And had they not begun the war,

They 'ad ne'er been sainted as they are :*
For saints in peace degenerate,

And dwindle down to reprobate;

Their zeal corrupts, like standing water,

645

In th' intervals of war and slaughter;
Abates the sharpness of its edge,
Without the pow'r of sacrilege :t

And tho' they've tricks to cast their sins,
As easy as serpents do their skins,‡

650

That in a while grow out agen,

In peace they turn mere carnal men,
And from the most refin'd of saints,
As nat rally grow miscreants
As barnacles turn soland geese

In th' islands of the Orcades.§

655

*Had not the divines, on the Presbyterian side, fomented the differences, the Independents had never come in play, or been taken notice of.

That is, if they have not the power and opportunity of committing sacrilege, by plundering the church lands.

Positis novus exuviis, nitidusque juventa. Georg. iii. 437. Our poet was too good a naturalist to suppose that a shellfish would turn to a goose: but in this place, as in many others, he means to banter some of the papers published by the first establishers of the Royal Society. In the twelfth volume of the Philosophical Transactions, No. 137, p. 925, Sir Robert Moray gives an account of barnacles hanging upon trees, and containing each of them a little bird, so completely formed that nothing appeared wanting, as to the external parts, for making up a perfect sea-fowl: the little bill, like that of a goose; the eyes marked; the head, neck, breast, and wings, tail and feet formed; the feathers every way perfectly shaped, and blackish colored; and the feet like those of other water fowls. See the Lepas anatifera, Lin. Syst. 668. My friend, Mr. Pennant, observes, (British Zoology, vol. iv. No. 9,) that the animal is furnished with a feathered beard, which in a credulous age was believed to be part of a young bird; it is a native of hot climates, and found adhering to the bottoms of ships. Heylin says, they are bred in the Isle of Man from rotten wood thrown into the water. The same is mentioned by Camden, and by old Gerard in his Herbal, who gives a print of the goose itself in p. 1587, with a cluster of the shells called Lepas anatifera, or barnacle shells, which he calls Concha anatiferæ Britannica, and by the wise naturalists of the sixteenth century were thought to generate the birds, which hung for a while by the bill, then fell into the sea, and grew to maturity: they did not, like our poet, make the tree goose a soland goose, but the goose called the barnacle. British Zoology, ii. 269. Sir John Mandeville, in his Voyages, ch. 84, says, "In my country there are trees that do bear fruit "that become birds flying, and they are good to eat, and that "which falls in the water lives, and that which falls on the "earth dies." Ed. London, 1722. Hector Boetius, in his History of Scotland, tells us of a goose-bearing tree, as it is called in the Örcades: that is, one whose leaves falling into the water, are