Classic Poem

Lord! what a goodly thing is want of shirts!
How a Scotch stomach, and no meat, converts!
They wanted food and raiment; so they took
Religion for their seamstress and their cook.
Unmask them well, their honours and estate,
As well as conscience, are sophisticate.
Shrive but their titles, and their money poise,
A laird and twenty pence pronounced with noise,
When construed, but for a plain yeoman go,
And a good sober tuppence; and well so.
Hence then, you proud impostors, get you gone,
You Picts in gentry and devotion:
You scandal to the stock of verse! a race
Able to bring the gibbet in disgrace.
Hyperbolus by suffering did traduce
The ostracism, and shamed it out of use.
The Indian that heaven did forswear,
Because he heard the Spaniards were there,
Had he but known what Scots in hell had been,
He would Erasmus-like have hung between.
My Muse hath done. A voider for the nonce!
I wrong the Devil, should I pick the bones.
That dish is his: for when the Scots decease,
Hell like their nation feeds on barnacles.
A Scot, when from the gallows-tree got loose,
Drops into Styx, and turns a solan goose.