’T was done and the Fool governed.  He decreed
  The time of harvest and the time of seed;
  Ordered the rains and made the weather clear,
  And had a famine every second year;
  Altered the calendar to suit his freak,
  Ordaining six whole holidays a week;
  Religious creeds and sacred books prepared;
  Made war when angry and made peace when scared. 
  New taxes he inspired; new laws he made;
  Drowned those who broke them, who observed them, flayed,
  In short, he ruled so well that all who’d not
  Been starved, decapitated, hanged or shot
  Made the whole country with his praises ring,
  Declaring he was every inch a king;
  And the High Priest averred ’t was very odd
  If one so competent were not a god.

  Meantime, his master, now in motley clad,
  Wore such a visage, woeful, wan and sad,
  That some condoled with him as with a brother
  Who, having lost a wife, had got another. 
  Others, mistaking his profession, often
  Approached him to be measured for a coffin. 
  For years this highborn jester never broke
  The silence—­he was pondering a joke. 
  At last, one day, in cap-and-bells arrayed,
  He strode into the Council and displayed
  A long, bright smile, that glittered in the gloom
  Like a gilt epithet within a tomb. 
  Posing his bauble like a leader’s staff,
  To give the signal when (and why) to laugh,
  He brought it down with peremptory stroke
  And simultaneously cracked his joke!

  I can’t repeat it, friends.  I ne’er could school
  Myself to quote from any other fool: 
  A jest, if it were worse than mine, would start
  My tears; if better, it would break my heart. 
  So, if you please, I’ll hold you but to state
  That royal Jester’s melancholy fate.

  The insulted nation, so the story goes,
  Rose as one man—­the very dead arose,
  Springing indignant from the riven tomb,
  And babes unborn leapt swearing from the womb! 
  All to the Council Chamber clamoring went,
  By rage distracted and on vengeance bent. 
  In that vast hall, in due disorder laid,
  The tools of legislation were displayed,
  And the wild populace, its wrath to sate,
  Seized them and heaved them at the Jester’s pate. 
  Mountains of writing paper; pools and seas
  Of ink, awaiting, to become decrees,
  Royal approval—­and the same in stacks
  Lay ready for attachment, backed with wax;
  Pens to make laws, erasers to amend them;
  With mucilage convenient to extend them;
  Scissors for limiting their application,
  And acids to repeal all legislation—­
  These, flung as missiles till the air was dense,
  Were most offensive weapons of offense,
  And by their aid the Fool was nigh destroyed. 
  They ne’er had been so harmlessly employed. 
  Whelmed underneath a load of legal cap,
  His mouth egurgitating ink on tap,