Where'er the Son of Jesse's harp shall sound, Or Israel's sweetest songs be sung, (Like Samson's lion sweet and strong) You and your happy Muse shall be renown'd, To whose kind hand the Son of Jesse owes His last deliverance from all his foes. Blood-thirsty Saul, less barbarous than they, His person only sought to kill; These would his deathless poems slay, 50 And sought immortal blood to spill, To sing whose songs in Babylon would be A new Captivity: Deposèd by these rebels, you alone Restor'd the glorious David to his throne. Long in disguise the royal Prophet lay, Long from his own thoughts banishèd, Ne'er since his death till this illustrious day Was sceptre in his hand, or crown plac'd on his head: He seem'd as if at Gath he still had bin 60 As once before proud Achish he appear'd, His face besmear'd, With spittle on his sacred beard, A laughing-stock to the insulting Philistine. Drest in their rhymes, he look'd as he were mad, In tissue you, and Tyrian purple have him clad. [_To Dr. Sam. Woodford._] First printed in _A Paraphrase upon the Psalms of David_, 1668. A MS. version is in Rawlinson D. 260 (fol. 27) of the Bodleian. Woodford (1636-1700) though much forgotten now, must have been something more than an ordinary person. As such he might have been, as he was, a St. Paul's boy and an Oxford (Wadham) man, a member of the Inner Temple, an early F.R.S., and later a Canon of Chichester and Winchester. But as such merely he would hardly have been, in the Preface to his Paraphrases of the Canticles (_v. inf._, p. 366), the first, and for a long time the only, 'ingoing' critic of Milton's blank verse. He does not take quite the right view of it, but it is noteworthy that he should have taken any view of an intelligent character.] [Line: 12 soar'd] tow'red _MS._] [Line: 16 a _om._ _MS._] [Line: 18 'But which of us poor mortals' _1668_, _MS._] [Line: 20, 21, &c. have] ha' _1668_.] [Line: 25 ire] Dire _MS._, a word of which a unique instance in the sense of 'dire quality' is quoted in the _N.E.D._ from Anthony à Wood. The scribe may have misunderstood 'important' ( = 'importunate').] [Line: 39 flown] got _MS._] [Line: 41 This quaint anti-climax is one of the not very few indications which make of Flatman a sort of rough draft of Prior.]