WOMAN. For when the horse lies down at night, no cares TRAVELLER. But both can work; and sure as cheerfully WOMAN. Why, for that, I've had my share; some sickness and some Ay! idleness! the rich folks never fail Or trouble me in sleep; had for a Sunday, You have known trouble; He had his silver buckles and his watch; These haply may be happier. There was not in the village one who look'd Sprucer on holydays. We married, Sir, And we had children; but while wants increased, Wages stood still. The silver buckles went; So went the watch; and when the holyday coat Was worn to work, no new* one in its place. Well will it be for them to know no worse. For me-you see my rags! but I deserve them, Yet I had rather hear a daughter's knell For wilfully, like this new-married pair, Than her wedding-peal, Sir, if I thought her fate I went to my undoing. Promised no better things. sorrow. TRAVELLER. Sure, sure, good woman, They who have wealth want more; so are we all WOMAN. Sir! d'ye see that horse A farmer once told the author of Malvern Hills, "that he almost constantly remarked a gradation of changes in those men he had been in the habit of employing. Young men, he said, were generally neat in their appearance, active and cheerful, till they became married and had a family, when he had observed that their silver buttons, buckles, and watches gradually disappeared, and their Sunday clothes became common, without any other to supply their place,-but, said he, some good comes from this, for they will then work for whatever they can get." Note to CoTTLE'S Malvern Hills. Let comfortably in the summer wind; To see them in their coffins-God reward you! TRAVELLER. Your pardon too, Sir, If, with this text before me, I should feel In the preaching mood! But for these barren fig. trees, With all their flourish and their leafiness, We have been told their destiny and use, You have taught me When the axe is laid unto the root, and they Cumber the earth no longer. To give sad meaning to the village bells! Bristol, 1800. IX. THE ALDERMAN'S FUNERAL. STRANGER. Who are they ushering from the world, with all This pageantry and long parade of death? TOWNSMAN. A long parade, indeed, Sir, and yet here STRANGER. 'Tis but a mournful sight; and yet the pomp Tempts me to stand a gazer. TOWNSMAN. Yonder schoolboy. Who plays the truant, says the proclamation Of peace was nothing to the show; and even The chairing of the members at election Would not have been a finer sight than this; Only that red and green are prettier colours Than all this mourning. There, Sir, you behold One of the red-gown'd worthies of the city, The envy and the boast of our exchange ;Ay, what was worth, last week, a good halfmillion, Screw'd down in yonder hearse! STRANGER. Undone ;-for sins, not one of which is written STRANGER. You knew him, then, it seems ? TOWNSMAN. As all men know The virtues of your hundred-thousanders; They never hide their lights beneath a bushel. STRANGER. The camel and the needle,- Are reservoirs whence public charity Is that then in your mind? TOWNSMAN. Now, Sir, you touch To that hard face. Yet he was always found In the other world,-donations to keep open Plead his own cause as plaintiff. STRANGER. I must needs Believe you, Sir :-these are your witnesses, These mourners here, who from their carriages, Gape at the gaping crowd. A good March wind Were to be pray'd for now, to lend their eyes Some decent rheum; the very hireling mute Bears not a face more blank of all emotion Than the old servant of the family! How can this man have lived, that thus his death Costs not the soiling one white handkerchief? TOWNSMAN. Who should lament for him, Sir, in whose heart When yet he was a boy, and should have breathed So from the way in which he was train'd up Trimly set forth in lapidary lines, Faith with her torch beside, and little Cupids Dropping upon his urn their marble tears. Bristol, 1803. ODE ON THE PORTRAIT OF BISHOP HEBER. 1. YES, such as these were Heber's lineaments; Such was the gentle countenance which bore Its ominous marks infix'd, Nor the worse die of evil habit set An inward stain ingrain'd. Such were the lips whose salient playfulness Enliven'd peaceful hours of private life; Whose eloquence Held congregations open ear'd, As from the heart it flow'd, a living stream, Of Christian wisdom, pure and undefiled. 2. And what if there be those Who in the cabinet Of memory hold enshrined A livelier portraiture, And see in thought, as in their dreams, For he hath taken with the Living Dead His holy habitation. Hearts, to which Will yearn towards him; and they, too, (for such Having the breastplate on of righteousness, With reverential love, Till they shall grow familiar with its lines, And know him when they see his face in Heaven 3. Ten years have held their course That living countenance, When on Llangedwin's terraces we paced Partaking there its hospitality, His friend and mine,-my earliest friend, whom I From boyhood to gray hairs, In goodness, and in worth and warmth of heart. The grass-grown site, where armed feet once The threshold of Glendower's embattled hall; On Yorwerth's fabled tomb; Of Monacella's legend there are left, The faded portrait of that lady fair, Thought, obstinate in hopeless hope, to see 4. The sunny recollections of those days Full soon were overcast, when Heber went Where half this wide world's circle lay Between us interposed. A messenger of love he went, Not for ambition, nor for gain, Took he the overseeing on himself For this great end. devotedly he went, His own loved paths of pleasantness and peace, Books, leisure, privacy, Prospects (and not remote) of all wherewith And, dearer far to him, Pursuits that with the learned and the wise Should have assured his name its lasting place. 5. Large, England, is the debt Thou owest to Heathendom; To India most of all, where Providence, How beautiful are the feet of him That bringeth good tidings of good, The Malabar, the Moor, the Cingalese, Yet not the less admired Injuriously deprived, Felt, at his presence, the neglected seed Refresh'd, as with a quickening dew from Heaven. Be cognizant of aught that passeth here, To look from Paradise that hour, 8. Ram boweth down, Creeshna and Seeva stoop; The Arabian Moon must wane to wax no more, And Esau's-to their brotherhood, And to their better birthright then restored And sing ye, O ye Heavens, and shout, O Earth, Thy mountains and thy woods; 9. Take comfort, then, my soul! Our aspirations held, To live laborious days, 10. Hadst thou revisited thy native land, 11. Yes, to the Christian, to the Heathen world, The rending of a veil! Oh, when that leaf shall fall, commit that execrable impiety was, because he thought the famine would the sooner cease, if those unprofitable beggars that consumed more bread than they were worthy to eat, were dispatched out of the world. For he said that those poor folks were like to Mice, that were good for nothing but to devour corne. But God Almighty, the just avenger of the poor folks' quarrel, did not long suffer this hainous tyranny, this most detestable fact, unpunished. For he mustered up an army of Mice against the Archbishop, and sent them to persecute him as his furious Alastors, so that they afflicted him both day and night, and would not suffer him to take his rest in any place. Whereupon the Prelate, thinking that he should be secure from the injury of Mice if he were in a certain tower, that standeth in the Rhine near to the towne, betook himself unto the said tower as to a safe refuge and sanctuary from his enemies, and locked himself in. But the innumerable troupes of Mice chased him continually very eagerly, and swumme unto him upon the top of the water to execute the just judgment of God, and so at last he was most miserably devoured by those sillie creatures; who pursued him with such bitter hostility, that it is recorded they scraped and knawed out his very name from the walls and tapistry wherein it was written, after they had so cruelly devoured his body. Wherefore the tower wherein he was eaten up by the Mice is shewn to this day, for a perpetual monument to all succeeding ages of the barbarous and inhuman tyranny of this impious Prelate, being situate in a little green Island in the midst of the Rhine near to the towne of Bingen, and is commonly called in the German Tongue the MowSE-TURN. CORYAT'S Crudities, pp. 571, 572. Other authors who record this tale say that the Bishop was eaten by Rats. THE summer and autumn had been so wet, Every day the starving poor That shell be burst, that veil be rent,-may then For he had a plentiful last-year's store, My spirit be with thine! Keswick, 1820. GOD'S JUDGMENT ON A WICKED BISHOP. Here followeth the History of HATTO, Archbishop of And all the neighbourhood could tell At last Bishop Hatto appointed a day To quiet the poor without delay; He bade them to his great Barn repair, And they should have food for the winter there. Rejoiced such tidings good to hear, It hapned in the year 914, that there was an exceed-Bishop Hatto he made fast the door; once Abbot of Fulda, was Archbishop of Mentz, of He set fire to the Barn and burnt them all. the Bishops after Crescens and Crescentius the two and thirtieth, of the Archbishops after St. Bonifacius "I' faith, 'tis an excellent bonfire !" quoth he, the thirteenth. This Hatto in the time of this great" And the country is greatly obliged to me, famine afore-mentioned, when he saw the poor peo- For ridding it in these times forlorn ple of the country exceedingly oppressed with fa- Of Rats that only consume the corn." mine, assembled a great company of them together into a Barne, and, like a most accursed and merci-So then to his palace returned he, lesse caitiffe, burnt up these poor innocent souls, that And he sat down to supper merrily, were so far from doubting any such matter, that they rather hoped to receive some comfort and relief at his hands. The reason that moved the prelat to And he slept that night like an innocent man; |