But know their rights, and, knowing, dare maintain;
Prevent the long-aimed blow,
And crush the tyrant while they rend the chain:
These constitute a State.”[580]
To all these accomplishments add the glowing emotions of his noble nature, his love of virtue, his devotion to freedom, his sympathy for the poor and downtrodden. His biographer records as “a favorite opinion of Sir William Jones, that all men are born with an equal capacity for improvement,”[581] and also reports him as saying: “I see chiefly under the sun the two classes of men whom Solomon describes, the oppressor and the oppressed.… I shall cultivate my fields and gardens, and think as little as possible of monarchs or oligarchs.”[582] With these declarations it is easy to credit Dr. Paley, who said of him, “He was a great republican when I knew him.”[583] Like seeks like, and a long intimacy in the family of the good Bishop of St. Asaph,[584] ending in a happy marriage with his eldest daughter, shows how he must have sympathized with the American cause and with the future of our country.
Our author had been the tutor of Lord Althorp, the same who, as Earl Spencer, became so famous a bibliophile and a patron of Dibdin, and on the marriage of his pupil with Miss Lavinia Bingham, he was moved to commemorate it in a poem, entitled “The Muse Recalled: an Ode on the Nuptials of Lord Viscount Althorp and Miss Lavinia Bingham, eldest Daughter of Charles Lord Lucan, March 6, 1781,”[585] which his critic, Wraxall, calls “one of the most beautiful lyric productions in the English language, … emulating at once the fame of Milton and of Gray.”[586] But beyond the strain of personal sympathy, congenial to the occasion, was a passion for America, and the prophetic spirit which belongs to the poet. Lamenting that Freedom and Concord are repudiated by the sons of Albion, all the Virtues disappear,—
“Truth, Justice, Reason, Valor, with them fly
To seek a purer soil, a more congenial sky.”
But the soil and sky which they seek are of the Delaware:—
“Beyond the vast Atlantic deep