“Ye are honest gentlemen, I can play many tunes,” squeaked a poor mad
loyalist fiddler, who had been accustomed to play in the taverns to the
cavalier party, and just remembered the words of a similar minstrel
playing for Colonel Blunt in the committee. “Then play me the air to
“Rebellion is breaking up house,” exclaimed the tailor, dancing wildly
about his cell (as far as his chains allowed him) to an imaginary
measure. The weaver could contain no longer. “How long, Lord, how long,”
he exclaimed, “shall thine enemies insult thy sanctuary, in which I have
been placed an anointed teacher? even here, where I am placed to preach
to the souls in prison?--Open the flood-gates of thy power, and though
thy waves and storms go over me, let me testify in the midst of them,
even as he who spreadeth forth his hands to swim may raise one of them
to warn his companion that he is about to sink.--Sister Ruth, why dost
thou uncover thy bosom to discover my frailty?--Lord, let thine arm of
power be with us as it was when thou brakest the shield, the sword, and
the battle,--when thy foot was dipped in the blood of thine enemies, and
the tongue of thy dogs was red through the same.--Dip all thy garments
in blood, and let me weave thee fresh when thou art stained.--When shall
thy saints tread the wine-press of thy wrath? Blood! blood! the saints
call for it, earth gapes to swallow it, hell thirsts for it!--Sister
Ruth, I pray thee, conceal thy bosom, and be not as the vain women of
this generation.--Oh for a day like that, a day of the Lord of hosts,
when the towers fell!--Spare me in the battle, for I am not a mighty man
of war; leave me in the rear of the host, to curse, with the curse of
Meroz, those who come not to the help of the Lord against the
mighty,--even to curse this malignant tailor,--yea, curse him
bitterly.--Lord, I am in the tents of Kedar, my feet stumble on the dark
mountains,--I fall,--I fall!”--And the poor wretch, exhausted by his
delirious agonies, fell, and grovelled for some time in his straw. “Oh!
I have had a grievous fall,--Sister Ruth,--Oh Sister Ruth!--Rejoice not
against me, Oh mine enemy! though I fall, I shall rise again.” Whatever
satisfaction Sister Ruth might have derived from this assurance, if she
could have heard it, was enjoyed tenfold by the weaver, whose amorous
reminiscences were in a moment exchanged for war-like ones, borrowed
from a wretched and disarranged mass of intellectual rubbish. “The Lord
is a man of war,” he shouted.--“Look to Marston Moor!--Look to the city,
the proud city, full of pride and sin!--Look to the waves of the Severn,
as red with blood as the waves of the Red Sea!--There were the hoofs
broken by means of the prancings, the prancings of the mighty
ones.--Then, Lord, was thy triumph, and the triumph of thy saints, to
bind their kings in chains, and their nobles in links of iron.” The
malignant tailor burst out in his turn: “Thank the false Scots, and
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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