I was in contempt called the poet.

"This humor pursued me through my life. My first composition after I
left school was a panegyric on pope Alexander IV, who then pretended a
project of dethroning the king of Sicily. On this subject I composed a
poem of about fifteen thousand lines, which with much difficulty I got
to be presented to his holiness, of whom I expected great preferment as
my reward; but I was cruelly disappointed: for when I had waited a year,
without hearing any of the commendations I had flattered myself with
receiving, and being now able to contain no longer, I applied to a
Jesuit who was my relation, and had the pope's ear, to know what his
holiness's opinion was of my work: he coldly answered me that he was
at that time busied in concerns of too much importance to attend the
reading of poems.

"However dissatisfied I might be, and really was, with this reception,
and however angry I was with the pope? for whose understanding I
entertained an immoderate contempt, I was not yet discouraged from
a second attempt. Accordingly, I soon after produced another work,
entitled, The Trojan Horse. This was an allegorical work, in which the
church was introduced into the world in the same manner as that machine
had been into Troy. The priests were the soldiers in its belly, and the
heathen superstition the city to be destroyed by them. This poem was
written in Latin. I remember some of the lines:--

Mundanos scandit fatalis machina muros,
Farta sacerdotum turmis: exinde per alvum
Visi exire omnes, maguo cum murmure olentes.
Non aliter quam cum llumanis furibundus ab antris
It sonus et nares simul aura invadit hiantes.
Mille scatent et mille alii; trepidare timore
Ethnica gens coepit: falsi per inane volantes
Effugere Dei--Desertaque templa relinquunt.
Jam magnum crepitavit equus, mox orbis et alti
Ingemuere poli: tunc tu pater, ultimus omnium
Maxime Alexander, ventrem maturus equinum
Deseris, heu proles meliori digne parente."

"I believe Julian, had I not stopped him, would have gone through the
whole poem (for, as I observed in most of the characters he related, the
affections he had enjoyed while he personated them on earth still made
some impression on him); but I begged him to omit the sequel of the
poem, and proceed with his history. He then recollected himself, and,
smiling at the observation which by intuition he perceived I had made,