BISHOP BONNER's GHOST.
STRAWBERRY-HILL: PRINTED BY THOMAS KIRGATE, MDCCLXXXIX.
THE ARGUMENT.
IN the gardens of the palace at Fulham is a dark recess; at the end of this stands a chair which once belonged to bishop Bonner.—A certain bishop of London, more than 200 years after the death of the aforesaid Bonner, just as the clock of the gothic chapel had struck six, undertook to cut with his own hand a narrow walk thro' this thicket, which is since called the
monk's walk.
He had no sooner begun to clear the way than, lo! suddenly up-started from the chair the ghost of bishop Bonner, who in a tone of just and bitter indignation uttered the following verses.
BONNER's GHOST.
REFORMER, hold! ah! spare my shade,
Respect the hallow'd dead;
Vain pray'r! I see the op'ning glade,
See utter darkness fled.
Just so your innovating hand
Let in the moral light;
So, chas'd from this bewilder'd land,
Fled intellectual night.
Where now that holy gloom which hid
Fair truth from vulgar ken?
Where now that wisdom which forbid
To think that monks were men?
The tangled mazes of the schools
Which spread so thick before,
Which knaves intwin'd to puzzle fools,
Shall catch mankind no more.
Those charming intricacies where?
Those venerable lies?
Those legends, once the church's care,
Those sweet perplexities?
Ah! fatal age, whose sons combin'd
Of credit to exhaust us;
Ah! fatal age, which gave mankind
A Luther and a Faustus!
The same age which brought heresy into the church unhappily introduced printing among the arts, by which means the scriptures were unluckily disseminated among the vulgar.
Had only Jack and Martin
How bishop Bonner came to have read Swist's Tale of a Tub it may now be in vain to inquire.
liv'd,
Our pow'r had slowly fled;
Our influence longer had surviv'd
Had laymen never read.
For knowledge flew, like magic spell,
By typographic art:
Oh, shame! a peasant now can tell
If priests the truth impart.
Ye councils, pilgrimages, creeds!
Synods, decrees, and rules!
Ye warrants of unholy deeds,
Indulgencies and bulls!
Where are ye now? and where, alas!
The pardons we dispense?
And penances, the sponge of sins;
And Peter's holy pence?
Where now the beads, which us'd to swell
Lean virtue's spare amount?
Here only faith and goodness fill
A heretic's account.
But soft—what gracious form appears?
Is this a convent's life?
Atrocious sight! by all my fears,
A prelate with a wife!
Ah! sainted Mary,
An orthodox queen of the 16th. century, who laboured with might and main, conjointly with these two venerable bishops to extinguish a dangerous heresy y-cleped the reformation.
not for this
Our pious labours join'd;
The witcheries of domestic bliss
Had shook ev'n Gardiner's mind.
Hence all the sinful, human ties,
Which mar the cloyster's plan;
Hence all the weak fond charities,
Which make man feel for man.
But tortur'd memory vainly speaks
The projects we design'd,
While this apostate bishop seeks
The freedom of mankind.
Oh, born in ev'ry thing to shake
The systems plann'd by me!
So heterodox, that he wou'd make
Both soul and body free.
Nor clime nor colour stays his hand;
With charity deprav'd,
He wou'd, from Thames' to Gambia's strand,
Have all be free and sav'd.
And who shall change his wayward heart;
His wilful spirit turn?
For those his labours can't convert,
His weakness will not burn.
Ann. Dom.
1900.
A GOOD OLD PAPIST.
By the lapse of time the three last stanzas are become unintelligible. Old chronicles say, that towards the latter end of the 18th century a bill was brought into the British parliament by an active young reformer for the abolition of a pretended traffic of the human species. But this only shews how little faith is to be given to the exaggerations of history, for as no vestige of this incredible trade now remains, we look upon the whole story to have been one of those fictions, not uncommon among authors, to blacken the memory of former ages.