I dread to appear in this Humble Dedication to Your Royal Highness, as
one of those Insolent and Saucy Offenders who take occasion by Your
absence to commit ill-mannered indecencies, unpardonable to a Prince of
your Illustrious Birth and God-like Goodness, but that in spight of
Seditious Scandal You can forgive; and all the World knows You can
suffer with a Divine Patience: the proofs You have early and late given
of this, have been such, as if Heaven design’d ’em only to give the
World an undeniable Testimony of Your Noble Vertues, Your Loyalty and
True Obedience (if I may presume to say so,) both to Your Sacred
Brother, and the never satisfied People, when either one Commanded, or
t’other repin’d, With how chearful and intire a submission You Obey’d?
And tho the Royal Son of a Glorious Father who was render’d unfortunate
by the unexemplary ingratitude of his worst of Subjects; and sacrific’d
to the insatiate and cruel Villany of a seeming sanctifi’d Faction, who
cou’d never hope to expiate for the unparallell’d sin, but by an intire
submission to the Gracious Off-spring of this Royal Martyr: yet You,
Great Sir, denying Yourself the Rights and Priviledges the meanest
Subject Claims, with a Fortitude worthy Your Adorable Vertues, put
Yourself upon a voluntary Exile to appease the causeless murmurs of
this again gathering Faction, who make their needless and self-created
fears, an occasion to Play the old Game o’re again; whil’st the
Politick self-interested and malitious few betray the unconsidering
Rest, with the delicious sounds of Liberty and Publick Good; that lucky
Cant which so few years since so miserably reduc’d all the Noble, Brave
and Honest, to the Obedience of the ill-gotten Power, and worse-acted
Greatness of the Rabble; so that whil’st they most unjustly cry’d down
the oppression of one of the best of Monarchs, and all Kingly
Government: all England found itself deplorably inslav’d by the
Arbitrary Tyranny of many Pageant Kings. Oh that we shou’d so far
forget with what greatness of mind You then shar’d the common Fate, as
now and again to force Your Royal Person to new Perils, and new Exiles;
but such ingratitude we are punisht with, and You still suffer for, and
still forgive it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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