It will be necessary to observe here, that after much enquiry and very laborious search, as to the birth-place of the Right Honourable Secretary (for the honour of which, however difficult now to discover, Hibernia’s cities will, doubtless, hereafter contend) we found that he was born in NORTHUMBERLAND; which, added to other circumstances, clearly establishes the applicability of the description of the word Goth, &c. and particularly in the lines where he calls him the
———VANDAL of the modern time,
The latter offspring of the Northern clime.
Having investigated, with an acumen and minuteness seldom incident to genius, and very rarely met with in the sublimer poetry, all the circumstances attending an event which he emphatically describes as the Revolution of seventeen hundred and eighty-five, he makes the following address to the English:
No more, ye English, high in classic pride,
The phrase uncouth of Ireland’s sons deride;
For say, ye wise, which most performs the fool,
Or he who speaks, or he who acts—a BULL.
The Poet catches fire as he runs:
—Poetica surgit
Tempestas.
He approximates now to the magnificent, or perhaps more properly to the mania of Poetry, and like another Cassandra, begins to try his skill at prophecy; like her he predicts truly, and like her, for the present at least, is not, perhaps, very implicitly credited.—He proceeds thus;
Rapt into future times, the Muse surveys
The rip’ning; wonders of succeeding days:
Sees Albion prostrate, all her splendour gone!
In useless tears her pristine state bemoan;
Sees the fair sources of her pow’r and pride
In purer channels roll their golden tide;
Sees her at once of wealth and honour shorn,
No more the nations’ envy, but their scorn;
A sad example of capricious fate,
Portentous warning to the proud and great:
Sees Commerce quit her desolated isle,
And seek in other climes a kinder soil;
Sees fair Ierne rise from England’s flame,
And build on British ruin, Irish fame.
The Poet in the above passage, is supposed to have had an eye to
Juno’s address to Æolus in the first book of the Æneid:
Gens inimica mihi Tyrrhenum navigat æquor
Ilium in Italiam portans, Victos que Penates.