THE King's DISGUISE.  

ANd why a Tenant to this vile disguise,  
Which who but sees blasphemes thee with his eyes?  
My Twins of Light within their penthouse shrink,  
And hold it their allegiance to wink.  
Oh for a State-distinction to arraign  
CHARLES of High-Treason 'gainst my sovereign.  
What an usurper to his Prince is wont,  
Cloister and shave him, He himself hath done't.  
His muffled feature speaks him a Recluse,  
Whose ruins prove him a Religious House.  
The Sun hath moved his beams from off his lamp,  
And Majesty defaced the royal stamp.  
Is't not enough thy Dignity's in thrall,  
But thou'lt transmute it in thy shape and all?  
As if thy Blacks were of too faint a dye  
Without the tincture of tautology.  
Flay an Egyptian from his Cassock skin,  
Spun of his country's darkness, lined within  
With Presbyterian budge, that drowsy trance,  
The Synods sable, foggy ignorance.  
No bodily nor ghostly Negro could  
Rough-cast thy figure in a sadder mould:  
This privy-chamber of thy shape would be  
But the Close mourner of thy royalty.  
'Twill break the circle of thy gaolcrs' spell,  
A pearl within a rugged Oysters shell.  
Heaven, which the Minster of thy Person owns,  
Would fine thee for Dilapidations.  
Like to a martyred Abbeys courser doom,  
Devoutly altered to a Pigeon room:  
Or like the college by the changeling rabble,  
manchester's Elves, reformed into a Stable.  
Or if there be a profanation higher,  
Such is the sacrilege of thine Attire.  
By which thou'rt half deposed, thou look'st like one  
Whose looks are under Sequestration.  
Whose Renegado form at the first glance  
Shows like the self-denying Ordinance.  
Angel of light, and darkness too, I doubt,  
Inspired within, and yet possessed without.  
Majestic twilight in the state of grace,  
Yet with an excommunicated face.  
Charles and his mask are of a different mint,  
A psalm of mercy in a miscreant print.  
The sun wears Midnight, Day is beetle-browed,  
And Lightning is in Keldar of a cloud.  
Oh the accurst stenography of fate!  
The Princely Eagle shrunk into a Bat.  
What charm, what magic vapour can it be  
That shrinks his rays to this apostasy?  
It is no subtle film of Tiffany air,  
No cobweb vizard, such as Ladies wear,  
When they are veiled on purpose to be seen,  
Doubling their lustre by their vanquished screen:  
Nor the false scabbard of a Prince● tough,  
And three piled darkness, like unto the slough  
Of an imprisoned flame, 'tis Faux in grain  
Dark lantern to our high Meridian.  
Hell belched the damp, the Warwick-Castle-Vote  
Rang Britan's curfew, so our light went out.  
Thy visage is not legible, the Letters  
Like a Lord's name writ in fantastic fetters,  
Clothes where a Swisser might be buried quick,  
Sure they would fit the Body politic.  
False beard enough to fit a Stages plot,  
For that's the ambush of their wit, God wot.  
Nay all his properties so strange appear,  
Y'are not i'th' presence, though the King be there.  
A libel is his dress, a garb uncouth,  
Such as the Hue and Cry once purged at mouth.  
Scribbling assassinate, thy lines attest  
An ear mark due; Cubbe of the Blatant Beast,  
Whose breath before 'tis syllabled for worse  
Is Blasphemy unfledged, a Callow curse.  
The Laplanders when they would sell a wind  
Wafting to hell, bag up thy phrase, and bind  
It to the bark, which at the voyage end▪  
Shifts poop, and brings the colic in the Fiend.  
But I'll not dub thee with a glorious scar,  
Nor sink thy scholar with a Man of War.  
The black-mouthed Si quis, and this slandering suit,  
Both do alike in picture execute.  
But since w'are all called Papists, why not date,  
Devotion to the Rags thus consecrate.  
As Temples use to have their Porches wrought  
With Sphynxes, creatures of an antic draught:  
And puzzling portraitures to show that there  
Riddles inhabited, the like is here.   

But pardon Sir, since I presume to be  
Clerk of this Closet to Your Majesty:  
Methinks in this your dark mysterious dress  
I see the Gospel couched in Parables.  
At my next view, my purblind fancy ripes,  
And shows Religion in its dusky types.  
Such a Text royal, so obscure a shade  
Was Solomon in Proverbs all arrayed.   

Come all ye Brats of this expounding age,  
To whom the Spirit is in pupil age;  
You that damn more than ever Samson slew,  
And with his engine, the same jawbone too:  
How is't he 'scape your Inquisition free,  
Since bound up in the bible's livery?  
Hence Cabinet-untrussers, picklocks hence,  
You that dim jewels with your Bristol-sense:  
And Characters, like Witches, so torment,  
Till they confess a guilt, though innocent.  
Keys for this Coffer you can never get,  
None but S. Peter's ops this Cabinet.  
This Cabinet, whose aspect would benight  
Critic spectators with redundant jight.  
A Prince most seen, is least: What Scriptures call  
The Revelation, is most mystical.   

Mount than thou Shadow royal, and with haste  
Advance thy Morning Star, Charles' overcast.  
May thy strange journey, contradictions twist,  
And force fair weather from a Scottish mist.  
Heaven's Confessors are posed, those star-eyed Sages  
Interpret an Eclipse, thus riding stages.  
Thus Israel-like he travels with a cloud,  
Both as a Conduct to him, and a shroud.  
But oh! he goes to Gibeon, and renews  
A league with mouldy bread and clouted shoes.   
FINIS.