Motto: ‘Intermissæ Venus diu | Rursus Bella Moves. | Hor: ad Venerem | Od: 1ma. Lib: 4’. First line: ‘My little Lodge! tease me no more’. The anonymous author describes himself as being fifty-five years of age. References to Lord and Lady Hervey and to Fanny Feilding suggest that the lines were composed between 1723 and 1729.
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Transcript
Intermissæ Venus diu
Rursus {1} Bella moves.—
Hor: ad Venerem
Od: 1ma. Lib: 4
Edgecombe | to Mother Lodge {2}
1
My little Lodge! tease me no more
With promise of the finest Whore
That Condom e’re was stuck in:
Give Younger Men the Beauteous dame
Alas I’m past the amourous Flame
And must have done with F—ing
2
I’m not that Hero once you knew
When I the Tygress did Subdue
By Noble Feats of Vigor;
Why shou’d I now pretend to swive {3}
Mother, you know at fifty five
A Man can only Fr–g Her
3
Go to Sr. Paul that vigorous Knight
Equal in F—ing or in Fight;
Ready for each Encounter;
He can a Lady’s Cause defend
In Senates, when she needs a Friend,
Or he in Bed can mount her
4
He says an hundred tender things,
Is Generous, & gives Ruby Rings,
In Prowess never wanting:
To Opera’s He’ll take the Jades,
And F–ck them too—at Masquerades
Three times without disc–nting.
5
But Lodge, Cold Customers like me
Entirely lost to Gallantry,
I fear wou’d quickly Starve You;
I value not who’ere I toast,
Nor care a Rush which pleases most
Or Lord or Ly. Her—y
6
And yet what means my faultring Tongue,
Again I sigh, again am Young,
In dreams I found her yeilding:
Oh! were she so, in day time too,
Still cou’d I dangle still pursue,
My Charming Fanny Feilding {4}.
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{1} MS ‘Russus’, with ‘r’ added above the first ‘s’.
{2} Sally Lodge, a brothel-keeper, known as Mother Lodge. See A Genuine Epistle … to the late famous Mother Lodge (1735).
{3} MS ‘swire’, with ‘r’ underlined and ‘? v.’ in the margin.
{4} Probably Lady Fanny Feilding, daughter of the 4th Earl of Denbigh, who was said to have been ‘distinguished for her beauty and amiable manners’. She married Daniel, 8th Earl of Winchilsea and 3rd Earl of Nottingham, in 1729 and died in 1734. See The Works of the English Poets, ed. A. Chalmers (1810), xvii. 589.
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