News from Colchester; or, a proper new Ballad
TO THE HON. EDWARD HOWARD,
HAT mighty gale hath rais'd a flight so strong?
So high above all vulgar eyes? so long?
One fingle rapture scarce itself confines
Within the limits of four thousand lines.:
And yet I hope to see this noble heat
Continue, till it makes the piece compleat,
That to the latter age it may descend,
And to the end of time its beams extend.
When poesy joins profit with delight,
Her images should be most exquifite,
Since man to that perfection cannot rise,
Of always virtuous, fortunate, and wife;
Therefore the patterns man should imitate
Above the life our masters should create.
Herein, if we confult with Greece and Rome,
Greece (as in war) by Rome was overcome;
Though mighty raptures we in Homer find,
Yet, like himself, his characters were blind
Virgil's fublimed eyes not only gaz'd,
But his fublimed thoughts to Heaven were rais'd.
Who reads the honours which he paid the gods,
Would think he had beheld their blest abodes;
DENHAM
And, that his hero might accomplish'd be,
From divine blood he draws his pedigree.
From that great judge your judgment takes its law, 25
And by the best original does draw
Bonduca's honour, with those heroes Time
Had in oblivion wrapt, his saucy crime;
To them and to your nation you are just,
In raising up their glories from the dust;
And to Old England you that right have done,
To shew, no story nobler than her own.
HENRY LORD HASTINGS. 1650.
PEADER, preferve thy peace; those bufy eyes.
Will weep at their own sad discoveries;
When every line they add improves thy loss,
Till, having view'd the whole, they suin a cross;
Such as derides thy passions' best relief,
And scorns the fuccours of thy easy grief.
Yet, lest thy ignorance betray thy name
Of man and pious, read and mourn: the shame
Of an exemption, from just sense, doth shew
Irrational, beyond excess of woe.
Since reason, then, can privilege a tear,
Mankood, uncensur'd, pay that tribute here,
Upon
ON THE DEATH OF LORD HASTINGS. 145
Upon this noble urn. Here, here remains
Dust far more precious than in India's veins :
Within these cold embraces, ravish'd, lies
That which compleats the age's tyrannies :
Who weak to fuch another ill appear,
For what destroys our hope, secures our fear.
What fin unexpiated, in this land
Of groans, hath guided so severe a hand?
The late great victim * that your altars knew,
Ye angry gods, might have excus'd this new
Oblation, and have spar'd one lofty light
Of virtue, to inform our steps aright;
By whose example good, condemned we
Might have run on to kinder destiny.
But, as the leader of the herd fell first
A facrifice, to quench the raging thinst
Of inflam'd vengeance for past crimes; fo none
But this white-fatted youngling could atone,
By his untimely fate, that impious smoke,
That sullied earth, and did Heaven's pity choak.
Let it fuffice for us, that we have lost
In him, more than the widow'd world can boast
In any lump of her remaining clay.
Fair as the grey-ey'd morn he was; the day,
Youthful, and climbing upwards still, imparts
No haste like that of his increasing parts;
Like the meridian beam, his virtue's light
Was seen, as full of comfort, and as bright.
* King Charles the First.
Had his noon been as fix'd as clear-but he,
That only wanted immortality
To make him perfect, now submits to night,
In the black bosom of whose sable spite,
He leaves a cloud of flesh behind, and flies,
Refin'd, all ray and glory, to the skies.
Great saint! shine there in an eternal sphere,
And tell those powers to whom thou now draw'st near,
That by our trembling sense, in HASTINGS dead,
Their anger and our ugly faults are read;
The short lines of whose life did to our eyes
Their love and majesty epitomize.
Tell them, whose stern decrees impose our laws,
The feasted grave may close her hollow jaws;
Though sin search nature, to provide her here
A second entertainment half so dear,
She'll never meet a plenty like this hearse,
Till Time present her with the Universe.
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