Classic Poem

Come keen Iambicks with your Badgers feet,
And Badger-like, bite till your teeth do meet.
Help ye tart Satyrists to imp my rage,
With all the Scorpions that should whip this age.
Scots are like Witches; do but whet your pen,
Scratch till the blood come, they'll not hurt you then.
Now as the Martyrs were inforc'd to take
The shapes of beasts, like hypocrites at stake,
I'll bait my Scot so, yet not cheat your eyes;
A Scot within a beast is no disguise.
No more let Ireland brag; her harmless Nation
Fosters no Venom, since the Scots Plantation:
Nor can ours feign'd antiquity maintain;
Since they came in, England hath Wolves again.
The Scot that kept the Tower, might have shown
(Within the grate of his own breast alone)
The Leopard and the Panther, and ingrost
What all those wilde Collegiates had cost
The honest high-shoes, in their termly fees,
First to the salvage Lawyer, next to these.
Nature her self doth Scotch-men beasts confess,
Making their Country such a wildernesse:
A Land that brings in question and suspence
Gods omni-presence, but that Charles came thence,
But that Montrose and Crawfords loyal band
Aton'd their sins, and christ'ned half the Land;
Nor is it all the Nation hath these spots;
There is a Church, as well as Kirk of Scots:
As in a Picture where the squinting paint
Shews fiend on this side, and on that side Saint.
He that saw Hell in 's melancholy dream,
And in the twilight of his fancy's theam
Scar'd from his sins repented in a fright,
Had he view'd Scotland, had turn'd Proselyte.
A Land, where one may pray with curst intent,
O may they never suffer banishment!
Had Cain been Scot, God would have chang'd his doom
Not forc't him wander, but confin'd him home.
Like Jews they spread, and as infection fly,
As if the Devil had ubiquity.
Hence 'tis they live at Rovers, and defie
This or that place; Rags of Geography.
They're Citizens o' th' world; they're all in all,
Scotland's a Nation Epidemicall.