aged three months and four days, RICHARD ACANTHUS, a young person of unblemished character: He was taken in his callow infancy from under the wing of a tender parent, by the rough and pitiless hands of a two legged animal without feathers. Though born with the most aspiring disposition and unbounded love of freedom, he was closely confined in a grated prison, and scarcely permitted to view those fields to the possession of which he had an ancient and undoubted charter. Deeply sensible of this infringement of his natural and unalienable rights, he was often heard to petition for redress; but in the most plaintive notes of harmonious sorrow: at length, tired with fruitless efforts to escape, his indignant soul burst the prison which his body could not, if suffering innocence can hope for retribution, the humble, though uncertain, hope of animating some happier form; or trying his new fledged pinions in some happy Elysium, beyond the reach of MAN, the tyrant of this lower world |