You scarce can bear a puny trifling ill,
It goes so deep, pray Heaven, it does not kill!
And all this trouble, and this vain ado,
Because a friend (forsooth) has proved untrue.
Shame o’ your beard! can this so much amaze?
Were you not born in good King Jimmy's days?
And are not you at length yet wiser grown,
When threescore winters on your head have snown?
Almighty Wisdom gives in Holy Writ
Wholesome advice to all that follow it;
And those that will not its great counsels hear,
May learn from mere experience how to bear
(Without vain struggling) fortune's yoke, and how
They ought her rudest shocks to undergo.
There's not a day so solemn through the year,
Not one red letter in the calendar,
But we of some new crime discovered hear:
Theft, murder, treason, perjury, what not?
Money by cheating, padding, poisoning got.
Nor is it strange; so few are now the good,
That fewer scarce were left at Noah's flood;
Should Sodom's angel here in fire descend,
Our nation wants ten men to save the land.
Fate has reserved us for the very lees
Of time, where ill admits of no degrees;
An age so bad old poets ne'er could frame,
Nor find a metal out to give't a name.
This your experience knows, and yet for all
On faith of God, and man, aloud you call,
Louder than on Queen Bess's day the rout
For Antichrist burned in effigy shout.[1]
- ↑ ’The horrid designs and contrivances of the Papists,’ says a pamphlet, entitled An Account of the Burning of the Pope at Temple-bar (1679), 'for many years past, for rooting out the Protestant religion from under heaven in this kingdom, as well as in all the Protestant countries in Europe, has raised such a just indignation in the breast of every good Christian and true Englishman, that the people of this nation have, upon all occasions, endeavoured to discover their generous detestation of those cursed invaders of their religions and civil liber-
