And treason labouring in the traitor’s thought;
  And midwife Time the ripen’d plot to murder brought. 
  There the red Anger dared the pallid Fear;
  Next stood Hypocrisy, with holy leer,
  Soft smiling, and demurely looking down,
  But hid the dagger underneath the gown: 
  The assassinating wife, the household fiend;
  And far the blackest there, the traitor-friend. 
  On the other side, there stood Destruction bare;
  Unpunish’d Rapine, and a waste of War. 570
  Contest, with sharpen’d knives, in cloisters drawn,
  And all with blood bespread the holy lawn. 
  Loud menaces were heard, and foul disgrace,
  And bawling infamy, in language base;
  Till sense was lost in sound, and silence fled the place. 
  The slayer of himself yet saw I there,
  The gore congeal’d was clotted in his hair;
  With eyes half closed, and gaping mouth he lay,
  And grim, as when he breathed his sullen soul away. 
  In midst of all the dome, Misfortune sate, 580
  And gloomy Discontent, and fell Debate,
  And Madness laughing in his ireful mood;
  And arm’d complaint on theft; and cries of blood. 
  There was the murder’d corpse in covert laid,
  And violent death in thousand shapes display’d: 
  The city to the soldiers rage resigned: 
  Successless wars, and poverty behind: 
  Ships burnt in fight, or forced on rocky shores,
  And the rash hunter strangled by the boars: 
  The new-born babe by nurses overlaid; 590
  And the cook caught within the raging fire he made. 
  All ills of Mars his nature, flame and steel;
  The gasping charioteer, beneath the wheel
  Of his own car; the ruin’d house that falls
  And intercepts her lord betwixt the walls: 
  The whole division that to Mars pertains,
  All trades of death that deal in steel for gains,
  Were there:  the butcher, armourer, and smith,
  Whose forges sharpen’d falchions, or the scythe. 
  The scarlet conquest on a tower was placed, 600
  With shouts, and soldiers’ acclamations graced: 
  A pointed sword hung threatening o’er his head,
  Sustain’d but by a slender twine of thread. 
  There saw I Mars his ides, the Capitol,
  The seer in vain foretelling Caesar’s fall;
  The last triumvirs, and the wars they move,
  And Antony, who lost the world for love. 
  These, and a thousand more, the fane adorn;
  Their fates were painted ere the men were born,
  All copied from the heavens, and ruling force 610
  Of the red star, in his revolving course. 
  The form of Mars high on a chariot stood,
  All sheath’d in arms, and gruffly look’d the god: 
  Two geomantic figures were display’d
  Above his head, a warrior and a maid,
  One when direct, and one when retrograde.