Who is there left their fury to withstand?
What champions now to guard thy helpless land?
Who is there left in listed fields to head
Thy valiant youth, and lead them on to victory?
Alas? thy valiant youth are dead,
And all thy brave commanders too:
Lo! how the glut and riot of the grave thus lie,
And none survive the fatal overthrow,
To right their injured ghosts upon the barbarous foe!
Rest, ye blessed shades, in everlasting peace,
Who fell your country's bloody sacrifice:
For ever sacred be your memories,
And oh! ere long may some avenger rise
To wipe off heaven's and your disgrace:
May they, these proud insulting foes,
Wash off our stains of honour with their blood;
May they ten thousandfold repay our loss,
For every life a myriad, every drop a flood!
UPON THE WORKS OF BEN JONSON.[1]
ODE.
I
Whose firm, established, and unshaken glories stand,
And proudly their own fame command,
Above our power to lessen or to raise,
And all, but the few heirs of thy brave genius, and thy bays;
- ↑ Written in 1678, the year when Oldham left Croydon.
- ↑ The indifference, or worse, in which the Elizabethan poets were held in the early part of the reign of Charles II., is evident from the whole of this poem; but Oldham rather overstates the case in reference to Ben Jonson, who was generally considered a greater genius than Shakespeare. About the time, however, when Oldham was writing this panegyric on Jonson, and condemning the age for its neglect of him, the tide of opinion was beginning to turn, and Jonson and his contemporaries were slowly coming into fashion again. It was in this year Dryden produced his tragedy of All for Love; or, the World Well
