"Beasts, birds, and insects, even to the minutest and meanest of their kind, act with the unerring providence of instinct; man, the while, who possesses a higher faculty, abuses it, and therefore goes blundering on."

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Fashion, leader of a chatt'ring train, Whom man for his own hurt permits to reign Who shifts and changes all things but his shape, And would degrade her vot'ry to an ape, The fruitful parent of abuse and wrong, Holds a usurp'd dominion o'er his tongue, There sits and prompts him with his own disgrace, Prescribes the theme, the tone, and the grimace, And when accomplish'd in her wayward school, Calls gentleman whom she has made a fool.

— William Cowper