Epigram Printed In The Northampton Mercury.

A poem by William Cowper

To purify their wine, some people bleed
A lamb into the barrel, and succeed;
No nostrum, planters say, is half so good
To make fine sugar as a negro’s blood.
Now lambs and negroes both are harmless things,
And thence perhaps this wondrous virtue springs,
‘Tis in the blood of innocence alone—
Good cause why planters never try their own.