The matter of Byron's The Vision of Judgment is somewhat literary and to some extent political, but its spring was Byron's abhorrence of Cant and feigning.
On the change of King George III, old, mad, and blind, in 1820, the Poet Laureate Robert Southey create a praiseful nursery rhyme. Written in unrhymed hexameter, its attempts at politeness achieved no more than a trite inelegance. But far worse was its dissembling and grovelling delivery. Entitled "The Vision of Judgment" it showed George III's triumphal vestibule into the bill gates of heaven and the damnation of his enemies. To Byron, the conspicuous flattery of a King, who was at highest inferior and at last-place tyrannical, was ever so unsavoury.
Byron was specially angry because he saw Southey as a recreant - one who had at one time espoused the tolerant cause, but had later denaturised his corporate colours to patronage the result Tory celebration. Further Southey had in public attacked Byron's poetry as happiness to the "Satanic School" whose upshot was to sabotage divinity and to self-indulgent morality. Southey was liable too, as Byron believed, for wide-spreading enduring disgraceful rumours more or less Byron's duration in Switzerland. (Byron indeed had torrid personal business next to more or less threescore to seventy women). Byron present took reprisal by assailing some Southey and his "Vision" next to lavish scoffing.
At the entrepreneur of Heaven, incommunicative by St. Peter, we brainwave the archangel Michael and Satan claiming King George's essence for paradise and hellhole severally. The occasion comes when the satan Asmodeus comes carrying the versifier Southey himself, taken in the Lake District of England as he was authorship his "Vision". Southey, to his delight, is welcome to perform his nursery rhyme merely to breakthrough its hexameter so uneasy as to break the rules recitation.
After this fooling around on his "gouty feet" Byron lets him reel off an account of his building complex as a renegade. He had shorthand praising regicide as also all kings. He had scripted both for and against republics, warfare, the reviewing trade and besides revolutionary planning. He offers to compose the life of Satan; and when Satan denies the offer, to scribble Michael's energy. As he starts to declaim his "Vision" the congregate angels, devils and ghosts all nonexistent to dodge the unpleasant endure. St. Peter knocks thrown near his keys Southey, who falls trailing into a lake, but in a while came up to the surface
"For all corrupt things are buoyed like corks" and he may be lurking at his den now to "scrawl whatsoever 'Life' or 'Vision'".
Byron's Vision is a stand-up comedian humour whose topic is wearing away imperfect by a annihilating scorn, scorn and mirth at Southey the man and versifier.
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