In executing his project, Byron deliberately neglected a large part of Southey’s _Vision_ and confined himself almost exclusively to the scene at the trial of the King. He began actually with the situation represented in Section IV of Southey’s poem, omitting all the preliminary matter, and ended with Southey’s Section V, avoiding entirely the meeting of George with the English worthies. So far as subject matter is concerned, Byron travestied only two of the twelve divisions of the earlier work. He concentrated his attention on the judgment of the King, and then deserted formal travesty in order to introduce his attack on Southey. It was part of Byron’s scheme that angels and demons, serious characters in Southey’s poem, should be made the objects of mirth. By a dexterous application of realism, he changed the New Jerusalem of Southey into a very earthly place, where angels now and then sing out of tune and hoarse, and where six angels and twelve saints act as a business-like Board of Clerks. These creatures of the spiritual realm are very substantial beings, not at all immune from mortal infirmities and passions. Saint Peter is a dull somnolent personage who grumbles over the leniency of heaven’s Master towards earth’s kings, and sweats through his apostolic skin at the appalling sight of Lucifer and demons pursuing the body of George to the very doors of heaven. Satan salutes Michael, “as might an old Castilian Poor noble meet a mushroom rich civilian,” and the archangel, in turn, greets the fallen Lucifer superciliously as “my good old friend.” It is probable that in this practice of treating with ridicule those beings who are commonly spoken of with reverence, Byron is imitating Pulci, whose angels and devils are also, in their attributes, more human than divine. Byron’s trial scene, in which Lucifer and Michael dispute for the possession of George III, is an admirable travesty of Southey’s representation of the same episode. The glorified monarch of Southey’s _Vision_ meets in Byron’s satire with scant courtesy from Lucifer, who acts as attorney for the prosecution. Lucifer admits the king’s “tame virtues” and grants that he was a “tool from first to last”; but he charges him with having “ever warr’d with Freedom and the free,” with having stained his career with “national and individual woes,” with having resisted Catholic emancipation, and with having lost a continent to his country. Wilkes and Junius, the two shamefaced accusers of Southey’s _Vision_, now act in a different manner. Wilkes scornfully extends his forgiveness to the king, and Junius, while reiterating the truth of his original accusations, refuses to be enlisted as an incriminating witness. This section of the satire is splendidly managed. The whole assault on the king tends to show him as more misguided than criminal. The lines, “A better farmer ne’er brush’d dew from lawn, A worse king never left a realm undone!”