Tells them, no monstrous birth, with pow'r endu'd, By that more monstrous beast, the Multitude,-- No State-_Coloss_ (though tall as that bestrid The Rhodian harbour where their navy rid), Can hold that ill-proportion'd greatness still, Beyond his greater, most resistless will, 30 Whose dreadful sentence, written on the Wall, Did sign the temple-robbing tyrant's fall; But spite of their vast privilege, which strives T' exceed the size of ten prerogatives; Spite of their endless parliament, or grants (In order to those votes and Covenants, When, without sense of their black perjury, They swear with Essex they would live and die), With their dead General ere long they must Contracted be into a span of dust. 40 [_On the Earl of Essex._] This and the next two may be called King's chief, if not his only, political poems: that they were kept back till after the Restoration is not surprising. Of Essex--one of the most unfortunate of men, the son of an unlucky father, the husband of one of the worst of women, and of another not much better, a half-hearted rebel, a soldier not less brave than blundering--not much is to be said here. King had some interest in the first and universally known divorce (the second, much less notorious, was from Elizabeth Paulet), for his father had been uncourtly and honest enough to oppose it strongly.] [Line: 10 This rather vigorous line was to be prophetic as well as true at the time, for when, after the Restoration, the title of Essex was revived it was for the Capels, who still hold it, not for any Devereux. The vigour just referred to is by no means absent from the whole poem, and in an ante-Drydenian piece is really remarkable.] [Line: 32 temple-robbing tyrant's fall] side-note in orig.: _Belshasar_, Dan. 5.] _An Elegy on Sir Charles Lucas and Sir George Lisle._ [Murdered August 28, 1648.] In measures solemn as the groans that fall From the hoarse trumpet at some funeral; With trailing Elegy and mournful verse, I wait upon two peerless soldiers' hearse: Though I acknowledge must my sorrow's dress Ill matched to the cause it should express; Nor can I, at my best invention's cost, Sum up the treasure which in them we lost. Had they, with other worthies of the age, Who late upon the kingdom's bloody stage, 10 For God, the King, and Laws, their valour tried, Through War's stern chance in heat of battle died, We then might save much of our grief's expense, Reputing it, not duty, but offence. They need no tears, nor howling exequy, Who in a glorious undertaking die; Since all that in the bed of honour fell, Live their own Monument and Chronicle.