Lines Written in a Country Alehouse

Here we behold the sons of Bacchus set,

To drown their sorrows in tumultuous joys,

Where each his past misfortunes does forget –

Where calls for silence but increase the noise.


Fumes potent rise, and each succeeding draught

Proclaims the growing goodness of the beer;

And Hodge rears his stentorian voice aloft –

For he in reasoning owns no compeer.


In Politics with foresight keen he dips –

To show their course his spacious hand extends;

Fates fall from off the rustic Nestor’s lips,

And empires hang upon his finger’s ends.


With well-clenched fist he makes the table plead;

Half-thunderstruck the gasping rustics stare;

They all admire the wisdom in his head –

But the great wonder is, how it came there.


I like such rhetoric – for to me it shows

More than a world of flowery tropes could teach –

That e’en the English Peasant feels and knows

The glorious privileges of thought and speech.

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