The end of the American war came in 1865. Of its magnitude and of the deeper issues involved; of the achievements of the heroes on either side – Sherman and Grant and Farragut, Stonewall Jackson and Lee —Punch showed himself strangely deficient in appreciation. The amende to Lincoln was handsome and complete, but it was not made until after the assassination of the greatest of Americans: —

Yes, he had lived to shame me from my sneer,
To lame my pencil and confute my pen —
To make me own this hind of princes peer,
This rail-splitter a true-born King of men.

It is truly said that Lincoln lived through four long-suffering years – years of ill-fate, ill-feeling, and ill-report – and lived to hear "the hisses change to cheers, the taunts to tribute, the abuse to praise," and took both with the same unwavering mood. Unhappily, as we have seen, by the change in Punch's view not being expressed until Lincoln was dead, the tribute lost its grace.

The toll of great or eminent men taken by 1865 was heavy, and memorial verses abound. Cobden, successively eulogized as a Free-Trader and attacked and even execrated as a Pacificist, died in the spring, and Lord Palmerston, the greatest of the Elder Statesmen, in the autumn. As we have often had occasion to notice in this chronicle, Punch had alternated between admiration of Palmerston's nerve and dislike of his Parliamentary opportunism. But no jarring note is struck in his eulogy; there is nothing elegiac in the cheerful dactyls – after the model of Tom Moore – in which he pays homage to Palmerston's wisdom, his courage, and his humour, and skates over the thin ice of his masterly inactivity in the cause of Reform: —

We trusted his wisdom, but love drew us nearer
Than homage we owed to his statesmanly art,
For never was statesman to Englishmen dearer
Than he who had faith in the great English heart.

The frank merry laugh, and the honest eye filling
With mirth, and the jests that so rapidly fell,
Told out the State-secret that made us right willing
To follow his leading – he loved us all well.

Our brave English Chief! – lay him down for the sleeping
That nought may disturb till the trumpet of doom:
Honour claims the proud vigil – but Love will come weeping,
And hang many garlands on Palmerston's tomb!

General Eyre

Relations with France were improved in 1865, the year of the fiftieth anniversary of peace with England, by the interchange of fraternal visits between the Fleets, duly celebrated by Punch. The death of the King of the Belgians, Leopold I, deprived Queen Victoria of one of her greatest and most trusted friends. As for Germany, the acquisition of Kiel laid the foundation of the naval policy formulated in the boast of Wilhelm II: "Our future lies on the water."

At home the Fenian outbreak in Ireland was spreading, but Punch refused to treat it as a serious menace, to judge from the burlesque list of its supporters published in the autumn. Much more space is devoted to the negro outbreak in Jamaica and the campaign against General Eyre, which affords a curious parallel to the Amritsar riots and the action of General Dyer. Eyre was much censured for his severity in suppressing the rising; the agitation to bring him to trial was kept up for three years by the Jamaica committee, of which J. S. Mill was a prominent member; but Punch defended Eyre throughout and heaped scorn on the "fanatics" and "noisy quacks" who thought so much of the blacks that they could not think of the whites. He admitted that the vengeance had been terrible; that a great slaughter had been made; but held that it had been justified by the needs of "a small white population, eight times outnumbered by the negroes, and suddenly confronted by the foulest horrors of savage warfare." The Grand Jury of Middlesex threw out the Bill in 1867, confirming the view already expressed by the Shropshire magistrates, but nevertheless Eyre was committed for trial a year later under the Colonial Governors' Act. Punch reprinted Eyre's speech in Court, and never swerved from the firm conviction that he had saved Jamaican society, white and black, by his promptness and resolution. He compared his long martyrdom with that of Warren Hastings, and predicted that Englishmen, who listen too much to noisy and gushing men, would in time make amends. The result was inconclusive, for while Eyre's career was ended by his recall, his legal expenses were paid by Government in 1872. He had undoubtedly saved the situation, but could not be acquitted of excessive severity.

The second of the three wars which consummated the aggrandisement of Prussia was brought to a speedy end in the summer of 1866 by the "twelve days" campaign which culminated in the defeat of Austria at Königgrätz (Sadowa). England, with Lord Russell as Premier, once more stood aloof, but English hostility to Prussia, and, above all, Bismarck – already recognized as the most formidable power in Continental politics – made itself widely felt. Punch expressed this general resentment in his comments on the rumour that the Queen was to visit Germany in the autumn. As a friend of Italy he could not disapprove of the arrangement by which Venetia was annexed to her dominions; as the unrelenting critic of Louis Napoleon he could not refrain from disparaging his attitude of neutrality tempered by a hope of "picking up the pieces." But England, though not embroiled in Continental disputes, was not without her own troubles. The Russell Cabinet had fallen over Reform, there had been riots in Hyde Park (of which we speak elsewhere), and before the Derby-Disraeli administration came in, the Liberals had been forced to suspend the Habeas Corpus Act in Ireland in order to deal effectually with what Mr. Gladstone did not hesitate to describe as the wicked conspiracy of Fenianism. Punch's summary of the proceedings in Parliament on Saturday, February 18, and the historic session on Sunday, 19, when the Suspension Bill became law, is not without interest. J. S. Mill supported the Government; Bright's speech in the character of the candid friend was described by Gladstone as "containing what was in part untrue, in part open to question, and generally out of place," a strange inversion of their rôles in 1886. It is noteworthy that the demand for land legislation and the disestablishment of the Irish Church was heard in the debate, and that the trouble in Ireland was largely ascribed by the Government to the presence of Irish-Americans, released by the cessation of the American war, who had come to Ireland to promote Fenianism and were "regularly paid by somebody." They were "wanted," but to make a general capture of these miscreants it was necessary to dispense with the law which forbade arrest without warrant and imprisonment without appeal to the judges. There is a distressingly familiar ring about these arguments, and the reference to the fact that the Fenians had already begun to murder.

Nascent Imperialism

To turn from the centre to the circumference, one may note a pleasant hint of nascent Imperialism in the little geography lesson, doubtless well needed, which Punch gives his readers on December 1, 1866: —

Mr. Punch is pleased to see that a decoration has been given by the Queen to the Finance Minister of Victoria. Victoria is one of the Australian colonies, it is at the southern extremity of the continent, Melbourne is the capital, and the inhabitants are far in advance of England in regard to civilization – for instance, they have compulsory education. The Hon. George Vernon came over on a mission to our Government. Victoria wants an armour-plated ship, for which she will partly pay, and a training ship, and Sir John Pakington has assented. The Minister, for his various services to the colony, has received the Bath Cross. Should it not have been the Victoria Cross? This little goak is the bit of sugar with which Mr. Punch rewards his readers for learning more than most English people know about one of our noblest colonies. If his readers are good, they shall have another colonial lesson some day. For we have other colonies besides Victoria.

Another lesson in geography had been suggested earlier in the year by the final success of the Great Eastern in laying the cable, a success due as much to the enterprise of Cyrus Field, the American capitalist, as to the genius of Brunel.

In 1867 there was a further recrudescence of Fenianism, and the "physical force" men extended their operations to England. For this was the year of the sinister attempt to blow up Clerkenwell prison, and the rescue of Fenians from the prison van in Manchester, in which a police-sergeant was shot, with, as a consequence, the execution of the "Manchester Martyrs," funeral processions and celebrations, the echoes of which have reverberated down to these days.

The Reform League expressed sympathy with the Fenians, and an English lady of rank associated herself with their cause; but Punch regarded such support with unqualified contempt and even abhorrence. Real military operations on a modest scale were conducted by England in one of her small wars – that against the recalcitrant King of Abyssinia – and an autumn session was held to vote supplies. It was suggested that Sir Robert Napier, who commanded the expedition, was not at first adequately rewarded, but he was raised to the peerage in the following year as Lord Napier of Magdala. There seems to have been less divergence of opinion over the protest that the cost of the war was entirely borne by income-tax payers. Disraeli having succeeded Lord Derby as Premier, and Mr. Ward Hunt having gone to the Exchequer, Punch contented himself with observing, à propos of the new Budget, that the money for the deficit of upwards of a million and a half "is, of course, to be taken from the Middle Class, which never defends itself," and returned to the charge on May 9 in his lines on "The Great Untaxed in their Glory": —

Napier came, saw, and conquered; the battle was o'er;
There's an end of the war and of King Theodore.
The prestige is recovered that England had lost,
And the popular voice cries "A fig for the cost!"

Lo, the tyrant's abolished, the captives are free!
And there isn't a fraction to pay on our tea,
Or our sugar: how sweet so cheap glory to win!
No additional tax on tobacco or gin!

Let us drink, then, success to Disraeli and Hunt,
Who exempted the many from finding the blunt;
And laid all the expense of the War on the few —
For the Income-Tax payer will pay all that's due.

Ah, tremble, ye tyrants, whom England can crush,
At a price which her millions won't care for one rush;
In the scale as a feather the money will weigh,
For a national war when a part has to pay.

French and German Ambitions

Meanwhile the upper classes had been spending their money freely at the great French Exhibition of 1867, that crowning manifestation of the art and opulence, the magnificence and cynicism of the Second Empire, with Schneider as high priestess of the revels, and all the rank and fashion of Europe paying homage at her shrine. Punch, however, took a friendly personal interest in the exhibition, for Leech's drawings were exhibited there. The Federation of Canada, an event of first-rank importance to the British Empire, with a Constitution framed mainly on the lines of Lord Durham's Report in 1840, was overshadowed by the more spectacular and dramatic events of the year 1867. Disraeli succeeded Lord Derby on his resignation in February, 1868, and Punch handsomely acknowledged "the genius and perseverance" which, after thirty years of strife, had thus been rewarded; but the new Premier only held office till December, when the Liberals were returned with a majority of 112. The peerage which he declined for himself, but accepted for his wife, who was created Viscountess Beaconsfield, inspired a graceful tribute from his old critic Punch. Parliament, before the prorogation in July, had been mainly occupied with the battle over Gladstone's Irish Church resolutions, which brought about the Government's downfall. It is worthy of note that in 1868 it was the Militarism of France, not of Germany, that excited Punch's misgivings and animosities, to the extent of his describing the Emperor's proposed Army Loan of 440 million francs as a measure to establish a reign of "terror and preponderance." A map, which was said to have been published by order of the Emperor, illustrating French ambitions, gravely exercised Punch later in a year which witnessed the Revolution in Spain and the flight of the notorious Queen Isabella, events which awakened little sympathy or interest in England. Yet the eviction of Isabella opened the door to the Hohenzollern candidature for the throne of Spain, the proximate cause of the war of 1870. But the seeds of conflict lay deeper – in the relentless diplomacy of Bismarck, bound sooner or later to manœuvre Napoleon III into a position from which he could not escape without resort to the arbitrament of war. In 1869 the celebration of the centenary of Napoleon I and the proposed inauguration of a Constitutional régime furnished Punch with material for some plain-spoken advice to Napoleon's successor and namesake. Distrust of Louis Napoleon still dominated Punch's outlook on foreign politics and clouded his vision. Strange to say the growth of the Prussian fleet is not only praised, but welcomed: —

BRAVO, BISMARCK!

John Bull used to laugh to scorn the idea of a Prussian Navy, and chuckled hugely when Punch christened it for him "The Fleet of the Future." But lo, "the wheel of Time has brought about his revenges," and the Fleet of the Future is the Fleet of the Present! Prussia has a fleet – and no chaff! A respectable force of steam ironclads, backed by a serviceable knot of unarmoured sailing-frigates and corvettes, with a first-class naval arsenal and dockyard, on the Jahde, is a very different thing from the solitary "gunboat on the Spree," which we used to poke our fun at twenty years ago.

Britannia, through her Punch, rejoices to weave among her naval azures a new shade – Prussian blue; and will be glad, in all fair quarrels, to hail it alongside the true blue of the British man-o'-war's-man.

But the mood of welcome was tempered with misgiving, and the possibility of an eventual naval war with Germany filled Punch with gloomy forebodings, which, in view of subsequent developments, approach to something like prophetic strain: —

LINE OF BATTLE IN SMOKE

We trust we shall ever preserve our friendship with the countrymen of Hans Breitmann. We allowed Denmark to be robbed of Schleswig-Holstein, and tolerated the total theft of Hanover; so that there seems to be no conceivable offence that can hook us into a war with Prussia and Germany. That view is a pleasant one to contemplate for thinking people, who, but for it, would be rendered very uneasy by the following statement in a Times' leader on "The Cruise of the Lords of the Admiralty": —

"It has been imagined that the introduction of steam-power would render naval tactics of extreme importance in any future engagements, but when on one occasion the ships were ordered to go into action, it was found that a few minutes sufficed to envelope the whole fleet in so dense a cloud of smoke that signals were no longer visible, and all that any vessel could do was to fire as rapidly as possible into the darkness around her."

Now, those Deutschers are confoundedly clever fellows; particularly at chemistry. Gun-cotton, which was discovered by one of them, is a substance they are at work on perfecting. No doubt they will soon make it available, so as to supersede powder, for naval gunnery. Gun-cotton goes off without smoke. In the happily almost impossible event of a war with them, our ships, enveloped in smoke of our own clumsy making, would blaze away at theirs in the dark, at random, with useless guns of precision, whilst they would fire with unerring aim at the flashes of our guns, and the end of our first sea-fight with them would be, that the British would be sent to the bottom by the German Fleet.

Death of Lord Derby

The same month witnessed the passing away of Lord Derby, "the Rupert of Debate," a statesman somewhat out of his element in a period of non-intervention; a great country-gentleman, sportsman, and scholar. Punch, whose memorial verses in these years did not err as a rule on the side of brevity, compressed his tribute within the compass of a sonnet, in which there is a happy reference to Lord Derby's love of Homer and of children, for he was the patron of Edward Lear, the laureate of the best, because the most unalloyed, nonsense: —

LORD DERBY

Born, 1799. Died, 1869

Withdrawing slow from those he loved so well,
Autumn's pale morning saw him pass away:
Leave them beside their sacred dead to pray,
Unmarked of strangers. Calmer memories tell
How nobly Stanley lived. No braver name
Glows in the golden roll of all his sires,
Or all their peers. His was the heart that fires
The eloquent tongue, and his the eye whose aim
Alone half quelled his foe. He struck for Power,
(And power in England is a hero's prize)
Yet he could throw it from him. Those whose eyes
See not for tears, remember in this hour
That he was oft from Homer's page beguiled
To frame some "wonder for a happy child."

The resignation by Lord Malmesbury, formerly Foreign Secretary, of the Conservative leadership of the House of Lords about the same time met with no such consideration. Lord Malmesbury had never been a favourite of Punch, who insinuated that the Tory leader had gone because he was obliged to, and quoted Artemus Ward's saying: "He told me to get out of the office – I pitied him and went."

The fateful year of 1870 opened with the attempt to establish a "Liberal" Empire in France with Ollivier as Prime Minister, a concession which Punch hailed as a "Magna Charta for France"; almost simultaneously Lord Clarendon, our Foreign Minister, with Gladstone's cordial approval, launched his suggestion of a partial simultaneous disarmament, a proposal rendered futile by the attitude of Bismarck. Lord Clarendon died on June 27, and his successor, Lord Granville, was informed by the Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office that he "had never during his long experience known so great a lull in foreign affairs." Yet war had already been declared by France when Punch, on July 23, issued his somewhat cynical manifesto of neutrality under the heading: "Prussian Pot and French Kettle": —

In this unhappy event of a war between France and Prussia, we shall of course do all we can to preserve the most perfect neutrality. We certainly feel it. Our sympathies with the one side and the other are, strong as they are, exactly equal.

As regards the Prussians we take a warmly admiring interest in the course of aggrandisement which their King and his Bismarck have been pursuing of late years, but most chiefly do we applaud its first step – the attack on Denmark, and the forcible annexation therefrom of the two Duchies. The immense number of Danes slain by the Prussian needle-guns commands our approbation only less than our wonder; but what crowns the sentiments with which we regard the spoliation and destruction of the Danes is the piety wherewith the author of those achievements solemnly expressed his thankfulness for having been permitted to accomplish them. One brother once knelt with Mrs. Fry in Newgate. The other might have knelt with Mrs. Cole.

On the other hand, with respect to France, we cannot but feel how much we owe to the French Imperial Government for the improvement which, by the menacing armaments it has kept up now for so many years, it has occasioned us to make in our national defences. But we have higher reasons for sympathy with France than considerations which are merely insular and selfish. The great principles of Liberty, Fraternity, and Equality have been professed by France more enthusiastically and more loudly than by any other European nation; and we behold their standing reduction to practice in the occupation of Rome, and the declaration that the chief of Italian cities shall never belong to Italy.

The foregoing reasons should satisfy any Prussian and any Frenchman of the perfect impartiality with which Englishmen must contemplate hostilities between their respective nations.

As a matter of fact, public opinion in England at the outbreak of the war was in the main inclined to favour Germany; the publication of the Draft Secret Treaty submitted to Bismarck by Louis Napoleon in 1867, providing in certain contingencies for the occupation of Belgium by France, and now communicated by Bismarck to The Times went a long way to sterilize sympathy with France; and it was not until after Sedan that compassion for France overwhelmed and obliterated the old distrust of the Emperor's intriguing ambitions. When the cry, "nous sommes trahis" was raised, Punch blamed the French nation more than the Emperor, whom he had portrayed in a famous cartoon with the ghost of Napoleon appearing to him as he set out for the front. As the wheels of war drove more heavily on French soil and Paris was threatened with famine, one notices the growing desire that Germany should grant generous terms, mingled with a sense of impotence. This mood is well shown in the verses, "Between the Hosts," printed in the number of December 17: —

Like him of old, when the plague's arrows sped,
And life sank blighted by that scathing rain,
We stand between the living and the dead,
Lifting our hands and prayers to Heaven in vain.
While those that faint upbraid us from dim eyes,
And those that fight arraign us as they fall,
And French and German curses 'gainst us rise,
And, hating none, we rest unloved of all.

And so we stand with a divided soul,
Our sympathies for both at war within,
Now eager for the strong, to reach his goal,
More often wishing that the weak could win.
Only one feeling will not leave our minds,
Hate of this hate, and anguish of this woe;
And still war's scythe-set car rolls on and grinds
Guilty and guiltless, blent in overthrow.

And first we interpose a useless hand,
And then we lift an unavailing voice,
While still Death holds his way with sword and brand,
Still the Valkyrier make their fatal choice.
Still stormed on by ill-will from either side,
Be we content to do the best we can —
Give all that wealth, peace, goodwill can provide,
For war's poor victims who their helpers ban.

We have no right to wait for men's good word,
No right to pause before men's unearned hate:
No right to turn the ear, when threats are heard
Of what will, some day, be the neutral's fate.
"Do right and fear not" must be England's stay,
As it has been, let wrath say what it will.
So with love's unthanked labour let us pray,
And do our best to ease war's weight of ill!

1871 – and its Sequel

In the autumn the consideration shown by some German troops in Champagne is welcomed; by the end of the year the reply of Göttingen University to an appeal protesting against the threatened destruction of the scientific and art treasures of Paris – a document breathing the familiar spirit of unctuous rectitude – roused Punch to indignant satire in "A Deutscher Dove-Coo," the name of the principal signatory being Dove. So a month later the pseudo-Walpolian letters issued as "Strawberry Leaves" reflect the popular disgust with which German brutality was viewed, but at the same time the popular dislike of England's participating in the war. When the siege of Paris ended at the close of the month, Punch congratulated Thiers on his statesmanship, but rebuked the Parisians for their fickleness in heaping insult on their fallen Emperor. The Germans entered Paris, but in the cartoon of March 11, and the accompanying verses "Vae Victis" a warning was addressed to Germany which has turned out to be a true prophecy. The triumph is admitted, but the sequel is clearly foreshadowed: —

Yet listen, conqueror, while the shade,
That should sit near thee in thy car,
Whispers how quickly laurels fade,
How swiftly shift the sands of war;
How, sixty-five years since, there came
A mightier Emperor than thou,
Upon Berlin to put the shame
Which thy hand puts on Paris now.

Even as thy heel is on their head,
That on thy folks' head set their heel,
So, ere threescore more years have sped,
The woe thou work'st thy sons may feel.
"Who smite with sword by sword shall fall,"
Holds for kings as for subjects true;
God's mills grind slow, but they grind small,
And he that grinds gives all their due.

The courtesy of Germany in coming to an amicable settlement over the loss of some British colliers sunk in the Thames is acknowledged; but anxiety as to her further aggressions was not allayed by her desire to possess Heligoland, and was undoubtedly enhanced by the publication of that brilliant realistic romance, The Battle of Dorking, while the fratricidal tragedy of the Commune, and the ruthless measures of suppression employed, augured ill for the recovery of France from the abasement of defeat. These events and the lessons they conveyed to England were not overlooked by Punch; they served to temper his light-heartedness with moods of misgiving. Yet the wonderful elasticity – due, as even official Republican historians admit, to the industrial prosperity created under the Second Empire – which enabled France to pay off what in those days seemed a crushing war indemnity long before the time fixed, emboldened Punch in the spring of 1873 to indulge once more in a prophecy of the reversal of the verdict of 1870. When the German occupation ended, France is shown undauntedly confronting Germany with the words: "Ha! We shall meet again."

Germany: "Farewell, Madame, and if – "

France: "Ha! We shall meet again!"

Germany was not the only foreign power that caused anxiety during the Gladstone administration of 1868-1874. Russia availed herself of the troubles of 1870 to revive the Near Eastern question by refusing to recognize her treaty obligations in the Black Sea; but the friction thus created was allayed by the compromise effected by the Black Sea Conference. And Russia's expedition to, and occupation of, Khiva in 1873 gave rise to further uneasiness. But non-intervention remained the order of the day throughout. The Ashanti expedition of 1873, whether in respect of its aim or its scale could not be regarded as forming an exception. But it furnished Punch with occasion for much plain-spoken criticism of War Office red tape and mismanagement. He saw in Sir Garnet Wolseley "the right man in the wrong place": —

In our deep penny wisdom, and horror of waste,
We shipped off the General minus his men,
So that if in a fix he should find himself placed,
He might merely lose time writing home back again.

Gladstonian Legislation

Happily these misgivings were falsified in the sequel, and early in 1874 Punch was able to record, amongst other evidences of the satisfactory conclusion of the campaign, the arrival in England of King Coffee's State umbrella. The Gladstone administration may not have been efficient in the conduct of military operations, but in the sphere of Army Reform it deserved well of the country for the abolition of purchase, in the teeth of strong opposition from the Horse Guards' element, and the reorganization of the service on lines which substantially endured for a generation or more. For these improvements we have to thank a civilian, Cardwell, whose name is indissolubly associated with the changes brought about in 1870. The second instalment of Gladstone's scheme for the pacification of Ireland – the Land Act of 1870 – was supported by Punch, but did not achieve its purpose, since it left the vexed question of dual ownership unsettled; and it was another Irish measure – the University Bill – that brought the Government down. The legislative achievements of the Gladstone Administration had been immense and salutary in many directions, but the universality of its activities undoubtedly contributed to its growing unpopularity and lent force to Disraeli's famous electioneering cry of "plundering and blundering." Punch, who had in the main supported Gladstone, advised the Cabinet to resign after their defeat, but the Prime Minister resumed office temporarily and did not dissolve till January 1874.

Dr. Punch: "My dear young friends, you have done next to nothing this half. Therefore, a little task during the vacation will be good for you. You, Master Benjamin, must get up a 'definite policy.' You, Lowe, will write a paper on the 'Application of the Screw.' Ayrton, you will have to get by heart the whole 'Book of Etiquette.' Miall, you must attend Church regularly. Whalley, you're going to America – stay there! Plimsoll, you must learn to – ahem – moderate your transports. And as for you, William Ewart, the idler you are the better!"

England 2,000 Years Hence

Much had been done in this, the central mid-Victorian age, to abate the evils and abuses which kept the "Two Nations" apart in earlier days. Yet at the opening of the new Disraelian régime, with its imperial aspirations, it may not be amiss to reproduce the verses, somewhat in the vein of Thackeray's musings on Vanitas Vanitatum, in which Punch bade farewell to the Comet of 1858: —

ADIEU TO THE COMET

Dare a bold atom ask, with brain half dizzy,
What you will see two thousand years to come,
This planet still an ant's nest, black and busy,
Or an extinct volcano, white and dumb?

Will you behold, if keeping that appointment,
(Made for you, Sir, by Airy and by Hind)
Men still anointing Kings with holy ointment,
And Priests still leading, as the blind the blind.

Earth's choicest youth fierce rushing to the slaughter
That two crowned Fools may wreak their idiot pet;
Or wiser Christians' blood poured out like water,
That Jews may gamble with a nation's debt.

Will that day's Patriot be a mouthing truckler,
Setting proud Freedom's hymn to Freedom's dirge;
Will Law be still the rich man's shield and buckler,
The good man's terror, and the poor man's scourge?

Will you find Life a hot and blindfold scrimmage,
Men straining, struggling, scrambling, for red gold;
And Faith still worshipping the Golden Image
Reared by King Beelzebub in days of old?

Will all that world, with coronet and plaudit,
Reward Success, while Merit's scorned and passed;
Will man ignore that great and dreadful Audit,
When Lies shall fail – the first time, and the last?

Who knows? Off, glorious Star-horse, clothed with thunder —
Thou hast no right to make a light strain sad;
Yet he wrote well, who wrote in awe and wonder —
"An undevout Astronomer is mad."