Wanted--Authors of all-work to job for the season,
No matter which party, so faithful to neither;
Good hacks who, if posed for a rhyme or a reason.
Can manage, like ******, to do without either.
If in jail, all the better for out-o'-door topics;
Your jail is for travellers a charming retreat;
They can take a day's rule for a trip to the Tropics,
And sail round the world at their ease in the Fleet.
For a dramatist too the most useful of schools--
He can study high life in the King's Bench community;
Aristotle could scarce keep him more within rules,
And of place he at least must adhere to the unity.
Any lady or gentleman, come to an age
To have good "Reminiscences" (three-score or higher)
Will meet with encouragement--so much, per page,
And the spelling and grammar both found by the buyer.
No matter with what their remembrance is stockt,
So they'll only remember the quantum desired;--
Enough to fill handsomely Two Volumes, oct.,
Price twenty-four shillings, is all that's required.
They may treat us, like Kelly, with old jeu-d'esprits,
Like Dibdin, may tell of each farcical frolic;
Or kindly inform us, like Madame Genlis,[1]
That gingerbread-cakes always give them the colic.
Wanted also a new stock of Pamphlets on Corn
By "Farmers" and "Landholders"--(worthies whose lands
Enclosed all in bow-pots their attics adorn,
Or whose share of the soil maybe seen on their hands).
No-Popery Sermons, in ever so dull a vein,
Sure of a market;--should they too who pen 'em
Be renegade Papists, like Murtagh O'Sullivan,[2]
Something extra allowed for the additional venom.
Funds, Physics, Corn, Poetry, Boxing, Romance,
All excellent subjects for turning a penny;--
To write upon all is an author's sole chance
For attaining, at last, the least knowledge of any.
Nine times out of ten, if his title is good,
The material within of small consequence is;--
Let him only write fine, and, if not understood,
Why--that's the concern of the reader, not his.
Nota Bene--an Essay, now printing, to show,
That Horace (as clearly as words could express it)
Was for taxing the Fund-holders, ages ago,
When he wrote thus--"Quodcunque in Fund is, assess it."