style="font-size:15px;"> So beauty, guarded out by Innocence,That ruins her which should be her defence.
Ingratitude, a devil of black renown,
Possess’d 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 suffer’d her to be so oft subdued;
By sev’ral crowds of wandering thieves o’er-run,
Often unpeopled, and as oft undone;
While ev’ry nation that her powers reduced,
Their languages and manners introduced;
From whose mix’d 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, Greek, and Lombards; and, by computation,
Auxiliaries or slaves of ev’ry nation.
With Hengist, Saxons; Danes with Sweno came,
In search of plunder, not in search of fame.
Scots, Picts, and Irish from th’ Hibernian shore;
And conq’ring William brought the Normans o’er.
All these their barb’rous offspring left behind,
The dregs of armies, they of all mankind;
Blended with Britons, who before were here,
Of whom the Welch ha’ blest the character.
From this amphibious, ill-born mob began,
That vain ill-natured thing, an Englishman.
The customs, sirnames, languages, and manners,
Of all these nations, are their own explainers;
Whose relics are so lasting and so strong,
They’ve left a Shiboleth upon our tongue;
By which, with easy search, you may distinguish
Your Roman, Saxon, Danish, Norman, English.
The great invading Norman let us know
What conquerors in after-times might do.
To every musqueteer 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 home again.
No re-assumptions in his reign were known,
Davenant 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 canton’d out the country to his men,
And every soldier was a denizen.
The rascals thus enrich’d, he called them lords,
To please their upstart pride with new-made words,
And doomsday book his tyranny records.
And here begins the 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 ’tis express’d,
May give a title to the lands possess’d;
But that the longest sword should be so civil,
To make a Frenchman English, that’s the devil.
These are the heroes that despise the Dutch,
And rail at new-come foreigners so much;
Forgetting that themselves are all derived
From the most scoundrel race that ever lived;
A horrid crowd of rambling thieves and drones
Who ransack’d kingdoms, and dispeopled towns;
The Pict and painted Briton, treach’rous Scot,
By hunger, theft, and rapine, hither brought;
Norwegian pirates, buccaneering Danes,
Whose red-hair’d offspring everywhere remains;
Who, join’d with Norman French, compound the breed
From whence your true-born Englishmen proceed.
And lest, by length of time, it be pretended,
The climate may this modern
