Note 109 — HOGARTH ILLUSTRATED. (continued 2)
Reading edition
This satire is wound up with a well-turned apology for the folly, but even here a dart must be hurled at the Duke.—The dart recoils, and returns to him who threw it; for although his Grace was vainly ostentatious, and absurdly extravagant, he was kind-hearted and beneficent to a fault:—
"Yet hence the poor are cloth'd, the hungry fed: Health to himself, and to his infants bread, The lab'rer bears: what his hard heart denies, His charitable vanity supplies. Another age shall see the golden ear Embrown the slope, and nod on the parterre; Deep harvests bury all his pride has plann'd, And laughing Ceres re-assume the land."
It is a singular circumstance that the prophecy in the last four lines (for a prophecy it must be called) should be fulfilled, I had almost said in the poet's lifetime. A very few years after his death, when Hallet the upholsterer purchased Canons, the park was ploughed up and sown with corn.
I have somewhere seen an epigram, written soon after the publication of this epistle:—
"What Chandos builds let Pope no more deride, Because he took not Nature for his guide, Since, mighty Bard—in thy own form we see That nature may mistake, as well as he."