Ecclesiastical Sonnets - Part III. - III - Charles The Second

Who comes with rapture greeted, and caressed With frantic love, his kingdom to regain? Him Virtue's Nurse, Adversity, in vain Received, and fostered in her iron breast: For all she taught of hardiest and of best, Or would have taught, by discipline of pain And long privation, now dissolves amain, Or is remembered only to give zest To wantonness. Away, Circean revels! But for what gain? if England soon must sink Into a gulf which all distinction levels That bigotry may swallow the good name, And, with that draught, the life-blood: misery, shame, By Poets loathed; from which Historians shrink!