An unpaid reck'ning on the frieze was scor'd,
And five crack'd tea-cups dress'd the chimney board.
And now imagine after his soliloquy, the landlord to make his
appearance, in order to dun him for the reckoning:--
Not with that face, so servile and so gay,
That welcomes every stranger that can pay,
With sulky eye he smoak'd the patient man,
Then pull'd his breeches tight, and thus began, etc.
All this is taken, you see, from nature. It is a good remark of
Montaign[e]'s, that the wisest men often have friends, with whom they do
not care how much they play the fool. Take my present follies as
instances of regard. Poetry is a much easier, and more agreeable species
of composition than prose, and could a man live by it, it were no
unpleasant employment to be a poet.'
In Letter xxix of 'The Citizen of the World', 1762, i. 119-22, which
first appeared in 'The Public Ledger' for May 2, 1760, they have a
different setting. They are read at a club of authors by a 'poet, in
shabby finery,' who asserts that he has composed them the day before.
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