22. 
To Peter’s view, all seemed one hue;
He was no Whig, he was no Tory; 565
No Deist and no Christian he;—­
He got so subtle, that to be
Nothing, was all his glory.

23. 
One single point in his belief
From his organization sprung, 570
The heart-enrooted faith, the chief
Ear in his doctrines’ blighted sheaf,
That ‘Happiness is wrong’;

24. 
So thought Calvin and Dominic;
So think their fierce successors, who 575
Even now would neither stint nor stick
Our flesh from off our bones to pick,
If they might ‘do their do.’

25. 
His morals thus were undermined:—­
The old Peter—­the hard, old Potter—­ 580
Was born anew within his mind;
He grew dull, harsh, sly, unrefined,
As when he tramped beside the Otter. (1)

26. 
In the death hues of agony
Lambently flashing from a fish, 585
Now Peter felt amused to see
Shades like a rainbow’s rise and flee,
Mixed with a certain hungry wish(2).

27. 
So in his Country’s dying face
He looked—­and, lovely as she lay, 590
Seeking in vain his last embrace,
Wailing her own abandoned case,
With hardened sneer he turned away: 

28. 
And coolly to his own soul said;—­
’Do you not think that we might make 595
A poem on her when she’s dead:—­
Or, no—­a thought is in my head—­
Her shroud for a new sheet I’ll take: 

29. 
’My wife wants one.—­Let who will bury
This mangled corpse!  And I and you, 600
My dearest Soul, will then make merry,
As the Prince Regent did with Sherry,—­’
‘Ay—­and at last desert me too.’

30. 
And so his Soul would not be gay,
But moaned within him; like a fawn 605
Moaning within a cave, it lay
Wounded and wasting, day by day,
Till all its life of life was gone.

31. 
As troubled skies stain waters clear,
The storm in Peter’s heart and mind 610
Now made his verses dark and queer: 
They were the ghosts of what they were,
Shaking dim grave-clothes in the wind.

32. 
For he now raved enormous folly,
Of Baptisms, Sunday-schools, and Graves, 615
’Twould make George Colman melancholy
To have heard him, like a male Molly,
Chanting those stupid staves.

33. 
Yet the Reviews, who heaped abuse
On Peter while he wrote for freedom, 620
So soon as in his song they spy
The folly which soothes tyranny,
Praise him, for those who feed ’em.