The Prince Regent
Byron’s “English Bards and Scotch Reviewers” maintains its place in the forefront of commingled ridicule and censure, but nothing in that famous satire, or its sequel, “Hints from Horace,” approaches in caustic severity his castigation of that royal voluptuary, the Prince Regent, afterwards George IV. Byron chanced to see him standing between the coffins of Charles I. and Henry VIII., and thereupon penned the following epigram:
“Famed for contemptuous breach of sacred ties,
By headless Charles see heartless Henry lies;
Between them stands another sceptred thing;
It moves, it reigns, in all but name a king.
Charles to his people, Henry to his wife,
In him the double tyrant wakes to life.
Justice and death have mixed their dust in vain,
Each royal vampire wakes to life again:
Ah, what can tombs avail? since these disgorge
The blood and dust of both to mould a George.”