like daggers and like fire; Ah, Britain, land of angels! which of all thy sins,          (Say, hapless isle, although It is a bloody list we know,)      Has given thee up a dwelling-place to fiends? Sin and the plague ever abound In governments too easy, and too fruitful ground; Evils which a too gentle king, Too flourishing a spring, And too warm summers bring:         Our British soil is over rank, and breeds Among the noblest flowers a thousand pois'nous weeds, And every stinking weed so lofty grows, As if 'twould overshade the Royal Rose; The Royal Rose, the glory of our morn, But, ah! too much without a thorn. 

      VI Forgive (original mildness) this ill-govern'd zeal,      'Tis all the angry slighted Muse can do In the pollution of these days; No province now is left her but to rail, And poetry has lost the art to praise, Alas, the occasions are so few:           None e'er but you, And your Almighty Master, knew With heavenly peace of mind to bear      (Free from our tyrant passions, anger, scorn, or fear)      The giddy turns of popular rage, And all the contradictions of a poison'd age; The Son of God pronounced by the same breath Which straight pronounced his death; And though I should but ill be understood, In wholly equalling our sin and theirs, And measuring by the scanty thread of wit What we call holy, and great, and just, and good,      (Methods in talk whereof our pride and ignorance make use,)        And which our wild ambition foolishly compares With endless and with infinite; Yet pardon, native Albion, when I say, Among thy stubborn sons there haunts that spirit of the Jews, That those forsaken wretches who to-day Revile his great ambassador, Seem to discover what they would have done        (Were his humanity on earth once more)      To his undoubted Master, Heaven's Almighty Son. 

      VII But zeal is weak and ignorant, though wondrous proud, Though very turbulent and very loud; The crazy composition shows, Like that fantastic medley in the idol's toes, Made up of iron mixt with clay, This crumbles into dust, That moulders into rust, Or melts by the first shower away. Nothing is fix'd that mortals see or know, Unless, perhaps, some stars above be so; And those, alas, do show, Like all transcendent excellence below; In both, false mediums cheat our sight, And far exalted objects lessen 

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