Amidst thy bowers the tyrant’s hand is seen. Strean’s explanation (Mangin, _ut supra_, pp. 140–1) of this is as follows:—‘The poem of _The Deserted Village_, took its origin from the circumstance of general Robert Napper [Napier or Naper], (the grandfather of the gentleman who now [1807] lives in the house, within half a mile of Lissoy, and built by the general) having purchased an extensive tract of the country surrounding Lissoy, or _Auburn_; in consequence of which many families, here called _cottiers_, were removed, to make room for the intended improvements of what was now to become the wide domain of a rich man, warm with the idea of changing the face of his new acquisition; and were forced, “_with fainting steps,_” to go in search of “_torrid tracts_” and “_distant climes._”’ Prior (_Life_, 1837, i. 40–3) points out that Goldsmith was not the first to give poetical expression to the wrongs of the dispossessed Irish peasantry; and he quotes a long extract from the _Works_ (1741) of a Westmeath poet, Lawrence Whyte, which contains such passages as these:— Their native soil were forced to quit, So Irish landlords thought it fit; Who without ceremony or rout, For their improvements turn’d them out ... How many villages they razed, How many parishes laid waste ... Whole colonies, to shun the fate Of being oppress’d at such a rate, By tyrants who still raise their rent, Sail’d to the Western Continent. The hollow-sounding bittern guards its nest. ‘Of all those sounds,’ says Goldsmith, speaking of the cries of waterfowl, ‘there is none so dismally hollow as the booming of the bittern.’ . . . ‘I remember in the place where I was a boy with what terror this bird’s note affected the whole village; they considered it as the presage of some sad event; and generally found or made one to succeed it.’ (_Animated Nature_, 1774, vi. 1–2, 4.) Bewick, who may be trusted to speak of a bird which he has drawn with such exquisite fidelity, refers (_Water Birds_, 1847, p. 49) to ‘the hollow booming noise which the bittern makes during the night, in the breeding season, from its swampy retreats.’ Cf. also that close observer Crabbe (_The Borough_, Letter xxii, ll. 197–8):— And the loud bittern, from the bull-rush home, Gave from the salt-ditch side the bellowing boom. Princes and lords may flourish, or may fade; A breath can make them, as a breath has made. Mitford compares _Confessio Amantis_, fol. 152:— A kynge may make a lorde a knave, And of a knave a lord also; and Professor Hales recalls Burns’s later line in the _Cotter’s Saturday Night_, 1785:—