What mean the cock'd hat and the masculine air,
With each motion designed to perplex?
Bright eyes were intended to languish, not stare,
And softness the test of your sex.
"The blushes of morn, and the mildness of May,
Are charms which no art can procure,
O, be but yourselves, and our homage we pay,
And your empire is solid and sure,
But if, Amazon-like, you attack your gallants,
And put us in fear of our lives,
You may do very well for sisters and aunts,
But, believe me, you'll never be wives."
He seems to have possessed some influence with Garrick, a man whose authority carried great weight in literary as well as dramatic matters.
Murphy, in his life of Garrick, expresses warm gratitude to the Laureate for his kind and equitable decision of a matter in which he was himself a principal. He had written a drama called "The Orphan of China," which he sent to Garrick. The play was refused. Murphy thought himself hardly treated, and commenced a paper war against the manager. Garrick made his complaint at Holland House. Fox asked Murphy why he had shown so much animosity. Murphy replied that to publicly assail Garrick was, because of his extreme sensitiveness, his only chance of success: that the fate of the "Orphan" depended on it. At Fox's request the play was sent to Holland House, and he and Horace Walpole read it together. On the following Sunday Garrick was a guest there, and Fox and Walpole quoted to him some lines from it. He was startled; he had not, as managers are said now-a-days to do, returned the play without reading it, but had undervalued its merits. He was now struck by the lines quoted, and begged for the play, which he took again under his consideration, and accepted. Soon after this a good-natured friend repeated to Mr. Garrick some angry and depreciatory remark which Murphy had made on him. The thin-skinned
