THOU, Liberty, thou art my theme;
Not such as idle poets dream,
Who trick thee up a heathen goddess
That a fantastic cap and rod has;
Such stale conceits are poor and silly;
I paint thee out, a Highland filly,
A sturdy, stubborn, handsome dapple,
As sleeks a mouse, as rounds an apple,
That when thou pleasest canst do wonders;
But when thy luckless rider blunders,
Or if thy fancy should demur there,
Wilt break thy neck ere thou go further.
These things premised, I sing a Fox,
Was caught among his native rocks,
And to a dirty kennel chained,
How he his liberty regained.
Glenriddell! Whig without a stain,
A Whig in principle and grain,
Couldst thou enslave a free-born creature,
A native denizen of Nature?
How couldst thou, with a heart so good,
(A better neer was sluiced with blood!)
Nail a poor devil to a tree,
That neer did harm to thine or thee?
The staunchest Whig Glenriddell was,
Quite frantic in his countrys cause;
And oft was Reynards prison passing,
And with his brother-Whigs canvassing
The Rights of Men, the Powers of Women,
With all the dignity of Freemen.
Sir Reynard daily heard debates
Of Princes, Kings, and Nations fates,
With many rueful, bloody stories
Of Tyrants, Jacobites, and Tories:
From liberty how angels fell,
That now are galley-slaves in hell;
How Nimrod first the trade began
Of binding Slaverys chains on Man;
How fell SemiramisGd d-mn her!
Did first, with sacrilegious hammer,
(All ills till then were trivial matters)
For Man dethrond forge hen-peck fetters;
How Xerxes, that abandoned Tory,
Thought cutting throats was reaping glory,
Until the stubborn Whigs of Sparta
Taught him great Natures Magna Charta;
How mighty Rome her fiat hurld
Resistless oer a bowing world,
And, kinder than they did desire,
Polishd mankind with sword and fire;
With much, too tedious to relate,
Of ancient and of modern date,
But ending still, how Billy Pitt
(Unlucky boy!) with wicked wit,
Has gaggd old Britain, draind her coffer,
As butchers bind and bleed a heifer,
Thus wily Reynard by degrees,
In kennel listening at his ease,
Suckd in a mighty stock of knowledge,
As much as some folks at a College;
Knew Britains rights and constitution,
Her aggrandisement, diminution,
How fortune wrought us good from evil;
Let no man, then, despise the Devil,
As who should say, I never can need him,
Since we to scoundrels owe our freedom.