What would it boot, if I, to gain my end,
Forego my quiet, and my ease of mind,
Still feared, at last betrayed by my great friend?
’Another cause, which I must boldly own,
And not the least, for which I quit the town,
Is to behold it made the common-sewer,[1]
Where France does all her filth and ordure pour;
What spark of true old English rage can bear
Those, who were slaves at home, to lord it here?
We've all our fashions, language, compliments,
Our music, dances, curing, cooking thence;
And we shall have their poisoning too ere long,[2]
If still in the improvement we go on.
What would'st thou say, great Harry, should'st thou view
Thy gaudy fluttering race of English now,
Their tawdry clothes, pulvilios, essences;
Their Chedreux'[3] perruques, and those vanities,
Which thou, and they of old did so despise?
What would'st thou say to see the infected town
With the foul spawn of foreigners o'er run?
Hither from Paris, and all parts they come,
The spew and vomit of their gaols at home;
To court they flock, and to St. James’s-square,
And wriggle into great men's service there;
Footboys at first, till they, from wiping shoes,
Grow by degrees the masters of the house;
- ↑ The common-sewer of Paris and of Rome.—London.
- ↑ The recent death of the Duchess of Orleans, who was poisoned by her husband immediately after her return from her mission to England, is here pointed at. It was a current subject at the time, and is more than once alluded to by Dryden in his prologues; as in the prologue to the Spanish Friar:
’When murder's out what vice can we advance.
Unless the new-found poisoning trick of France?’ - ↑ So called from Chedreux, a celebrated maker of perruques in Paris. In Etherege's comedy of The Man of Mode, Sir Fopling Flutter boasts of his Chedreux periwig, of which Dryden gives a description in the epilogue. Dryden himself wore a Chedreux and a sword when he ate tarts with Mrs. Reeve in the Mulberry-garden.
