Vos Deos Laudamus: The Conservative Journalists Anthem

As a matter of fact, no man living, or who ever lived, not Csar or Pericles, not Shakespeare or Michael Angelo, could confer honour more than he took on entering the House of Lords.     - Saturday Review, December 15, 1883.     Clumsy and shallow snobbery can do no hurt.     - Ibid. I.     O Lords our Gods, beneficent, sublime,     In the evening, and before the morning flames,     We praise, we bless, we magnify your names.     The slave is he that serves not; his the crime     And shame, who hails not as the crown of Time     That House wherein the all-envious world acclaims     Such glory that the reflex of it shames     All crowns bestowed of men for prose or rhyme.     The serf, the cur, the sycophant is he     Who feels no cringing motion twitch his knee     When from a height too high for Shakespeare nods     The wearer of a higher than Miltons crown.     Stoop, Chaucer, stoop: Keats, Shelley, Burns, bow down:     These have no part with you, O Lords our Gods. II.     O Lords our Gods, it is not that ye sit     Serene above the thunder, and exempt     From strife of tongues and casualties that tempt     Men merely found by proof of manhood fit     For service of their fellows: this is it     Which sets you past the reach of Times attempt,     Which gives us right of justified contempt     For commonwealths built up by mere mens wit:     That gold unlocks not, nor may flatteries ope,     The portals of your heaven; that none may hope     With you to watch how life beneath you plods,     Save for high service given, high duty done;     That never was your rank ignobly won:     For this we give you praise, O Lords our Gods. III.     O Lords our Gods, the times are evil: you     Redeem the time, because of evil days.     While abject souls in servitude of praise     Bow down to heads untitled, and the crew     Whose honour dwells but in the deeds they do,     From loftier hearts your nobler servants raise     More manful salutation: yours are bays     That not the dawns plebeian pearls bedew;     Yours, laurels plucked not of such hands as wove     Old age its chaplet in Colonos grove.     Our time, with heaven and with itself at odds,     Makes all lands else as seas that seethe and boil;     But yours are yet the corn and wine and oil,     And yours our worship yet, O Lords our Gods.