| There are who lord it o’er their fellow-men | |
| With most prevailing tinsel: who unpen | |
| Their baaing vanities, to browse away | |
| The comfortable green and juicy hay | |
| From human pastures; or, O torturing fact! | |
| Who, through an idiot blink, will see unpack’d | |
| Fire-branded foxes to sear up and singe | |
| Our gold and ripe-ear’d hopes. With not one tinge | |
| Of sanctuary splendour, not a sight | |
| Able to face an owl’s, they still are dight [equipped] | |
| By the blear-eyed nations in empurpled vests, | |
| And crowns, and turbans. With unladen breasts, | |
| Save of blown self-applause, they proudly mount | |
| To their spirit’s perch, their being’s high account, | |
| Their tiptop nothings, their dull skies, their thrones— | |
| Amid the fierce intoxicating tones | |
| Of trumpets, shoutings, and belabour’d drums, | |
| And sudden cannon. Ah! how all this hums, | |
| In wakeful ears, like uproar past and gone— | |
| Like thunder clouds that spake to Babylon, | |
| And set those old Chaldeans to their tasks.— | |
| Are then regalities all gilded masks? |
Endymion, Book III.
Emphasis added to show relevance to Messrs Trump and Morrison – with deepest apologies to the dead poet and his lonely grave in Rome – ‘Here lies one whose name was writ on water.’ At the age of twenty-five he was worth ten of those referred to above.
With Compliments 