Prodigious wonder! fit for Stow to tell,
And stand recorded in his Chronicle;[1]
A thing less memorable would require
As great a monument as London fire.
A man of faith and uprightness is grown
So strange a creature, both in court and town,
That he with elephants may well be shown;
A monster, more uncommon than a whale
At Bridge, the last great comet, or the hail,
Than Thames his double tide, or should he run
With streams of milk or blood to Gravesend down.
You're troubled that you've lost five hundred pound
By treacherous fraud; another may be found,
Has lost a thousand; and another yet,
Double to that; perhaps his whole estate.
Little do folks the heavenly powers mind,
If they but 'scape the knowledge of mankind.
Observe, with how demure and grave a look
The rascal lays his hand upon the book;
Then, with a praying face and lifted eye,
Claps on his lips, and seals the perjury;
If you persist his innocence to doubt,
And boggle in belief, he'll straight rap out
Oaths by the volley, each of which would make
Pale atheists start, and trembling bullies quake;
And more than would a whole ship's crew maintain
To the East Indies hence, and back again
’As God shall pardon me, sir, I am free
Of what you charge me with; let me ne'er see
His face in heaven else; may these hands rot,
These eyes drop out, if I e'er had a groat
Of yours, or if they ever touched, or saw't.'
- ↑ John Stow, the antiquary, like Speed, the contemporary of Spelman and Cotton, was the son of a tailor, and born in London about 1525. His principal works were the Summary of the Chronicles of England, and the Survey of London. Notwithstanding the high reputation he obtained by these valuable publications, he died in great poverty at the age of eighty, in 1605.
