Thomas Tickell (1686–1740)

OF Marlborough’s captains, and Eugenio’s friends,

The last, Cadogan, to the grave descends:

Low lies each hand, whence Blenheim’s glory sprung,

The chiefs who conquer’d, and the bards who sung,

From his cold corse though every friend be fled,

Lo! Envy waits, that lover of the dead:

Thus did she feign o’er Nassau’s hearse to mourn;

Thus wept insidious, Churchill, o’er thy urn;

To blast the living, gave the dead their due,

And wreaths, herself had tainted, trimmed anew;

Thou, yet unnamed to fill his empty place,

And lead to war thy country’s growing race,

Take every wish a British heart can frame,

Add palm to palm, and rise from fame to fame.

An hour must come, when thou shalt hear with rage

Thyself traduced, and curse a thankless age:

Nor yet for this decline the generous strife.

These ills, brave man, shall quit thee with thy life,

Alive though stained by every abject slave,

Secure of fame and justice in the grave.

Ah! no——when once the mortal yields to Fate,

The blast of Fame’s sweet trumpet sounds too late,

Too late to stay the spirit on its flight,

Or soothe the new inhabitant of light;

Who hears regardless, while fond man, distress’d,

Hangs on the absent, and laments the blest.

Farewell then Fame, ill sought thro’ fields and blood,

Farewell unfaithful promiser of good:

Thou music, warbling to the deafen’d ear!

Thou incense wasted on the funeral bier!

Through life pursued in vain, by death obtained,

When asked deny’d us, and when given disdained.