing days; So poets lose their feet by time, And can no longer dance in rhyme. Your annual bard had rather chose To celebrate your birth in prose: Yet merry folks, who want by chance A pair to make a country dance, Call the old housekeeper, and get her To till a place, for want of better; While Sheridan is off the hooks, And friend Delany at his books, That Stella may avoid disgrace, Once more the dean supplies their place. Beauty and wit, too sad a truth! Have always been confin'd to youth; The god of wit and beauty's queen, He twenty-one, and she fifteen. No poet ever sweetly sung, Unless he were, like Phœbus, young; Nor ever nymph inspir'd to rhyme, Unless, like Venus, in her prime. Rh