As full of freaks as curs are full of fleas,
Like gnats they swarm, like flies they buzz and breed. 
Thought works in silence:  Wisdom stops to think. 
No ass so obstinate as ignorance. 
Oft as they seize the ship of state, behold—­
Overboard goes all ballast and they crowd
To blast or breeze or hurricane full sail,
Each dunce a pilot and a captain too. 
How often cross-eyed Justice hits amiss! 
Doomed by Athenian mobs to banishment,
See Aristides leave the land he saved: 
Wisdom his fault and justice his offense. 
See Caesar crowned a god and Tully slain;
See Paris red with riot and noble blood,
A king beheaded and a monster throned,—­
King Drone, flat fool that weather-cocked all winds,
Gulped gall and vinegar and smacked it wine,
Wig-wagged his way from gilded Oeil de Boeuf
Through mob and maelstrom to the guillotine. 
Chateaus up-blazing torch the doom of France,
While human wolves howl ruin round their walls. 
Contention hisses from a million mouths,
And from ten thousand muttering craters smokes
The smell of sulphur.  Gaul becomes a ghoul;
While Parlez-Tous in hot palaver holds
Hubbub ad Bedlam—­Pandemonium thriced. 
There, voices drowning voice with frantic cries,
Discord demented flaps her ruffled wings
And shrieks delirium to her screeching brood. 
Sneer-lipped, hawk-eyed, wolf-tongued oraculars—­
Wise-wigs, Girondins, frothing Jacobins—­
Reason to madness run, tongues venom-tanged—­
Howl chaos all with one united throat. 
Maelstrom of madness, lazar-howled, hag-shrilled! 
Quack quackles quack; all doctors disagree,
While Doctor Guillotine’s huge scalpel heads
Hell-dogs beheading helpless innocents. 
The very babes bark rabies.  Journalism,
Moon-mad, green-eyed, hound-scented, lupus-tongued
On howls the pack and smells her bread in blood.

O Tempus ferax insanorum, Heu!
Physicked with metaphysics, pamphleteered
Into paroxysms, bruited into brutes. 
And metamorphosed into murder, lo
Men lapse to savagery and turn to beasts. 
Hell-broth hag-boiled:  a mad Theroigne is queen—­
Mounts to the brazen throne of Harlotdom,
Queen of the cursed, and flares her cannon-torch. 
Watch-wolves, lean-jawed, fore-smelling feast of blood,
In packs on Paris howl from farthest France. 
Discord demented bursts the bounds of Dis;
Mad Murder raves and Horror holds her hell. 
Hades up-heaves her whelps.  In human forms
Up-flare the Furies, serpent-haired and grin
Horrid with bloody jaws.  Scaled reptiles crawl
From slum and sewer, slimy, coil on coil—­
Danton, dark beast, that builded for himself
A monument of quicksand limed with blood;
Horse-leech Marat, blear-eyed, vile vulture born;
Fair Charlotte’s dagger robbed the guillotine! 
Black-biled, green-visaged, traitorous Robespierre,