Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE BOOKWORM. -,.,., , , Translated from the Latin of s Parnell. rimdor e Besa. COME hither, boy, we'll hunt to day The bookworm, ravening beast of prey, Produc'd by parent Earth, at odds, As fame reports it, with the gods. Him frantic hunger wildly drives Against a thousand authors' lives : Through all the fields of wit he flies ; Dreadful his head with clustering eyes, With horns without, and tusks within, And scales to serve him for a skin. Observe him nearly, lest he climb To wound the bards of ancien time, Or down the vale of fancy go To tear some modern wretch below. On every corner fix thine eye, Or ten to one he slips thee by. See where his teeth a passage eat : We'll rouse him from his deep retreat. But who the shelter 's forc'd to give ? 'Tis sacred Virgil, as I live ! From leaf to leaf, from song to song He draws the tadpole form along, He mounts the gilded edge before, He's up, he scuds the cover o'er, He turns, he doubles, there he past, And here we have him, caught at last. Insatiate brute, whose teeth abuse The sweetest servants of the Muse— Nay, never offer to deny, I took thee in the fact to fly. His roses nipt in every page, My poor Anacreon mourns thy rage ; By thee my Ovid wounded lies ; By thee my Lesbia's Sparrow dies ; Thy rabid teeth have half destroy'd The work of love in Biddy Floyd ; They rent Belinda's locks away, And spoil'd the Blouzelind of Gay. For all, for every single deed, Relentless justice bids thee bleed : Then fall a victim to the Nine, Myself the priest, my desk the shrine. Bring Homer, Virgil, Tasso near, To pile a sacred altar here : Hold, boy, thy hand outruns thy wit, You reach'd the plays that Dennis writ; You reach'd me Philips' rustic strain ; Pray take your mortal bards again. Come, bind the victim,—t...