reversion)
     Has generally no great crop to spare it, he
       Being only injured by his own assertion.
     And although here and there some glorious rarity
       Arise like Titan from the sea's immersion,
     The major part of such appellants go
     To—God knows where—for no one else can know.

     If fallen in evil days on evil tongues,
       Milton appealed to the avenger, Time,
     If Time, the avenger, execrates his wrongs
       And makes the word Miltonic mean sublime,
     He deigned not to belie his soul in songs,
       Nor turn his very talent to a crime.
     He did not loathe the sire to laud the son,
     But closed the tyrant-hater he begun.

     Think'st thou, could he, the blind old man, arise
       Like Samuel from the grave to freeze once more
     The blood of monarchs with his prophecies,
        Or be alive again—again all hoar
     With time and trials, and those helpless eyes
       And heartless daughters—worn and pale and poor,
     Would he adore a sultan? He obey
     The intellectual eunuch Castlereagh?

     Cold-blooded, smooth-faced, placid miscreant!
       Dabbling its sleek young hands in Erin's gore,
     And thus for wider carnage taught to pant,
       Transferred to gorge upon a sister shore,
     The vulgarest tool that tyranny could want,
       With just enough of talent and no more,
     To lengthen fetters by another fixed
     And offer poison long already mixed.

     An orator of such set trash of phrase,
       Ineffably, legitimately vile,
     That even its grossest flatterers dare not praise,
       Nor foes—all nations—condescend to smile.
     Not even a sprightly blunder's spark can blaze
       From that Ixion grindstone's ceaseless toil,
     That turns and turns to give the world a notion
     Of endless torments and perpetual motion.

     A bungler even in its disgusting trade,
       And botching, patching, leaving still behind
     Something of which its masters are afraid,
       States to be curbed and thoughts to be confined,
     Conspiracy or congress to be made,
       Cobbling at manacles for all mankind,
     A tinkering slave-maker, who mends old chains,
     With God and man's abhorrence for its gains.

     If we may judge of matter by the mind,
     Emasculated to the marrow, it
     Hath but two objects, how to serve and bind,
     Deeming the chain it wears even men may fit,
     Eutropius of its many masters, blind
     To worth as freedom, wisdom as to wit,
     Fearless, because no feeling dwells in ice;
     Its very courage stagnates to a vice.

     Where shall I turn me not to view its bonds,
       For I will never feel them. Italy,
     Thy late reviving Roman soul desponds
       Beneath the lie this state-thing breathed o'er thee.
     Thy clanking chain and Erin's yet green wounds
       Have voices, tongues to cry aloud for me.
     Europe has slaves, allies, kings, armies still,
     And Southey lives to sing them very ill.

     Meantime, Sir Laureate, I proceed to dedicate
       In honest simple verse this song to you.
     And if in flattering strains I do not predicate,
       'Tis that I still retain my buff and blue;
     My politics as yet are all to educate.
       Apostasy's so fashionable too,
     To keep one creed's a task grown quite
     Herculean Is it not so, my Tory, ultra-Julian?