A patient, useful creature, born to bear
The warm and woolly fleece, that cloth'd her murderer;
And daily to give down the milk she bred,
A tribute for the grass, on which she fed,
Living, both food and raiment she supplies,
And is of least advantage when she dies.
How did the toiling ox his death deserve;
A downright simple drudge, and born to serve?
O tyrant! with what justice canst thou hope
The promise of the year, a plenteous crop;
When thou destroy'st thy lab'ring steer, who till'd,
And plough'd with pains, thy else ungrateful field!
From his yet reeking neck to draw the yoke,
That neck, with which the surly clods he broke:
And to the hatchet yield thy husbandman,
Who finish'd autumn, and the spring began?
What more advance can mortals make in sin
So near perfection, who with blood begin?
Deaf to the calf that lies beneath the knife,
Looks up, and from her butcher begs her life:
Deaf to the harmless kid, that ere he dies,
All methods to secure thy mercy tries,
And imitates in vain the children's cries.'
Perhaps that voice or cry so nearly resembling the human, with which Providence has endued so many different animals, might purposely be given them to move our pity, and prevent those cruelties we are too apt to inflict on our fellow creatures.
There is a passage in the book of Jonas, when God declares his unwillingness to destroy Nineveh, where methinks that compassion of the Creator, which extends to the meanest rank of his
