The Miller: A Ballad

In a plain pleasant cottage, conveniently neat,
With a mill and some meadows—a freehold, estate,
A well-meaning miller by labour supplies,
Those blessings that grandeur to great ones denies:

No passions to plague him, no cares to torment,
His constant companions are health and content;
Their lordships in lace may remark if they will,
He's honest tho' daub'd with the dust of his mill.

Ere the larks early carrols salute the new day
He springs from his cottage as jocund as May;
He chearfully whistles, regardless of care,
Or sings the last ballad he bought at the fair:
While courtiers are toil'd in the cobwebs of state,
Or bribing elections in hopes to be great,
No fraud, of ambition his bosom does fill,
Contented he works, if there's grist for his mill.

On Sunday bedeck'd in his homespun array,
At church he's the loudest, to chaunt or to pray:
He sits to a dinner of plain English food,
Tho' simple the pudding, his appetite's good;

At night, when the priest and exciseman are gone,
He quaffs at the alehouse with Roger and John,
Then reels to his pillow, and dreams of no ill;
No monarch more blest than the man of the mill.