Love or lucre—justified obedience to the Ipse dixi:
Work done—palace reared from pavement up to soffit—
Was it strange if builders smelt out cheating all the while?
"Let them pelt and pound, bruise, bray you in a mortar!
What 's the odds to you who seek reward of quite another nature?
You 've enrolled your name where sages of your sort are,
—Michael of Constantinople, Hans of Halberstadt!
Nay and were you nameless, still you 've your conviction
You it was and only you—what signifies the nomenclature?—
Ruled the world in fact, though how you ruled be fiction