SATIRE II.
NAY, if our sins are grown so high of late,
That heaven no longer can adjourn our fate,
May 't please some milder vengeance to devise,
Plague, fire, sword, dearth, or anything but this,
Let it rain scalding showers of brimstone down,
To burn us, as of old the lustful town;
Let a new deluge overwhelm again,
And drown at once our land, our lives, our sin.
Thus gladly we'll compound, all this well pay,
To have this worst of ills removed away.
Judgments of other kinds are often sent
In mercy only, not for punishment;
But where these light, they show a nation's fate
Is given up, and past for reprobate.
When God his stock of wrath on Egypt spent
To make a stubborn land and king repent,
Sparing the rest, had he this one plague sent,
For this alone his people had been quit,
And Pharaoh circumcised a proselyte.
Wonder no longer why no curse, like these,
Was known, or suffered in the primitive days;
They never sinned enough to merit it,
'Twas therefore what Heaven's just power thought fit,
To scourge this latter, and more sinful age
With all the dregs and squeezings of his rage.
Too dearly is proud Spain with England quit
For all her loss sustained in Eighty-eight;
For all the ills our warlike virgin wrought,
Or Drake, or Raleigh, her great scourges, brought.
Amply she was revenged in that one birth,
When hell for her the Biscain plague brought forth;[1]
Great counter plague! in which unhappy we
Pay back her sufferings with full usury:
- ↑ Ignatius Loyola, who was born in 1491 in Guipuzcoa, one of the Basque provinces. In this Satire, Oldham is speaking in his own person.
