8.

    “But the softest note that sooth’d his ear
      Was the sound of a widow sighing,
    And the sweetest sight was the icy tear,
    Which Horror froze in the blue eye clear
      Of a maid by her lover lying—­
    As round her fell her long fair hair;
    And she look’d to Heaven with that frenzied air
    Which seem’d to ask if a God were there! 
    And, stretch’d by the wall of a ruin’d hut,
    With its hollow cheek, and eyes half shut,
      A child of famine dying: 
    And the carnage begun, when resistance is done,
      And the fall of the vainly flying!

    10.

    “But the Devil has reach’d our cliffs so white,
      And what did he there, I pray? 
    If his eyes were good, he but saw by night
      What we see every day;
    But he made a tour, and kept a journal
    Of all the wondrous sights nocturnal,
    And he sold it in shares to the Men of the Row,
    Who bid pretty well—­but they cheated him, though!

    11.

    “The Devil first saw, as he thought, the Mail,
      Its coachman and his coat;
    So instead of a pistol, he cock’d his tail,
      And seized him by the throat: 
    ‘Aha,’ quoth he, ’what have we here? 
    ‘Tis a new barouche, and an ancient peer!’

    12.

    “So he sat him on his box again,
      And bade him have no fear,
    But be true to his club, and stanch to his rein,
      His brothel, and his beer;
    ’Next to seeing a lord at the council board. 
      I would rather see him here.’

    17.

    “The Devil gat next to Westminster,
    And he turn’d to ‘the room’ of the Commons;
    But he heard, as he purposed to enter in there,
    That ‘the Lords’ had received a summons;
    And he thought, as a ‘quondam aristocrat,’
    He might peep at the peers, though to hear them were flat: 
    And he walk’d up the house, so like one of our own,
    That they say that he stood pretty near the throne.

    18.

    “He saw the Lord L——­l seemingly wise,
    The Lord W——­d certainly silly,
    And Johnny of Norfolk—­a man of some size—­
    And Chatham, so like his friend Billy;
    And he saw the tears in Lord E——­n’s eyes,
    Because the Catholics would not rise,
    In spite of his prayers and his prophecies;
    And he heard—­which set Satan himself a staring—­
    A certain Chief Justice say something like swearing. 
    And the Devil was shock’d—­and quoth he, ’I must go,
    For I find we have much better manners below. 
    If thus he harangues when he passes my border,
    I shall hint to friend Moloch to call him to order.’”
]

[Footnote 103:  Or Mr. Southey,—­for the right of authorship in them seems still undecided.]