Classic Poem

From mental mists to purge a nation's eyes;
To animate the weak, unite the wise;
To trace the deep infection, that pervades
The crowded town, and taints the rural shades;
To mark how wide extends the mighty waste
O'er the fair realms of Science, Learning, Taste;
To drive and scatter all the brood of lies,
And chase the varying falsehood as it flies;
The long arrears of ridicule to pay,
To drag reluctant Dullness back to day;
Much yet remains.--To you these themes belong,
Ye favoured sons of virtue and of song!
If Vice appal thee,--if thou view with awe
Insults that brave, and crimes that 'scape the law;--
Yet may the specious bastard brood, which claim
A spurious homage under Virtue's name,
Sprung from that parent of ten thousand crimes,
The New Philosophy of modern times,--
Yet, these may rouse thee!--with unsparing hand,
Oh, lash the vile impostures from the land!
--First, stern Philanthropy:--not she who dries
The orphan's tears, and wipes the widow's eyes;
Not she, who, sainted Charity her guide,
Of British bounty pours the annual tide:--
But French Philanthropy;--whose boundless mind
Glows with the general love of all mankind;
Philanthropy,--beneath whose baneful sway
Each patriot passion sinks and dies away.
Taught in her school to imbibe thy mawkish strain,
Condorcet, filtered through the dregs of Paine,
Each pert adept disowns a Briton's part,
And plucks the name of England from his heart.
What, shall a name, a word, a sound control
The aspiring thought, and cramp the expansive soul?
Shall one half-peopled island's rocky round
A love, that glows for all Creation, bound?
And social charities contract the plan
Framed for thy freedom, Universal Man?
--No--through the extended globe his feelings run
As broad and general as the unbounded sun!
No narrow bigot he;--his reasoned view
Thy interests, England, ranks with thine, Peru!
France at our dorrs, he sees no danger nigh,
But heaves for Turkey's woes the impartial sigh;
A steady Patriot of the World alone,
The friend of every country--but his own.
Next comes a gentler Virtue.--Ah! beware
Lest the harsh verse her shrinking softness scare.
Visit her not too roughly;--the warm sigh
Breathes on her lips;--the tear-drop gems her eye.
Sweet Sensibility, who dwells enshrined
In the fine foldings of the feeling mind;--
With delicate Mimosa's sense endued,
Who shrinks instinctive from a hand too rude;
Or, like the anagallis, prescient flower,
Shuts her soft petals at the approaching shower.
Sweet child of sickly Fancy!--her of yore
From her loved France Rousseau to exile bore;
And, while midst lakes and mountains wild he ran,
Full of himself, and shunned the haunts of man,
Taught her o'er each lone vale and Alpine steep
To lisp the story of his wrongs, and weep;
Taught her to cherish still, in either eye,
Of tender tears a plentiful supply,
And pour them in the brooks that babbled by;--
--Taught by nice scale to mete her feelings strong,
False by degrees, and exquisitely wrong;--
--For the crushed beetle first,--the widowed dove,
And all the warbled sorrows of the grove;--
Next for poor suff'ring guilt;--and last of all,
For parents, friends, a king and country's fall.
Mark her fair votaries, prodigal of grief,
With cureless pangs, and woes that mock relief,
Droop in soft sorrow o'er a faded flower;
O'er a dead jack-ass pour the pearly shower;--
But hear, unmoved, of Loire's ensanguined flood,
Choked up with slain;--of Lyons drenched in blood;
Of crimes that blot the age, the world with shame,
Foul crimes, but sicklied o'er with Freedom's name;
Altars and thrones subverted, social life
Trampled to earth,--the husband from the wife,
Parent from child, with ruthless fury torn,--
Of talents, honour, virtue, wit forlorn,
In friendless exile,--of the wise and good
Staining the daily scaffold with their blood,--
Of savage cruelties that scare the mind,
The rage of madness with hell's lusts combined--
Of hearts torn reeking from the mangled breast,--
They hear--and hope, that ALL IS FOR THE BEST.
Fond hope!--but Justice sanctifies the pray'r--
Justice!--here, Satire, strike! 'twere sin to spare!
Not she in British Courts that takes her stand,
The dawdling balance dangling in her hand,
Adjusting punishments to fraud and vice,
With scrupulous quirks, and disquisition nice:--
But firm, erect, with keen reverted glance,
The avenging angel of regenerate France,
Who visits ancient sins on modern times,
And punishes the Pope for Caesar's crimes.
Such is the liberal Justice which presides
In these our days, and modern patriots guides;--
Justice, whose blood-stained book one sole decree,
One statute fills--"the People shall be Free.'
Free by what means?--by folly, madness, guilt,
By boundless rapines, blood in oceans spilt;
By confiscation, in whose sweeping toils
The poor man's pittance with the rich man's spoils,
Mixed in one common mass, are swept away,
To glut the short-lived tyrant of the day:--
By laws, religion, morals, all o'erthrown:--
--"Rouse then, ye sovereign people, claim your own:--
The licence that enthrals, the truth that blinds,
The wealth that starves you, and the power that grinds.'
--So Justice bids.--'Twas her enlightened doom,
Louis, thy holy head devoted to the tomb!
'Twas Justice claimed in that accursed hour
The fatal forfeit of too lenient pow'r.
--Mourn for the man we may;--but for the King,--
Freedom, oh! Freedom's such a charming thing!
"Much may be said on both sides.'--Hark! I hear
A well-known voice that murmurs in my ear,--
The voice of Candour.--Hail! most solemn sage,
Thou drivelling virtue of this moral age,
Candour, which softens party's headlong rage.
Candour,--which spares its foes;--nor e'er descends
With bigot zeal to combat for its friends.
Candour,--which loves in see-saw strain to tell
Of acting foolishly, but meaning well;
Too nice to praise by wholesale, or to blame,
Convinced that all men's motives are the same;--
And finds, with keen discriminating sight,
Black's not so black;--nor white so very white.
"Fox, to be sure, was vehement and wrong:--
But then Pitt's words, you'll own, were rather strong.
Both must be blamed, both pardoned;--'twas just so
With Fox and Pitt full forty years ago!
So Walpole, Pulteney;--factions in all times,
Have had their follies, ministers their crimes.'
Give me the avowed, the erect, the manly foe,
Bold I can meet--perhaps may turn his blow;
But of all plagues, good heaven, thy wrath can send,
Save, save, oh! save me from the Candid Friend!