And now will pardon, comfort, kindness draw
The youth from vice? will honour, duty, law? 
Alas! not all:  the more the trials lent,
The less he seem’d to ponder and repent;
Headstrong, determined in his own career,
He thought reproof unjust and truth severe;
The soul’s disease was to its crisis come,
He first abused and then abjured his home;
And when he chose a vagabond to be,
He made his shame his glory—­“I’ll be free.” 
   Friends, parents, relatives, hope, reason, love,
With anxious ardour for that empire strove;
In vain their strife, in vain the means applied,
They had no comfort, but that all were tried;
One strong vain trial made, the mind to move,
Was the last effort of parental love. 
   E’en then he watch’d his father from his home,
And to his mother would for pity come,
Where, as he made her tender terrors rise,
He talk’d of death, and threaten’d for supplies. 
Against a youth so vicious and undone,
All hearts were closed, and every door but one: 
The Players received him; they with open heart
Gave him his portion and assign’d his part;
And ere three days were added to his life,
He found a home, a duty, and a wife. 
   His present friends, though they were nothing nice,
Nor ask’d how vicious he, or what his vice,
Still they expected he should now attend
To the joint duty as a useful friend;
The leader too declared, with frown severe,
That none should pawn a robe that kings might wear;
And much it moved him, when he Hamlet play’d,
To see his Father’s Ghost so drunken made: 
Then too the temper, the unbending pride
Of this ally, would no reproof abide:  —
So leaving these, he march’d away and join’d
Another troop, and other goods purloin’d;
And other characters, both gay and sage,
Sober and sad, made stagger on the stage. 
Then to rebuke with arrogant disdain,
He gave abuse, and sought a home again. 
   Thus changing scenes, but with unchanging vice,
Engaged by many, but with no one twice: 
Of this, a last and poor resource, bereft,
He to himself, unhappy guide! was left —
And who shall say where guided? to what seats
Of starving villany? of thieves and cheats? 
   In that sad time of many a dismal scene
Had he a witness, not inactive, been;
Had leagued with petty pilferers, and had crept
Where of each sex degraded numbers slept: 
With such associates he was long allied,
Where his capacity for ill was tried,
And that once lost, the wretch was cast aside,
For now, though willing with the worst to act,
He wanted powers for an important fact;
And while he felt as lawless spirits feel,
His hand was palsied, and he couldn’t steal. 
   By these rejected, is their lot so strange,
So low! that he could suffer by the change? 
Yes! the new station as a fall we judge, —
He now became the harlots’ humble drudge,