To Sir Joshua Reynolds.

Dear President, whose art sublime     Gives perpetuity to time,     And bids transactions of a day,     That fleeting hours would waft away     To dark futurity, survive,     And in unfading beauty live,     You cannot with a grace decline     A special mandate of the Nine     Yourself, whatever task you choose,     So much indebted to the Muse.     Thus say the sisterhood:We come     Fix well your pallet on your thumb,     Prepare the pencil and the tints     We come to furnish you with hints.     French disappointment, British glory,     Must be the subject of the story.     First strike a curve, a graceful bow,     Then slope it to a point below;     Your outline easy, airy, light,     Filld up becomes a paper kite.     Let independence, sanguine, horrid,     Blaze like a meteor in the forehead:     Beneath (but lay aside your graces)     Draw six-and-twenty rueful faces,     Each with a staring, stedfast eye,     Fixd on his great and good ally.     France flies the kitetis on the wing     Britannias lightning cuts the string.     The wind that raised it, ere it ceases,     Just rends it into thirteen pieces,     Takes charge of every fluttering sheet,     And lays them all at Georges feet.     Iberia, trembling from afar,     Renounces the confederate war.     Her efforts and her arts oercome,     France calls her shatterd navies home,     Repenting Holland learns to mourn     The sacred treaties she has torn;     Astonishment and awe profound     Are stampd upon the nations round:     Without one friend, above all foes,     Britannia gives the world repose.