Be modest, nor address your betters
With begging, vain, familiar letters.
A passage may be found,[7] I've heard,
In some old Greek or Latian bard,
Which says, "Would crows in silence eat
Their offals, or their better meat,
Their generous feeders not provoking
By loud and inharmonious croaking,
They might, unhurt by Envy's claws,
Live on, and stuff to boot their maws."
[Footnote 1: "King Henry the Fourth," Part I, Act ii,
Scene 4.--_W. E. B._]
[Footnote 2: Adapted from Hor., "Epist. ad Pisones," 140.--_W. E. B._]
[Footnote 3: See the "Petition to the Duke of Grafton," _post_,
p. 345.--_W. E. B._]
[Footnote 4: Alluding to Dr. Delany's ambitious choice of fixing in the
island of the Lake of Erin, where Sir Ralph Gore had a villa.--_Scott_.]
[Footnote 5: When residing at Chester, he obliged eight of his tributary
princes to row him in a barge upon the Dee. Hume's "History of England,"
vol. i, p. 106.--_W. E. B_.]
[Footnote 6: Which had suddenly dried up. See _post_, vol. ii, "Verses on
the sudden drying up of St. Patrick's Well, near Trinity College,
Dublin."--_W.E.B._]
[Footnote 7: Hor., "Epist.," lib. I, xvii, 50.
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