ng widowhood shall lose its weeds,
Old kings shall loathe the Tories,
And monks be tired of telling beads,
And Blues of telling stories;
And titled suitors shall be crossed,
And famished poets married,
And Canning's motion shall be lost,
And Hume's amendment carried;
And Chancery shall cease to doubt,
And Algebra to prove,
And hoops come in, and gas go out
Before I cease to love.

He hit off an exceedingly savage and certainly not wholly just "Epitaph
on the King of the Sandwich Islands" which puts the conception of George
the Fourth that Thackeray afterwards made popular, and contains these
felicitous lines:

The people in his happy reign,
Were blessed beyond all other nations:
Unharmed by foreign axe and chain,
Unhealed by civic innovations;
They served the usual logs and stones,
With all the usual rites and terrors,
And swallowed all their fathers' bones,
And swallowed all their fathers' errors.

When the fierce mob, with clubs and knives,
All swore that nothing should prevent them,
But that their representatives
Should actually represent them,
He interposed the proper checks,
By sending troops, with drums and banners,
To cut their speeches short, and necks,
And break their heads, to mend their manners.

Occasionally in a sort of middle vein between politics and society he
wrote in the "patter" style just noticed quite admirable things like
"Twenty-eight and Twenty-nine." Throughout the great debates on Reform
he rallied the reformers with the same complete and apparently useless
superiority of wit and sense which has often, if not invariably, been
shown at similar crises on the losing side. And once, on an
ever-memorable occasion, he broke into those famous and most touching
"Stanzas on seeing the Speaker Asleep" which affect one almost to tears
by their grace of form and by the perennial and indeed ever-increasing
applicability of their matter.

Sleep, Mr. Speaker: it's surely fair,
If you don't in your bed, that you should in your chair:
Longer and longer still they grow,
Tory and Radical, Aye and No;
Talking by night and talking by day;
Sleep, Mr. Speaker; sleep, sleep while you may.

Sleep, Mr. Speaker: slumber lies
Light and brief on a Speaker's eyes--
Fielden or Finn, in a minute or two,
Some disorderly thing will do;