If you cannot be a poet, be a poetaster; and if you cannot be that, be a
poetess, or "she-poet," as Johnson, in his big dictionary, defines the
word. So "gently take all that ungently comes," and hammer away as
sedulously as old Boileau. Somebody will, undoubtedly, in the next age,
relish your rinsings. A poet, you know, is a prophet. Console yourself
by vaticinating in the bower of your bed-chamber, as you count the feet
upon your fingers, your own immortality. If 'tis a delusion, 'tis a
cheap one, to which even a poet can afford to treat himself. Play with
and humor your life, till you fall asleep, and then the care will be
over! Meanwhile, you must be more stupid than I think, if you cannot
find somebody to give you your fodder of flattery. You need not blush,
for I know that you like it, and you need not be ashamed of liking it.
We all do,--we are all women in that regard; although the honestest man
to confess it that I ever heard of was Sir Godfrey Kneller, who said to
Pope, when he was painting his picture, "I can't do so well as I should
do, unless you flatter me a little; pray, flatter me, Mr. Pope! You know
I love to be flattered."

You see, my excellent Robert, that, by some hocus-pocus which I do not
exactly comprehend, myself, I have introduced a wheel within a wheel, a
letter within a letter, a play within a play, after the manner of
the old dramatists; and I beg you to make a note that the foregoing
admonitions and most sapient counsels are not addressed to you. You are
something of a philosopher; but you are not, like Mr. Stephen Duck,
"something of a philosopher _and_ something of a poet"; for I do not
believe, O fortunate youth, that you ever invoked the ten ladies _minus_
one in your life; and I shrewdly suspect, that, so far from knowing the
difference between a male and a female rhyme, you are unfamiliar with
the close family connection between "trees" and "breeze," or between