No subjects more obsequiously obey,
None please so well, or are so pleased as they;
The cunning artist manages so well,
He lets them bow to heav’n, and drink to hell.
If but to wine and him they homage pay,
He cares not to what deity they pray;
What god they worship most, or in what way.
Whether by Luther, Calvin, or by Rome,
They sail for heaven, by wine he steers them home.
Ungovern’d passion settled first in France,
Where mankind lives in haste, and thrives by chance;
A dancing nation, fickle and untrue,
Have oft undone themselves, and others too;
Prompt the infernal dictates to obey,
And in hell’s favour none more great than they.
The pagan world he blindly leads away,
And personally rules with arbitrary sway:
The mask thrown off, plain devil, his title stands;
And what elsewhere he tempts, he there commands;
There, with full gust, th’ ambition of his mind,
Governs, as he of old in heaven design’d:
Worshipp’d as God, his Paynim altars smoke,
Imbrued with blood of those that him invoke.
The rest by deputies he rules so well,
And plants the distant colonies of hell;
By them his secret power he firm maintains,
And binds the world in his infernal chains.
By zeal the Irish, and the Russ by folly,
Fury the Dane, the Swede by melancholy;
By stupid ignorance, the Muscovite;
The Chinese, by a child of hell, call’d wit;
Wealth makes the Persian too effeminate;
And poverty the Tartar desperate:
The Turks and Moors, by Mah’met he subdues;
And God has given him leave to rule the Jews:
Rage rules the Portuguese, and fraud the Scotch;
Revenge the Pole, and avarice the Dutch.
Satire, be kind, and draw a silent veil,
Thy native England’s vices to conceal:
Or, if that task’s impossible to do,
At least be just, and show her virtues too;
Too great the first, alas! the last too few.
England, unknown, as yet unpeopled lay —
Happy, had she remain’d so to this day,
And still to ev’ry nation been a prey.
Her open harbours, and her fertile plains,
The merchant’s glory these, and those the swain’s,
To ev’ry barbarous nation have betray’d her;
Who conquer her as oft as they invade her,
So beauty, guarded out by Innocence,
That ruins her which should be her defence.
Ingratitude, a devil of black renown,
Possess’d her very early for his own:
An ugly, surly, sullen, selfish spirit,
Who Satan’s worst perfections does inherit;
Second to him in malice and in force,
All devil without, and all within him worse.
He made her first-born race to be so rude,
And suffer’d her to be so oft subdued;
By sev’ral crowds of wandering thieves o’er-run,
Often unpeopled, and as oft undone;
While ev’ry nation that her powers reduced,
Their languages and manners introduced;
From whose mix’d relics our compounded breed,
By spurious generation does succeed;
Making a race uncertain and uneven,
Derived from all the nations under heaven.
The Romans first with Julius Cæsar came,
Including all the nations of that name,
Gauls, Greek, and Lombards; and, by computation,
Auxiliaries or slaves of ev’ry nation.
With Hengist, Saxons; Danes with Sweno came,
In search of plunder, not in search of fame.
Scots, Picts, and Irish from th’ Hibernian shore;
And conq’ring William brought the Normans o’er.
All these their barb’rous offspring left behind,
The dregs of armies, they of all mankind;
Blended with Britons, who before were here,
Of whom the Welch ha’ blest the character.
From this amphibious, ill-born mob began,
That vain ill-natured thing, an Englishman.
The customs, sirnames, languages, and manners,
Of all these nations, are their own explainers;
Whose relics are so lasting and so strong,
They’ve left a Shiboleth upon our tongue;
By which, with easy search, you may distinguish
Your Roman, Saxon, Danish, Norman, English.
The great invading Norman let us know
What conquerors in after-times might do.
To every musqueteer he brought to town,
He gave the lands which never were his own;
When first the English crown he did obtain,
He did not send his Dutchmen home again.
No re-assumptions in his reign were known,
Davenant might there ha’ let his book alone.
No parliament his army could disband;
He raised no money, for he paid in land.
He gave his legions their eternal station,
And made them all freeholders of the nation.
He canton’d out the country to his men,
And every soldier was a denizen.
The rascals thus enrich’d, he called them lords,
To please their upstart pride with new-made words,
And doomsday book his tyranny records.
And here begins the ancient pedigree
That so exalts our poor nobility.
’Tis that from some French trooper they derive,
Who with the Norman bastard did arrive:
The trophies of the families appear;
Some show the sword, the bow, and some the spear,
Which their great ancestor, forsooth, did wear.
These in the herald’s register remain,
Their noble mean extraction to explain,
Yet