As if Misfortune made the throne her seat,
And none could be unhappy but the great.

Rowe’s couplet satirizes a common posture of the powerful: the tendency to treat suffering as a special prerogative of rank, as though “Misfortune” naturally belongs on a throne and only the “great” can truly be unhappy. The lines expose the self-dramatizing melancholy of courts and rulers, where private grief is inflated into public tragedy and ordinary hardship is overlooked. Implicitly, the speaker insists that misery is not confined to high station; the poor and obscure endure misfortune no less, though without the spectacle or sympathy accorded to elites. The couplet thus critiques aristocratic self-pity and re-centers compassion on the universality of human vulnerability.