Edward Farr, ed. Select Poetry of the Reign of Queen Elizabeth. 1845.
Lines from “The Severall Seiges, Assaults, Sackings, and Finall Destruction of the Famous, Ancient, and memoriable Citty of Jerusalem”LXVIII. John Taylor
T
Of heav’ns iust, merciful, Almighty King;
By whose fore-knowledge all things were elected,
Whose power hath all things made & al protected,
Whose mercies’ flood hath quencht his iustice flame,
Who was, is, shall be one, and still the same;
Who in the prime, when all things first began,
Made all for man, and for himselfe made man,
Made, not begotten, or of humane birth,
No sire but God, no mother but the earth;
Who ne’r knew childhood, or the sucking teate,
But at the first was made man compleat;
Whose inward soule in God-like forme did shine,
As image of the Maiestie Divine;
Whose supernaturall wisdome (beyond nature)
Did name each sensible and senceless creature,
And from whose star-like, sand-like generation
Sprung every kindred, kingdome, tribe, and nation.
All people then one language spake alone,
Interpreters the world then needed none;
There lived then no learned deepe grammarians,
There were no Turkes, no Scythians, no Tartarians;
Then all was one, and one was only all
The language of the universall ball.
Then if a traveller had gone as farre
As from the Artick to th’ Antartick starre,
If he from Boreas unto Auster went,
Or from the Orient to th’ Occident,
Which way soever he did turne or winde,
He had been sure his country-man to find.
One hundred thirty winters since the flood
The earth one onely language understood;
Vntill the sonne of Cush, the sonne of Cham,
A proud, cloud-scaling towre began to frame,
Trusting that if the world again were drown’d,
He in his lofty building might rest sound;
All future floods he purpos’d to prevent,
Aspiring to heav’n’s glorious battlement.
But high Jehovah with a puff was able
To make ambitious Babel but a bable,
(For what is man, that he should dare resist
The great Almightie’s pow’r, who in his fist
Doth gripe eternity, and, when he please,
Can make and unmake heav’n and earth & seas?)
For in their expectation of conclusion
He plag’d them all with sundry tongues’ confusion.
Such gibrish, gibble-gabble, all did fangle,
Some laugh, some fret, all prate, all different wrangle;
One calls in Hebrew to his working mate,
And he in Welch, Glough whee comrage doth prate;
Another gapes in English or in Scotch,
And they are answered in the French or Dutch,
Caldiac, Syriacke, and Arabian,
Greeke, Latine, Tuscan, and Armenian,
The Transilvanian, and Hungarian,
The Persian, and the rude Barbarian:
All these, and divers more than I can number,
Misunderstanding tongues did there incumber.