Читать книгу The Collected Works - William Cowper - Страница 94

Table of Contents

Olney, July 8, 1780.

Mon Ami—If you ever take the tip of the chancellor's ear between your finger and thumb, you can hardly improve the opportunity to better purpose, than if you should whisper into it the voice of compassion and lenity to the lace-makers. I am an eye-witness to their poverty, and do know that hundreds in this little town are upon the point of starving; and that the most unremitting industry is but barely sufficient to keep them from it. I know that the bill by which they would have been so fatally affected is thrown out, but Lord Stormont threatens them with another; and if another like it should pass, they are undone. We lately sent a petition to Lord Dartmouth; I signed it, and am sure the contents are true. The purport of it was to inform him, that there are very near one thousand two hundred lace-makers in this beggarly town, the most of whom had reason enough, while the bill was in agitation, to look upon every loaf they bought as the last they should ever be able to earn. I can never think it good policy to incur the certain inconvenience of ruining thirty thousand, in order to prevent a remote and possible damage, though to a much greater number. The measure is like a scythe, and the poor lace-makers are the sickly crop, that trembles before the edge of it. The prospect of a peace with America is like the streak of dawn in their horizon; but this bill is like a black cloud behind it, that threatens their hope of a comfortable day with utter extinction.

I do not perceive, till this moment, that I had tacked two similes together, a practice which, though warranted by the example of Homer, and allowed in an Epic Poem, is rather luxuriant and licentious in a letter; lest I should add another, I conclude.

W. C.