Thy knowledge of women might be surpassed: 
     As any sad dog’s of sweet flesh when he quits
     The wayside wandering bone! 
     No revilings of comrades as ingrates:  thee
     The tempter, misleader, and criminal (screened
     By laws yet barbarous) own.

     If some one performed Fiend’s deputy,
     He was for awhile the Fiend. 
     Still, nursing a passion to speak,
     As the punch-bowl does, in the moral vein,
     When the ladle has finished its leak,
     And the vessel is loquent of nature’s inane,
     Hie where the demagogues roar
     Like a Phalaris bull, with the victim’s force: 
     Hurrah to their jolly attack
     On a City that smokes of the Plain;
     A city of sin’s death-dyes,
     Holding revel of worms in a corse;
     A city of malady sore,
     Over-ripe for the big doom’s crack: 
     A city of hymnical snore;
     Connubial truths and lies
     Demanding an instant divorce,
     Clean as the bright from the black. 
     It were well for thy system to sermonize. 
     There are giants to slay, and they call for their Jack.

     Then up stand thou in the midst: 
     Thy good grain out of thee thresh,
     Hand upon heart:  relate
     What things thou legally didst
     For the Archseducer of flesh. 
     Omitting the murmurs of women and fate,
     Confess thee an instrument armed
     To be snare of our wanton, our weak,
     Of all by the sensual charmed. 
     For once shall repentance be done by the tongue: 
     Speak, though execrate, speak
     A word on grandmotherly Laws
     Giving rivers of gold to our young,
     In the days of their hungers impure;
     To furnish them beak and claws,
     And make them a banquet’s lure.

     Thou the example, saved
     Miraculously by this poor skin! 
     Thereat let the Purse be waved: 
     The snake-slough sick of the snaky sin: 
     A devil, if devil as devil behaved
     Ever, thou knowest, look thou but in,
     Where he shivers, a culprit fettered and shaved;
     O a bird stripped of feather, a fish clipped of fin!

     And commend for a washing the torrents of wrath,
     Which hurl at the foe of the dearest men prize
     Rough-rolling boulders and froth. 
     Gigantical enginery they can command,
     For the crushing of enemies not of great size: 
     But hold to thy desperate stand. 
     Men’s right of bequeathing their all to their own
     (With little regard for the creatures they squeezed);
     Their mill and mill-water and nether mill-stone
     Tied fast to their infant; lo, this is the last
     Of their hungers, by prudent devices appeased. 
     The law they decree is their ultimate slave;
     Wherein we perceive old Voracity glassed. 
     It works from their