DEAR DAN,
Here I return my trust, nor ask
One penny for remittance;
If I have well perform’d my task,
Pray send me an acquittance.
Too long I bore this weighty pack,
As Hercules the sky;
Now take him you, Dan Atlas, back,
Let me be stander-by.
Not all the witty things you speak
In compass of a day,
Not half the puns you make a-week,
Should bribe his longer stay.
With me you left him out at nurse,
Yet are you not my debtor;
For, as he hardly can be worse,
I ne’er could make him better.
He rhymes and puns, and puns and rhymes,
Just as he did before;
And, when he’s lash’d a hundred times,
He rhymes and puns the more.
When rods are laid on school-boys’ bums,
The more they frisk and skip:
The school-boys’ top but louder hums
The more they use the whip.
Thus, a lean beast beneath a load
(A beast of Irish breed)
Will, in a tedious dirty road,
Outgo the prancing steed.
You knock him down and down in vain,
And lay him flat before ye,
For soon as he gets up again,
He’ll strut, and cry, Victoria!
At every stroke of mine, he fell,
’Tis true he roar’d and cried;
But his impenetrable shell
Could feel no harm beside.
The tortoise thus, with motion slow,
Will clamber up a wall;
Yet, senseless to the hardest blow,
Gets nothing but a fall.
Dear Dan, then, why should you, or I,
Attack his pericrany?
And, since it is in vain to try,
We’ll send him to Delany.