Pardon, dear Saint, that we so late With lazy sighs bemoan thy fate, And with an after-shower of verse And tears, we thus bedew thy hearse. Till now, alas! we did not weep, Because we thought thou didst but sleep. Thou liv'dst so long we did not know Whether thou couldst now die or no. We looked still when thou shouldst arise And ope the casements of thine eyes. 10 Thy feet, which have been used so long To walk, we thought, must still go on. Thine ears, after a hundred year, Might now plead custom for to hear. Upon thy head that reverend snow Did dwell some fifty years ago: And then thy cheeks did seem to have The sad resemblance of a grave. Wert thou e'er young? For truth I hold And do believe thou wert born old. 20 There 's none alive, I'm sure, can say They knew thee young, but always grey. And dost thou now, venerable oak, Decline at Death's unhappy stroke? Tell me, dear son, why didst thou die And leave 's to write an elegy? We're young, alas! and know thee not. Send up old Abram and grave Lot. Let them write thy Epitaph and tell The world thy worth; they kenned thee well. 30 When they were boys, they heard thee preach And thought an angel did them teach. Awake them then: and let them come And score thy virtues on thy tomb, That we at those may wonder more Than at thy many years before. [_An Elegy, &c._ This and the following piece are among the disputed poems, but as they occur in _1653_ I give them, with warning and asterisked. The _D.N.B._ allows (with a ?) 104 years (1536?-1640) to Chadderton. As the first Master of the House of pure Emmanuel he might be supposed unlikely to extract a tear from Cleveland. But he had resigned his Mastership nearly twenty years before his death, and that death occurred before the troubles became _insanabile vulnus_. There is nothing to require special annotation in it, or indeed in either, though in _Doctor Chadderton_, l. 23, one may safely guess that either 'thou' or 'now' is an intrusion; in l. 25 of the same that 'son' should be 'sir', 'sire', 'saint', &c.; and in l. 29 that 'th' Epitaph' is likelier.] *Mary's Spikenard.