I thought of dyeing it the other day.
—[MS.]
Compare Childe Harold, Canto III stanza CVII line 2. —Editor ↩
“Me nec femina, nec puer
Jam, nec spes animi credula mutui,
Nec certare juvat mero;
Nec vincire novis tempora floribus.”
Hor., Od. IV i 30
[In the revise the words nec puer Jam were omitted. On this Hobhouse comments, “Better add the whole or scratch out all after femina.”—
“Quote the whole then—it was only in compliance with your settentrionale notions that I left out the remnant of the line.”
—[B.]]
For “How Fryer Bacon made a Brazen head to speak,” see The Famous Historie of Fryer Bacon (Reprint, London, 1815, pp. 13–18); see, too, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, by Robert Greene, ed. Rev. Alexander Dyce, 1861, pp. 153–181. —Editor ↩
“Ah! who can tell how hard it is to climb
Beattie’s Minstrel, Bk. I stanza I lines 1, 2
The steep where Fame’s proud temple shines afar?” etc.
—Editor ↩
A book—a damned bad picture—and worse bust.
—[MS.]
[“Don’t swear again—the third ‘damn.’ ”
—[H.]—[Revise]]
Byron sat for his bust to Thorwaldsen, in May, 1817. —Editor ↩
This stanza appears to have been suggested by the following passage in the Quarterly Review, April, 1818, vol. XIX p. 203:
“[It was] the opinion of the Egyptians, that the soul never deserted the body while the latter continued in a perfect state. To secure this union, King Cheops is said, by Herodotus, to have employed three hundred and sixty thousand of his subjects for twenty years in raising over the ‘angusta domus’ destined to hold his remains, a pile of stone equal in weight to six millions of tons, which is just three times that of the vast Breakwater thrown across Plymouth Sound; and, to render this precious dust still more secure, the narrow chamber was made accessible only by small, intricate passages, obstructed by stones of an enormous weight, and so carefully closed externally as not to be perceptible.—Yet, how vain are all the precautions of man! Not a bone was left of Cheops, either in the stone coffin, or in the vault, when Shaw entered the gloomy chamber.”
—Editor ↩
Must bid you both farewell in accents bland.
—[MS.]
Lines 1–4 are taken from the last stanza of the Epilogue to the Lay of the Laureate, entitled “L’Envoy.” (See Poetical Works of Robert Southey, 1838, X 174.) —Editor ↩
Begun at Venice, December 13, 1818—finished January 20, 1819. ↩
Lost that most precious stone of stones—his modesty.
—[MS.]
Compare “The Girl of Cadiz,” Poetical Works, 1900, III 1, and note 1. —Editor ↩
But d⸺n me if I ever saw the like.
—[MS.]
Fazzioli—literally, little handkerchiefs—the veils most availing of St. Mark.
[“I fazzioli, or kerchiefs (a white kind of veil which the lower orders wear upon their heads).”
—Letter to Rogers, March 3, 1818, Letters, 1900, IV 208]
Their manners mending, and their morals curing.
—[MS.]
She taught them to suppress their vice—and urine.
Compare—
“And fast the white rocks faded from his view
Childe Harold, Canto I stanza XII lines 3–6, Poetical Works, 1898, I 24
⋮
And then, it may be, of his wish to roam
Repented he.”
—Editor ↩
“To breathe a vein … to lance it so as to let blood.”
Compare—
Love’s Labour’s Lost, act II sc. 1, line 185
Rosalind Is the fool sick? Biron Sick at heart. Ros Alack, let it blood.
—Editor ↩
Sea-sickness death; then pardon Juan—how else
—[MS. M]
Keep down his stomach ne’er at sea before?
“With regard to the charges about the Shipwreck, I think that I told you and Mr. Hobhouse, years ago, that there was not a single circumstance of it not taken from fact: not, indeed, from any single shipwreck, but all from actual facts of different wrecks.”
—Letter to Murray, August 23, 1821
In the Monthly Magazine, vol. LIII (August, 1821, pp. 19–22, and September, 1821, pp. 105–109), Byron’s indebtedness to Sir G. Dalzell’s Shipwrecks and Disasters at Sea (1812, 8vo) is pointed out, and the parallel passages are printed in full. —Editor ↩
“Night came on worse than the day had been; and a sudden shift of wind, about midnight, threw the ship into the trough of the sea, which struck her aft, tore away the rudder, started the sternpost, and shattered the whole of her stern-frame. The pumps were immediately sounded, and in the course of a few minutes the water had increased to four feet. …
“One gang was instantly put on them, and the remainder of the people employed in getting up rice from the run of the ship, and heaving it over, to come at the leak, if possible. After three or four hundred bags were thrown into the sea, we did get at it, and found the water rushing into the ship with astonishing rapidity; therefore we thrust sheets, shirts, jackets, tales of muslin, and everything of the like description that could be got, into the opening.
“Notwithstanding the pumps discharged fifty tons of water an hour, the ship certainly must have gone down, had not our expedients been attended with some success. The pumps, to the excellent construction of which I owe the preservation of my life, were made by Mr. Mann of London. As the next day advanced, the weather appeared to moderate, the men continued incessantly at the pumps, and every exertion was made to keep the ship afloat.”
—See “Loss of the American ship Hercules,
