Confute with candour, where you can confute,
Reason and arrogance but poorly suit.
Yourself may fall before some abler pen,
Infallibility is not for men.
With modest diffidence new schemes indite,
Be not too positive, tho' in the right.
What man of sense would value vulgar praise,
Or rise on Penny's prose, or duller lays?
Tho' pointed fingers mark the Man of Fame,
And literary Grocers chaunt your name;
Tho' in each Taylors book-case Catcott shines,
With ornamental flow'rs and gilded lines;
Tho' youthful Ladies who by instinct scan
The Natural Philosophy of Man,
Can ev'ry reason of your work repeat,
As sands in Africa retain the heat:
Yet check your flowing pride: Will all allow
To wreathe the labour'd laurel round your brow?
Some may with seeming arguments dispense,
Tickling your vanity to wound your sense:
But Clayfield censures, and demonstrates too,
Your theory is certainly untrue;
On Reason and Newtonian rules he proves,
How distant your machine from either moves.
But my objections may be reckon'd weak,
As nothing but my mother tongue I speak;
Else would I ask; by what immortal Pow'r
All Nature was dissolv'd as in an hour.
How, when the earth acquir'd a solid state,
And rising mountains saw the waves abate,
Each particle of matter sought its kind,
All in a strata regular combin'd?
When instantaneously the liquid heap
Harden'd to rocks, the barriers of the deep,
Why did not earth unite a stony mass;
Since stony filaments thro' all must pass?
If on the wings of air the planets run,
Why are they not impell'd into the sun?
Philosophy, nay common sense, will prove
All passives with their active agents move.
If the diurnal motion of the air,
Revolves the planets in their destin'd sphere;
How are the secondary orbs impell'd?
How are the moons from falling headlong held?