The hungry judges soon the sentence sign,
And wretches hang that jurymen may dine.

These lines come from Alexander Pope’s mock-epic poem "The Rape of the Lock" (1712; revised 1714), in which Pope satirizes the manners and vanities of fashionable London society. In the poem’s famous “game of ombre” episode, Pope comically elevates a card game to the status of heroic warfare, then pivots to other scenes of urban life. The couplet about “hungry judges” is part of a broader satirical glance at public institutions, suggesting that even the solemn business of law can be hurried along by appetite and convenience. Pope’s Augustan wit often targets the gap between professed virtue and actual motives in polite society.

Pope compresses a sharp social critique into a neat heroic couplet: justice is portrayed as vulnerable to petty human needs. “Hungry judges” and jurymen eager to “dine” imply that legal decisions—potentially matters of life and death—may be rushed, careless, or biased when officials are impatient to end proceedings. The grim punchline (“wretches hang”) underscores the disproportion between trivial motives and irreversible consequences. More broadly, the lines exemplify Pope’s satiric method: exposing how self-interest and bodily appetite can corrupt institutions that claim impartiality, turning the machinery of justice into another arena where convenience outweighs conscience.