It was written in response to the Poet Laureate Robert Southey's A Vision of Judgement (1821), which had imagined the soul of king George triumphantly entering Heaven to receive his due.
[3] A cherub brings the news of the king's death to St. Peter, and George III then arrives accompanied by Lucifer, the archangel Michael and an angelic host.
[4] In support of this view, Lucifer calls John Wilkes's shade as witness, who however declines to give evidence against the king, claiming that his ministers were more to blame.
The Courier for 26 October 1822 described Byron as having "a brain from heaven and a heart from hell", assuring its readers that he "riots in thoughts that fiends might envy," and "seems to have lived only that the world might learn from his example how worthless and how pernicious a thing is genius, when divorced from religion, from morals, and from humanity.
",[10] and Swinburne wrote: A poem so short and hasty, based on a matter so worthy of brief contempt and long oblivion as the funeral and the fate of George III, bears about it at first sight no great sign or likelihood of life.