Fragment CI: O Plutus! justly to your gifts and you

O Plutus! justly to your gifts and you
Mankind attribute praise and honour due.
With your assistance we securely face
Defeat and disappointment and disgrace.
Thus to reward the virtuous, and to slight
Wicked and dirty knaves, is surely right!
For with the world at large no merit tells,
But Plutus and his bounty,—nothing else!
No! not the sense of Rhadamanthus old,
Nor all the shrewd devices manifold,
Which Sisyphus, the keen Corinthian, knew ;
That wily chief, that, if old tales are true,
Made a most strange escape, so poets tell,
By dint of rhetoric, he return’d from hell!
For she, (that kind oblivion can dispense,
But takes away the judgment and the sense, )
The goddess Proserpine, by strong persuasion,
Consented to connive at his evasion :
A thing unheard of and unknown before ;
That, having pass’d the dark infernal door,
And visited those dreary realms below,
From that disastrous prison-house of woe,
A man by policy should work his way,
Emerging into light and upper day!
Sisyphus gain’d a point which none beside
(Of all that ever liv’d or ever died)
Could have achiev’d—yet Sisyphus would fail,
Nor would Ulysses with his arts prevail,
Nor aged Nestor with his eloguence—
No merit would avail you—no pretence ;
Though you possess’d the vigour and the speed
Of the swift Harpies, or the winged breed
Of Boreas, in the proud Olympic game
A conqueror ; your native place and name
“ Recorded and announce’d with loud acclaim ;
Still would you find the common saying hold,
“Fame is a jest; favour is bought and sold;
No power on earth is like the power of gold.”