The rest by Deputies he rules as well,
And plants the distant colonies of Hell.
By them his secret power he maintains,
And binds the world in his infernal chains.
By Zeal the Irish, and the Russ by Folly
Fury the Dane, the Swede by Melancholy;
By stupid Ignorance the Muscovite;
The Chinese by a child of Hell called Wit
Wealth makes the Persian too effeminate,
And Poverty the Tartars desperate;
The Turks and Moors by Mah’met he subdues,
And God has given him leave to rule the Jews.
Rage rules the Portuguese and Fraud the Scotch,
Revenge the Pole and Avarice the Dutch.
Satire, be kind, and draw a silent veil
Thy native England’s vices to conceal;
Or, if that task’s impossible to do,
At least be just and show her virtues too—
Too great the first; alas, the last too few!
England, unknown as yet, unpeopled lay;
Happy had she remained so to this day,
And not to every nation been a prey.
Her open harbours and her fertile plains
(The merchant’s glory those, and these the swain’s)
To every barbarous nation have betrayed her,
Who conquer her as oft as they invade her;
So beauty’s guarded but by innocence,
That ruins her, which should be her defence.
Ingratitude, a devil of black renown,
Possessed her very early for his own.
An ugly, surly, sullen, selfish spirit,
Who Satan’s worst perfections does inherit;
Second to him in malice and in force,
All devil without, and all within him worse.
He made her first-born race to be so rude,
And suffered her so oft to be subdued;
By several crowds of wandering thieves o’errun,
Often unpeopled, and as oft undone;
While every nation that her powers reduced
Their languages and manners introduced.
From whose mixed relics our compounded breed
By spurious generation does succeed,
Making a race uncertain and uneven,
Derived from all the nations under Heaven.
The Romans first with Julius Cæsar came,
Including all the nations of that name,
Gauls, Greeks, and Lombards, and, by computation
Auxiliaries or slaves of every nation.
With Hengist, Saxons; Danes with Sueno came,
In search of plunder, not in search of fame.
Scots, Picts, and Irish from the Hibernian shore,
And conquering William brought the Normans o’er.
All these their barbarous offspring left behind,
The dregs of armies, they of all mankind;
Blended with Britons, who before were here,
Of whom the Welsh ha’ blessed the character.
From this amphibious ill-born mob began
That vain, ill-natured thing, an Englishman.
The customs, surnames, languages, and manners
Of all these nations are their own explainers:
Whose relics are so lasting and so strong,
They ha’ left a shibboleth upon our tongue,
By which with easy search you may distinguish
Your Roman-Saxon-Danish Norman English.
The great invading Norman[[12]] let us know
What conquerors in after times might do.
To every musketeer[[13]] he brought to town,
He gave the lands which never were his own.
When first the English crown he did obtain,
He did not send his Dutchmen back again.
No reassumptions in his reign were known,
D’Avenant might there ha’ let his book alone.
No Parliament his army could disband;
He raised no money, for he paid in land.
He gave his legions their eternal station,
And made them all freeholders of the nation.
He cantoned out the country to his men,
And every soldier was a denizen.
The rascals thus enriched, he called them lords,
To please their upstart pride with new-made words,
And Doomsday Book his tyranny records.
And here begins our ancient pedigree,
That so exalts our poor nobility:
’Tis that from some French trooper they derive,
Who with the Norman bastard did arrive;
The trophies of the families appear,
Some show the sword, the bow, and some the spear,
Which their great ancestor, forsooth, did wear.
These in the herald’s register remain,
Their noble mean extraction to explain,
Yet who the hero was, no man can tell,
Whether a drummer or a colonel:
The silent record blushes to reveal
Their undescended dark original.
But grant the best, how came the change to pass,
A true-born Englishman of Norman race?
A Turkish horse can show more history
To prove his well-descended family.
Conquest, as by the moderns[[14]] ’tis expressed,
May give a title to the lands possessed:
But that the longest sword should be so civil
To make a Frenchman English, that’s the devil.