Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 6.djvu/39

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DON JUAN.
9

Thy clanking chain, and Erin's yet green wounds,
Have voices—tongues to cry aloud for me.
Europe has slaves—allies—kings—armies still—
And Southey lives to sing them very ill.


XVII.

Meantime, Sir Laureate, I proceed to dedicate,
In honest simple verse, this song to you.
And, if in flattering strains I do not predicate,
'T is that I still retain my "buff and blue;"[1]
My politics as yet are all to educate:
Apostasy 's so fashionable, too,
To keep one creed 's a task grown quite Herculean;
Is it not so, my Tory, ultra-Julian?[2]

Venice, Sept. 16, 1818.
  1. [Charles James Fox and the Whig Club of his time adopted a uniform of blue and buff. Hence the livery of the Edinburgh Review.]
  2. I allude not to our friend Lander's hero, the traitor Count Julian, but to Gibbon's hero, vulgarly yclept "The Apostate."