Fifty of the Protestant Ballads :: :: University of Virginia Library

By all means—Law and Quiet—
Be these our modern praise!
No Lord George Gordon riot,
No “light of other days,”
Such light as bonfires flaring
With sacrilegious fires,
Or mobs our matrons scaring,
As once they scared our sires!

Yes; though the parish tyrant
Provokes the fist that strikes,
By sacerdotal high rant
And daring what he likes
Against our English feelings
Of honesty at home,
By superstitious stealings
Of trumpery from Rome,—

Yet we would make no Edom
Of his chancel or his pelf,
But all we want is freedom
From the thraldom of himself;
We give him leave to leave us
Right peacefully in time,
Before the rabble grieve us
By—Heaven avert it!—crime.

For Britain frowns and hectors
In honest wrath to know
So many budding rectors
Perverted to the foe,
And vows she will not stand it,
To see the parish priest
A semi-papal bandit
Of the Babylonish Beast!

Shall that Italian Ferret
Usurp this Lion-throne
Which Protestants inherit
Through their pure faith alone?
Shall Popery and its vermin
(As bad old times have seen)
Again infest the ermine
Of England and her Queen?

No! those old times have taught us
The strength that in us lies,—
For our own hands have wrought us
The freedom that we prize;
Our hands upheld by Heaven,
Have conquered in the fight,
And quell'd the papal leaven
By force of truth and right.

So, yet once more if treason
To that pure faith of ours
Wakes up with bitter reason
An angry people's powers

As with the white and red-rose
That tore our weal in twain.
Shall rage, as if the dead rose,
Red civil war again!

Or, if some scheme less frightful
Be managed to divide
The wrongful from the rightful
Without that bloody tide,
At least our torn division
Of church, and creed, and crown,
Must earn the world's derison,
And drag our glory down!

These Romanizing traitors
Are forcing to a fight
The lovers and the haters
Of liberty and light;
And beckon on war's demon
To scare sweet peace at home,
By threats that England's fremen
Shall wear the chains of Rome!

So, their's the guilt, not our's,
If revolution dire,
That now in thunder lours,
Should wrap this land in fre;
No peace can be for Zion
If Jezebel come here,—
No rest for Judah's lion
With Rabshakeh so near!