Classic Poem

Since by just flames the guilty piece is lost--
The noblest work thy fruitless art could boast--
Employ thy faithful pains a second time;
From the duke's ashes raise the king of Lyme,
And make thy fame eternal as his crime.
The land, if such it may be counted, draw,
Where int'rest is religion, treason law;
Th'ungrateful land whose treach'rous sons are foes
To the kind monarchy by which they rose,
And by instinctive hatred dread the power
Joined in our king and in their conqueror.
Amidst the counsels of that close divan,
Draw the misled, aspiring, wretched man,
His sword maintaining what his fraud began;
Draw Treason, Sacrilege, and Julian nigh,
The cursed Achitophel's kind legacy.
And lest their horrid force too weak should prove,
Add tempting woman's more destructive love;
Give the ambitious fair------
All nature's gifts refined by subtlest art
Too able to betray his easy heart
And, with worse charms than Helen's, to destroy
That other hope of our mistaken Troy.
The scene from dullness and Dutch plots bring o'er
And set the hopeful parricide ashore,
Fraught with the blessings of each boorish friend
And the kind helps their prayers and brandy lend,
With those few crowns------
Some English Jews and some French Christians send.
Next in the blackest colors paint the town
For old hereditary treasons known,
Whose infant sons in early mischief bred
Swear to the Cov'nant they can hardly read,
Brought up with too much charity to hate
Aught but their prayer book and their magistrate;
Here let his gaudy banner be displayed,
While the kind fools invoke their neighbor's aid
T'adore the idol which themselves have made,
And peasants from neglected plows resort
To fill his army and adorn his court.
Near these exalted on a drum unbraced
Let Heav'n's and James's enemy be placed,
The wretch that hates like his Argyle the crown,
The wretch that like our Oates defames the gown,
And through the speaking-trumpet of his nose
Blasphemously Heav'n's sacred word expose,
Bidding the long-eared rout, "With one accord
Stand up and fight the battles of the Lord."
Then near the pageant prince, alas! too nigh,
Draw Grey with a romantic constancy,
"Resolved to conquer, or resolved to--fly."
And let there in his guilty face appear
The rebel's malice and the coward's fear,
That future ages in thy piece may see
Not his wife falser to his bed than to his party he.
Now let the cursed triumvirate prepare
For all the glorious ills of horrid war;
Let zealous lust the dreadful work begin,
Backed with a sad variety of sin;
Let vice in all its num'rous shapes be shown--
Crimes which to milder Brennus were unknown,
And innocent Cromwell would have blushed to own;
Their arms from pillaged temples let 'em bring
And rob the Deity to wound the king.
Excited thus by their camp priest's long prayer,
Their country's curses, and their own despair,
Whilst Hell combines with its black offspring Night
To hide their treach'ry or secure their flight,
The watchful troops with cruel haste come on,
Then shout, look terrible, discharge, and run.
Fall'n from his short-lived power and flattered hopes,
His friends destroyed by hunger, swords, or ropes,
To some near grove the western monarch flies
In vain. The grove her innocent shade denies.
The juster trees------
Which when for refuge Charles and virtue fled
By grateful instinct their glad branches spread
And round the sacred charge cast their enlarged head--
Soon as the outcast Absalom comes nigh
Drop off their trembling leaves and blasted die.
Not earth itself would hide her guilty son
Though he for refuge to her bowels run.
Seditious Corah to her arms she took
When angry Heav'n his Good Old Cause forsook,
But now provoked with a more just disdain
She shrinks her frightened head and gives our rebel back again.
Now, Artist, let thy juster pencil draw
The sad effects of necessary law.
In painted words and speaking colors tell
How the great, pitied, stubborn traitor fell.
On the sad scene the glorious rebel place,
His pride and sorrow struggling in his face;
Describe the labors of his tortured breast
(If by thy imag'ry thought can be expressed),
Show with what difference two vast passions move
And how the hero with the Christian strove.
Then draw the sacred prelate by his side
To raise his sorrow and confound his pride
With the dear, dreadful thought of a God crucified.
Paint if thou canst the powerful words which hung
Upon the holy man's persuasive tongue,
Words sweet as Moses writ or Asaph sung,
Words whose prevailing influence might have won
All but the haughty, hardened Absalon.
At distance round the weeping mother place
The too unmindful father's beauteous race,
But like the Grecian artist spread a veil
O'er the sad beauties of fair Annabel;
No art, no muse those sorrows can express
Which would be rendered by description less.
Now close the dismal scene, conceal the rest--
That the sad orphans' eyes will teach us best--
Thy guilty art might raise our ill-placed grief too high
And make us, whilst we pity him, forget our loyalty.