Southey’s _Vision of Judgment_, of which Byron’s _Vision_ is a travesty, was written in the author’s function as poet-laureate shortly after the death of George III. on January 29, 1820. Certainly in many ways it lent itself readily to burlesque.[361] It was composed in the unrhymed dactyllic hexameter, a measure in which Southey was even less successful than Harvey and Sidney had been. It was full of adulation of a king, who, however much he may have been distinguished for domestic virtues, was surely, in his public activities, no suitable subject for encomium. It was dedicated, moreover, to George IV. in language which seems to us to-day the grossest flattery.[362] The poem itself, divided into twelve sections, deals with the appearance of the old King at the gate of heaven, his judgment and beatification by the angels, and his meeting with the shades of illustrious dead--English worthies, mighty figures of the Georgian age, and members of his own family. Many special features of Southey’s poem were disagreeable to Byron. It was a vindication and a eulogy of the existing system of government in England, George III, whom Byron despised, being described as an ideal sovereign. Southey had made a contemptuous reference to what he was pleased to call the watchwords of Faction, “Freedom, Invaded Rights, Corruption, and War, and Oppression,” a summary which must have been distasteful to a man who had been raising his voice in resistance to political tyranny. Southey had also carefully omitted Dryden and Pope from the list of great writers whom George III met in heaven. On the whole Southey’s poem was pervaded by a tone of arrogance and self-satisfaction which was exceedingly offensive to Byron.