VISION OF JUDGMENT, The. If we accept Byron's (Don Juan) as something more than satire, his 'Vision of Judgment' is by far his finest satirical poem and, with the ex ception of Dryden's (Absolom and Achitophel' (q.v.), is the best of its kind in English litera ture. It wiring directly from the last phase of a long-standing quarrel with Southey, the poet laureate, whom Byron detested as a Church man, a Tory and a literary man-of-all-work ; but, more remotely, it had its origin in a com plex of personal, political and literary causes. George III died in 1820 and in 1821 Southey wrote a preposterous panegyric of the dead king entitled (A Vision of Judgment,' which shows Michael and Satan contending for his soul, with victory to the former, of course, and ushers George into heaven, where he is en thusiastically acclaimed. In his preface Southey attacks what he terms "the satanic school," meaning thereby chiefly Byron and Shelley. In this Southey blundered: he had provoked the most pitiless and brilliant satirist of the age. Byron had been waiting for the chance. Southey's absurd poem suggested a means of flaying the poet-laureate himself ; of showing up George III as a model of private virtue but of public vice, and of attacking Tory poli tics and the whole reactionary political policy of European statesmen in general. Byron .takes Southey's title for his own poem and for the method of his satire employs a travesty of the original, using the tnal scene before the gate of heaven, only changing the tone of the whole from the would-be sublime to the intentionally ridiculous. The metre and the style of Byron s poem are those of the purely satiric portions of his 'Don Juan,) with its Italian ottiva rima, or eight-line stanza, its free and often burlesque rhymes, its realism, its sudden drops from the sublime to the ridiculous and its equally sud den rises from pure burlesque into poetry.
The (Vision of Judgment' is perhaps the only poem in which satire becomes truly sublime and one of the very few in which poetry and humor exist not merely side by side but are actually fused. Throughout its 800 lines there is no flagging of the wing of its superb energy. In indignation, in wit, even in humor, it has been equalled by other satires, but in high imagination, its attainment of the sublime, it remains unapproachable. Satire more scathing was never compressed into smaller compass; yet its scorn does not seem petty or spiteful : it has much of the Olympian quality of Dryden. Though without the masterful characterizations of