The grace of Tullies eloquence doth excell
any Englishmans tongue ... my barbarous stile ...

The tongue our leaders use to cast their spell
was once denounced as " rude " , " gross " , " base " and " vile " .

How fortunate we are who've come so far!

We boys can take old Hansards and translate
the British Empire into SPQR
but nothing demotic or too up-to-date,
and not the English that I speak at home,
not Hansard standards, and if Antoninus
spoke like delinquent Latin back in Rome
he'd probably get gamma double minus.

And so the lad who gets the alphas works
the hardest in his class at his translation
and finds good Ciceronian for Burke's:

a dreadful schism in the British nation.