What's this in one annihilated city,

Where thousand loves, and ties, and duties grow? Cockneys of London! Muscadins of Paris!

Just ponder what a pious pastime war is.

Think how the joys of reading a Gazette

Are purchased by all agonies and crimes: Or if these do not move you, don't forget

Such doom may be your own in after-times. Meantime the Taxes, Castlereagh, and Debt,

Are hints as good as sermons, or as rhymes. Read your own hearts and Ireland's present story, Then feed her famine fat with Wellesley's glory.

But still there is unto a patriot nation,

Which loves so well its country and its king,

A subject of sublimest exultation

Bear it, ye Muses, on your brightest wing!

Howe'er the mighty locust, Desolation,

Strip your green fields, and to your harvests cling,

Gaunt famine never shall approach the throne
Though Ireland starve, great George weighs twenty stone

But let me put an end unto my theme:

There was an end of Ismail — hapless town!

Far flash'd her burning towers o'er Danube's stream,
And redly ran his blushing waters down.

The horrid war-whoop and the shriller scream
Rose still; but fainter were the thunders grown:
Of forty thousand who had mann'd the wall,
Some hundreds breathed - the rest were silent all!

EXHORTATION TO MR. WILBERFORCE.

(DON JUAN, Canto xiv. Stanzas 82-84.)

O WILBERFORCE! thou man of black renown,
Whose merit none enough can sing or say,
Thou hast struck one immense Colossus down,
Thou moral Washington of Africa!
But there's another little thing, I own,

Which you should perpetrate some summer's day,

And set the other half of earth to rights;

You have freed the blacks. -now pray shut up the whites.

Shut up the bald-coot bully Alexander !

Ship off the Holy Three to Senegal;

Teach them that "sauce for goose is sauce for gander," And ask them how they like to be in thrall?

Shut up each high heroic salamander,

Who eats fire gratis (since the pay 's but small); no, not the King, but the Pavilion,

Shut up

Or else 't will cost us all another million.

Shut up the world at large, let Bedlam out;
And you will be perhaps surprised to find
All things pursue exactly the same route,

As now with those of soi-disant sound mind.
This I could prove beyond a single doubt,
Were there a jot of sense among mankind;
But till that point d'appui is found, alas!
Like Archimedes, I leave earth as 't was.

EXHORTATION TO MRS. FRY.

(DON JUAN, Canto x. Stanzas 85-87.)

OH Mrs. Fry! Why go to Newgate? Why
Preach to poor rogues? And wherefore not begin
With Carlton, or with other houses? Try
Your hand at harden'd and imperial sin.
To mend the people 's an absurdity.

Fy!

A jargon, a mere philanthropic din,
Unless you make their betters better:
I thought you had more religion, Mrs. Fry.

Teach them the decencies of good threescore;

Cure them of tours, hussar and highland dresses; Tell them that youth once gone returns no more, That hired huzzas redeem no land's distresses;

Tell them Sir William Curtis is a bore,

Too dull even for the dullest of excesses, The witless Falstaff of a hoary Hal,

A fool whose bells have ceased to ring at all.

Tell them, though it may be perhaps too late
On life's worn confine, jaded, bloated, sated,

To set up vain pretences of being great,

'T is not so to be good; and be it stated, The worthiest kings have ever loved least state; And tell them- But you won't, and I have prated Just now enough; but by and by I'll prattle Like Roland's horn in Roncesvalles' battle.

SATAN CLAIMS, AT HEAVEN'S GATE, GEORGE THE THIRD.

(VISION OF JUDGMENT, Stanzas 42-49.)

"Look to the earth, I said, and say again:

When this old, blind, mad, helpless, weak, poor worm
Began in youth's first bloom and flush to reign,
The world and he both wore a different form,
And much of earth and all the watery plain

Of ocean call'd him king: through many a storm
His isles had floated on the abyss of time;
For the rough virtues chose them for their clime.

"He came to his sceptre young; he leaves it old:
Look to the state in which he found his realm,
And left it; and his annals too behold,

How to a minion first he gave the helm;
How grew upon his heart a thirst for gold,
The beggar's vice, which can but overwhelm
The meanest hearts; and for the rest, but glance
Thine eye along America and France.

"'T is true, he was a tool from first to last

(I have the workmen safe); but as tool
So let him be consumed. From out the past
Of ages, since mankind have known the rule
Of monarchs - from the bloody rolls amass'd

Of sin and slaughter — from the Cæsar's school,

Take the worst pupil; and produce a reign

More drench'd with gore, more cumber'd with the slain

"He ever warr'd with freedom and the free: Nations as men, home subjects, foreign foes, So that they utter'd the word 'Liberty!'

Found George the Third their first opponent. Whose History was ever stain'd as his will be

With national and individual woes?

I grant his household abstinence; I grant

His neutral virtues, which most monarchs want;

"I know he was a constant consort; own
He was a decent sire, and middling lord.
All this is much, and most upon a throne;
As temperance, if at Apicius' board,
Is more than at an anchorite's supper shown.
I grant him all the kindest can accord;
And this was well for him, but not for those
Millions who found him what oppression chose.

"The New World shook him off: the Old yet groans
Beneath what he and his prepared, if not
Completed: he leaves heirs on many thrones
To all his vices, without what begot

Compassion for him

- his tame virtues; drones

Who sleep, or despots who have now forgot

A lesson which shall be re-taught them, wake
Upon the thrones of earth; but let them quake!

"Five millions of the primitive, who hold

The faith which makes ye great on earth, implored

A part of that vast all they held of old,

Freedom to worship — not alone your Lord,