That wears three ruined orphans on his back;
Meanwhile, you in the alley stand, and sneak:
And you therewith must rest contented, since
Almighty wealth does put such difference.
What citizen a son-in-law will take,
Bred ne'er so well, that can't a jointure make?
What man of sense, that's poor, e'er summoned is
Amongst the common council to advise?
At vestry-consults when does he appear,
For choosing of some parish officer,
Or making leather buckets for the choir?[1]
''Tis hard for any man to rise, that feels
His virtue clogged with poverty at heels;[2]
But harder 'tis by much in London, where
A sorry lodging, coarse and slender fare,
Fire, water, breathing, everything is dear;
Yet such as these an earthen dish disdain,
With which their ancestors, in Edgar's reign,
Were served, and thought it no disgrace to dine,
Though they were rich, had store of leather coin.
Low as their fortune is, yet they despise
A man that walks the streets in homely frieze;
To speak the truth, great part of England now,
In their own cloth will scarce vouchsafe to go;
Only, the statute's penalty to save,
Some few perhaps wear woollen in the grave.
- ↑ After the fire of 1666, the Common Council passed an act obliging the wards of the city to keep in readiness a certain number of leathern buckets, ladders, hand-squirts, pickaxe sledges, and shod-shovels. By the same act every alderman was compelled to furnish his quota of buckets and hand-squirts.
- ↑ Johnson's noble line—throws Oldham's version into shadow. The picture given by Oldham of the condition of poverty in London in the seventeenth century, contrasted with the ostentatious expenditure of the upper and middle classes, throws a curious light on the miseries that lay under the sensualities and dissipation of the time. The whole poem is interesting from its details of contemporary characteristics, and in this point of view more curious than the London of Johnson.
’Slow rises worth by poverty depressed,'
