Where moth and rust doth corrupt

 Thus all the treasure of our flowing years, 

Our ebb of life forever takes away.

 

-- Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon

They're not innocents: The poets write what they know

 Folly and vice are easy to describe,

The common subjects of our scribbling tribe.

 

-- Wentworth Dillon

 

 

On the self-importance of the poets

 

 True poets are the guardians of a state,

And when they fail, portend approaching fate.

-- Wentworth Dillon

Today's cancel culture is the very enemy of the Christian culture: "Forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors"

Thou, whom avenging pow'rs obey,

Cancel my debt, too great to pay,

Before the sad accounting day.

-- Roscommon

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors. ... But if ye forgive not men their trespasses, neither will your Father forgive your trespasses. 

-- Matthew 6:12, 15

Woe unto you, lawyers!

The busy, subtile serpents of the law

Did first my mind from true obedience draw;

While I did limits to the king prescribe,

And took for oracles that canting tribe.

-- Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon

Virtue needs no defence

Virtue, dear friend, needs no defence, 

The surest guard is innocence,

Quivers and bows and poison'd darts

Are only us'd by guilty hearts.

-- 4th Earl of Roscommon

A lesser man than Trump would have succumbed to paranoia by now

 

 

The press, the pulpit and the stage,

Conspire to censure and expose our age.

-- 4th Earl of Roscommon

Be not blindly guided by the throng

Be not blindly guided by the throng;

The multitude is always in the wrong.

-- Wentworth Dillon

Oh the times they are decayin'

 

 

Time sensibly all things impairs;

Our fathers have been worse than theirs,

And we than ours; next age will see

A race more profligate than we,

With all the pains we take,

have skill enough to be.

-- Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon

The soul ascends back the way it came, like Theseus' return from the convoluted lair of the Minotaur, guided by a thread

Ariadne giving a clew of thread to Theseus, by Pelagio Palagi

While, guided by some clew of heav'nly thread,
The perplex'd labyrinth we backward tread.

-- Wentworth Dillon, 4th Earl of Roscommon (1637-1685)