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Ambition, avarice, penury incurred

By endless riot, vanity, the luft

Of pleasure and variety, dispatch,

As duly as the swallows disappear,

The world of wandering knights and squires to town.
London ingulphs them all! The fhark is there,
And the fhark's prey; the spendthrift and the leech,
That fucks him. There the fycophant, and he
Who, with bare-headed and obfequious bows,
Begs a warm office, doomed to a cold jail
And groat per diem, if his patron frown.

The levee fwarms, as if in golden pomp

Were charactered on every statesman's door, "BATTERED AND BANKRUPT FORTUNES MENDED

HERE."

These are the charms, that fully and eclipse
The charms of nature. "Tis the cruel gripe,
That lean hard-handed poverty inflicts,
The hope of better things, the chance to win,
The wish to fhine, the thirft to be amused,
That at the found of winter's hoary wing
Unpeople all our counties of fuch herds

Of fluttering, loitering, cringing, begging, loofe
And wanton vagrants, as make London, vaft
And boundless as it is, a crowded coop:

Oh thou, resort and mart of all the earth, Chequered with all complexions of mankind, And spotted with all crimes; in whom I fee Much that I love, and more that I admire, And all that I abhor; thou freckled fair, That pleaseft and yet shockeft me, I can laugh And I can weep, can hope, and can despond, Feel wrath and pity, when I think on thee! Ten righteous would have saved a city once, And thou haft many righteous.-Well for theeThat falt preferves thee; more corrupted elfe, And therefore more obnoxious, at this hour Than Sodom in her day had power to be, For whom God heard his Abraham plead in vain.

THE TA S K.

BOOK IV.

ARGUMENT OF THE FOURTH BOOK.

The poft comes in.-The newspaper is read.-The world contemplated at a diftance.—Address to Winter.-The rural amusements of a winter evening compared with the fashionable ones.-Addrefs to evening.-A brown ftudy.-Fall of fnow in the evening. The waggoner-A poor family-piece.— The rural thief-Public houses.—The multitude of them cenfured.-The farmer's daughter: what She was what he is.-The fimplicity of country manners almoft loft.-Caufes of the change.-Defertion of the country by the rich.-Neglect of magiftrates.-The militia principally in fault.—The new recruit and his transformation.—Reflection on bodies corporate. The love of rural objects natural to all, and never to be totally extinguished.

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