We, who for name and empty honour strive, 390
  Our true nobility from him derive. 
  Your ancestors, who puff your mind with pride,
  And vast estates to mighty titles tied,
  Did not your honour, but their own, advance;
  For virtue comes not by inheritance. 
  If you tralineate from your father’s mind,
  What are you else but of a bastard kind? 
  Do, as your great progenitors have done,
  And, by their virtues, prove yourself their son. 
  No father can infuse or wit or grace; 400
  A mother comes across, and mars the race. 
  A grandsire or a grandame taints the blood;
  And seldom three descents continue good. 
  Were virtue by descent, a noble name
  Could never villanise his father’s fame;
  But, as the first, the last of all the line,
  Would, like the sun, even in descending shine;
  Take fire, and bear it to the darkest house,
  Betwixt King Arthur’s court and Caucasus: 
  If you depart, the flame shall still remain, 410
  And the bright blaze enlighten all the plain: 
  Nor, till the fuel perish, can decay,
  By nature form’d on things combustible to prey. 
  Such is not man, who, mixing better seed
  With worse, begets a base degenerate breed: 
  The bad corrupts the good, and leaves behind
  No trace of all the great begetter’s mind. 
  The father sinks within his son, we see,
  And often rises in the third degree;
  If better luck a better mother give, 420
  Chance gave us being, and by chance we live. 
  Such as our atoms were, even such are we,
  Or call it chance, or strong necessity: 
  Thus loaded with dead weight, the will is free. 
  And thus it needs must be; for seed conjoin’d
  Lets into nature’s work the imperfect kind;
  But fire, the enlivener of the general frame,
  Is one, its operation still the same. 
  Its principle is in itself:  while ours
  Works, as confederates war, with mingled powers; 430
  Or man or woman, which soever fails: 
  And oft the vigour of the worse prevails. 
  Aether with sulphur blended alters hue,
  And casts a dusky gleam of Sodom blue. 
  Thus, in a brute, their ancient honour ends,
  And the fair mermaid in a fish descends: 
  The line is gone; no longer duke or earl;
  But, by himself degraded, turns a churl. 
  Nobility of blood is but renown
  Of thy great fathers by their virtue known, 440
  And a long trail of light, to thee descending down. 
  If in thy smoke it ends, their glories shine;
  But infamy and villanage are thine. 
  Then what I said before is plainly show’d,
  The true nobility proceeds from God;
  Nor left us by inheritance, but given
  By bounty of our stars, and grace of Heaven. 
  Thus from a captive Servius Tullius rose,