Yet, sluggard, wake, and gull thy soul no more With earth's false pleasure, and the world's delight,

Whose fruit is fair and pleasing to the sight, But sour in taste, false as the putrid core;

Thy flaring glass is gems at her half light; She makes thee seeming rich, but truly poor :

She boasts a kernel, and bestows a shell; Performs an inch of her fair-promis'd ell: Her words protest a heaven; her works produce a hell.

O thou, the fountain of whose better part
Is earth'd and gravel'd up with vain desire :
That daily wallow'st in the fleshly mire
And base pollution of a lustful heart,

That feel'st no passion but in wanton fire,
And own'st no torment but in Cupid's dart;
Behold thy type: thou sitt'st upon this ball
Of earth, secure, while death that flings at all,
Stands arm'd to strike thee down, where flames
attend thy fall.

S. BERN.

Security is no where; neither in heaven, nor in paradise, much less in the world. In heaven the angels fell from the divine presence; in paradise, Adam fell from his place of pleasure; in the world, Judas fell from the school of our Saviour.

HUGO.

I eat secure, I drink secure, I sleep secure, even as though I had past the day of death, avoided the day of judgment, and escaped the torments of hell fire: I play and laugh, as though I were already triumphing in the kingdom of heaven.

Epig. 7.

Get up, my soul; redeem thy slavish eyes
From drowsy bondage: O beware; be wise :
Thy foe's before thee; thou must fight or fly:
Life lies most open in a closed eye.

Woe unto you that laugh now! for ye shall mourn and weep.

THE world's a popular disease, that reigns
Within the froward heart and frantic brains
Of poor distemper'd mortals, oft arising
From ill digestion, through th' unequal poising

Of ill-weigh'd elements, whose light directs
Malignant humours to malign effects;

One raves and labours with a boiling liver;
Rends hair by handfuls, cursing Cupid's quiver;
Another, with a bloody flux of oaths,

Vows deep revenge: one dotes; the other loathes:
One frisks and sings, and cries, A flagon more
To drench dry cares, and make the welkin roar :
Another droops: the sunshine makes him sad;
Heav'n cannot please: one's mop'd; the other's
mad:

One hugs his gold; another lets it fly:

He knowing not for whom; nor t' other why.
One spends his day in plots, his night in play;
Another sleeps and slugs both night and day:
One laughs at this thing; t' other cries for that.
Wonder of wonders! What we ought t' evite
As our disease, we hug as our delight:
"Tis held a symptom of approaching danger,
When disacquainted sense becomes a stranger,
And takes no knowledge of an old disease;
But when a noisome grief begins to please
The unresisting sense, it is a fear

That death has parley'd, and compounded there:
As when the dreadful Thund'rer's awful hand
Pours forth a vial on the infected land,

At first the affrighten❜d mortals quake and fear;
And ev'ry noise is thought the Thunderer:
But when the frequent soul-departing bell
Has pav'd their ears with her familiar knell,

It is reputed but a nine days wonder,

They neither fear the Thund'rer nor his thunder.
So when the world (a worse disease) began
To smart for sin, poor new-created man
Could seek for shelter, and his gen'rous son
Knew by his wages what his hands had done:
But bold-fac'd mortals in our blushless times
Can sing and smile, and make a sport of crimes,
Transgress of custom, and rebel in ease,
We false-joy'd fools can triumph in disease,
And (as the careless pilgrim, being bit
By the tarantula, begins a fit

Of life-concluding laughter) waste our breath
In lavish pleasure, till we laugh to death.