And thankfully await what I may give you still.
Have pictures aught to say to guide the artist’s hand?
His cunning ’tis decides what portrait shall expand.
So all your paltry surmise of my royal mind
An insult is,—an arrogance,—that must be fined.25
‘They who conceive an evil thing of God’[333] are cursed;
And if I spare you, justice will be clean reversed.
To rid the world of scandal, I must end your lives;
Your story shall a moral point; whoe’er contrives.”
With this he smiled again most grimly on the pair.