- Fraudful, their weight of sugar to increase.1
- Far be such guile from Britain’s honest swains.
- Such arts, awhile, the unwary may surprise,
- And benefit the Impostor; but, ere long, [460]
- The skilful buyer will the fraud detect,
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And, with abhorrence, reprobate the name.
- FORTUNE had crown’d Avaro’s2 younger years,
- With a vast tract of land, on which the cane
- Delighted grew, nor ask’d the toil of art. [465]
- The Sugar-bakers deem’d themselves secure,
- Of mighty profit, could they buy his cades;
- For, whiteness, hardness, to the leeward-crop,
- His muscovado gave. But, not content
- With this pre-eminence of honest gain, [470]
- He baser sugars started in his casks;
- His own, by mixing sordid things, debas’d.
- One year the fraud succeeded; wealth immense
- Flowed in upon him, and he blest his wiles:
- The next, the brokers spurn’d the adulterate mass, [475]
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Both on the Avon and the banks of Thame.3
- BE thrifty, planter, even thy skimmings4 save:
- For, planter, know, the refuse of the Cane
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Grainger criticizes the French, whom he accuses of doctoring their sugar by adding sand to it. ↩︎
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A mean-spirited, rich man who appears as a character in Richard Steele’s The Tatler (1709-1711). ↩︎
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The Thames, another major site for sugar refining in the eighteenth century. ↩︎
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The thick syrup or scum produced during the sugar-boiling step of refining. ↩︎