To bear his burdens, drawing in his gears,
And sweating in his service, his caprice
Becomes the soul that animates them all.
He deems a thousand, or ten thousand lives,
Spent in the purchase of renown for him,
An easy reckoning; and they think the same.
Thus kings were first invented, and thus kings
Were burnished into heroes, and became
The arbiters of this terraqueous swamp;

Storks among frogs, that have but croaked and died.
Strange, that such folly, as lifts bloated man
To eminence fit only for a god,

Should ever drivel out of human lips,

Even in the cradled weakness of the world!
Still stranger much, that when at length mankind
Had reached the sinewy firmness of their youth,
And could discriminate and argue well

On subjects more mysterious, they were yet
Babes in the cause of freedom, and should fear
And quake before the gods themselves had made:
But above measure strange, that neither proof
Of sad experience, nor examples set

By some, whose patriot virtue has prevailed,
Can even now, when they have grown mature
In wisdom, and with philosophic deeds
Familiar, serve to emancipate the rest!

Such dupes are men to custom, and so prone

To reverence what is ancient, and can plead
A course of long observance for its use,
That even servitude, the worst of ills,
Because delivered down from sire to son,
Is kept and guarded as a sacred thing.
But is it fit, or can it bear the shock
Of rational discussion, that a man,
Compounded and made up like other men
Of elements tumultuous, in whom lust
And folly in as ample measure meet,
As in the bosoms of the slaves he rules,
Should be a despot absolute, and boast
Himself the only freeman of his land?

Should, when he pleases, and on whom he will,
Wage war, with any or with no pretence
Of provocation given, or wrong sustained,
And force the beggarly last doit by means,
That his own humour dictates, from the clutch
Of poverty, that thus he may procure

His thousands, weary of penurious life,

A splendid opportunity to die?

Say ye, who (with less prudence than of old
Jotham ascribed to his assembled trees
In politic convention) put your trust

In the shadow of a bramble, and reclined
In fancied peace beneath his dangerous branch,
Rejoice in him, and celebrate his sway,

Where find ye passive fortitude? Whence springs
Your self-denying zeal, that holds it good

To stroke the prickly grievance, and to hang
His thorns with streamers of continual praise?
We too are friends to loyalty. We love
The king, who loves the law, respects his bounds
And reigns content within them: him we serve
Freely and with delight, who leaves us free:
But recollecting still that he is man,

We trust him not too far. King though he be,
And king in England too, he may be weak,
And vain enough to be ambitious still;,
May exercise amiss his proper powers,
Or covet more than freemen choose to grant:
Beyond that mark is treason. He is our's
To administer, to guard, to adorn, the state,
But not to warp or change it. We are his
To serve him nobly in the common cause,
True to the death, but not to be his slaves.
Mark now the difference, ye that boast your love
Of kings, between your loyalty and our's.
We love the man, the paltry pageant you:
We the chief patron of the commonwealth,
You the regardless author of its woes:
We for the sake of liberty a king,

You chains and bondage for a tyrant's sake,

Our love is principle, and has its root

In reason, is judicious, manly, free;
Your's, a blind instinct, crouches to the rod,
And licks the foot, that treads it in the dust.
Were kingship as true treasure as it seems,
Sterling, and worthy of a wise man's wish,
I would not be a king to be beloved

Causeless, and daubed with undiscerning praise,
Where love is mere attachment to the throne,
Not to the man, who fills it as he ought.
Whose freedom is by sufferance, and at will
Of a superior, he is never free.

Who lives, and is not weary of a life
Exposed to manacles, deserves them well.

The state, that strives for liberty, though foiled,
And forced to abandon what she bravely sought,
Deserves at least applause for her attempt,

And pity for her loss. But that's a cause
Not often unsuccessful: power usurped
Is weakness when opposed: conscious of wrong,
'Tis pusillanimous and prone to flight.

But slaves, that once conceive the glowing thought
Of freedom, in that hope itself possess

All that the contest calls for; spirit, strength,
The scorn of danger, and united hearts;
The surest presage of the good they seek*.

*The author hopes that he shall not be censured for unnecessary warmth upon so interesting a subject,

Then shame to manhood, and opprobrious more
To France than all her losses and defeats,
Old or of later date, by sea or land,

Her house of bondage, worse than that of old
Which God avenged on Pharaoh-the Bastile.
Ye horrid towers, the abode of broken hearts;
Ye dungeons and ye cages of despair,
That monarchs have supplied from age to age
With music, such as suits their sovereign ears,
The sighs and groans of miserable men!
There's not an English heart, that would not leap
To hear that ye were fallen at last; to know
That even our enemies, so oft employed
In forging chains for us, themselves were free.
For he, who values liberty, confines

His zeal for her predominance within

No narrow bounds; her cause engages him
Wherever pleaded. "Tis the cause of man.
There dwell the most forlorn of human kind,
Immured though unaccused, condemned untried,
Cruelly spared, and hopeless of escape.
There, like the visionary emblem seen
By him of Babylon, life stands a stump,

He is aware that it is become almost fashionable to stigmatize such sentiments as no better than empty declamation; but it is an ill symptom, and peculiar to modern times.