Nor is the people’s judgment always true: 
  The most may err as grossly as the few? 
  And faultless kings run down by common cry,
  For vice, oppression, and for tyranny. 
  What standard is there in a fickle rout,
  Which, flowing to the mark, runs faster out? 
  Nor only crowds but Sanhedrims may be
  Infected with this public lunacy,
  And share the madness of rebellious times,
  To murder monarchs for imagined crimes. 790
  If they may give and take whene’er they please,
  Not kings alone, the Godhead’s images,
  But government itself at length must fall
  To nature’s state, where all have right to all. 
  Yet, grant our lords the people kings can make,
  What prudent men a settled throne would shake? 
  For whatsoe’er their sufferings were before,
  That change they covet makes them suffer more. 
  All other errors but disturb a state;
  But innovation is the blow of fate. 800
  If ancient fabrics nod, and threat to fall,
  To patch their flaws, and buttress up the wall,
  Thus far ’tis duty:  but here fix the mark;
  For all beyond it is to touch the ark. 
  To change foundations, cast the frame anew,
  Is work for rebels, who base ends pursue;
  At once divine and human laws control,
  And mend the parts by ruin of the whole,
  The tampering world is subject to this curse,
  To physic their disease into a worse. 810

    Now what relief can righteous David bring? 
  How fatal ’tis to be too good a king! 
  Friends he has few, so high the madness grows;
  Who dare be such must be the people’s foes. 
  Yet some there were, even in the worst of days;
  Some let me name, and naming is to praise.

    In this short file Barzillai first appears;
  Barzillai, crown’d with honour and with years. 
  Long since, the rising rebels he withstood
  In regions waste beyond the Jordan’s flood:  820
  Unfortunately brave to buoy the state;
  But sinking underneath his master’s fate: 
  In exile with his godlike prince he mourn’d;
  For him he suffer’d, and with him return’d. 
  The court he practised, not the courtier’s art: 
  Large was his wealth, but larger was his heart,
  Which well the noblest objects knew to choose,
  The fighting warrior, and recording muse. 
  His bed could once a fruitful issue boast;
  Now more than half a father’s name is lost. 830
  His eldest hope, with every grace adorn’d,
  By me, so Heaven will have it, always mourn’d,
  And always honour’d, snatch’d in manhood’s prime
  By unequal fates, and providence’s crime: 
  Yet not before the goal of honour won,
  All parts fulfill’d of subject and of son: 
  Swift was the race, but short the time to run. 
  O narrow circle, but of power divine,