—Editor ↩
foes, friends, sex, kind, are nothing more to me
—[MS.]
Than a mere dream of something o’er the sea.
For the same archaism or blunder, compare Manfred, act I sc. 4, line 19, Poetical Works, 1901, IV 132. —Editor ↩
Compare “The Prisoner of Chillon,” line 78, Poetical Works, p. 16. —Editor ↩
Holding her sweet breath o’er his cheek and mouth,
—[MS.]
As o’er a bed of roses, etc.
Vide post, Canto XVI stanza LXXXVI line 6, note 1198. —Editor ↩
For without heart Love is not quite so good;
—[MS.]
Ceres is commissary to our bellies,
And Love, which also much depends on food:
While Bacchus will provide with wine and jellies—
Oysters and eggs are also living food.
He was her own, her Ocean lover, cast
—[MS.]
To be her soul’s first idol, and its last.
And saw the sunset and the rising moon.
—[MS.]
The MS. and the editions of 1819, 1823, 1828, read “woman.” The edition of 1833 reads “women.” The text follows the MS. and the earlier editions. —Editor ↩
Compare stanza prefixed to Dedication, vide ante, Fragment on the Back of the MS. of Canto I. —Editor ↩
Compare—
“Yes! thy Sherbet to-night will sweetly flow,
Corsair, Canto I lines 427, 428, Poetical Works, 1900, III 242
See how it sparkles in its vase of snow!”
—Editor ↩
A pleasure naught but drunkenness can bring:
—[MS.]
For not the blest sherbet all chilled with snow.
Nor the full sparkle of the desert-spring,
Nor wine in all the purple of its glow.
Spread like an Ocean, varied, vast, and bright.
—[MS.]
—I’m sure they never reckoned;
And being joined—like swarming bees they clung,
And mixed until the very pleasure stung.
or,
And one was innocent, but both too young,
—[MS.]
Their hearts the flowers, etc.
In all the burning tongues the Passions teach
—[MS. erased]
They had no further feeling, hope, nor care
Save one, and that was Love.
Pillowed upon her beating heart—which panted
—[MS.]
With the sweet memory of all it granted.
Some drown themselves, some in the vices grovel.
—[MS.]
Lady Caroline Lamb’s Glenarvon was published in 1816. For Byron’s farewell letter of dismissal, which Lady Caroline embodied in her novel (vol. III chap. IX), see Letters, 1898, II 135, note 1. According to Medwin (Conversations, 1824, p. 274), Madame de Staël catechized Byron with regard to the relation of the story to fact. —Editor ↩
In their sweet feelings holily united,
—[MS.]
By Solitude (soft parson) they were wed.
Titus forebore to marry “Incesta” Berenice (see Juv., Sat. VI 158), the daughter of Agrippa I, and wife of Herod, King of Chalcis, out of regard to the national prejudice against intermarriage with an alien. —Editor ↩
Caesar’s third wife, Pompeia, was suspected of infidelity with Clodius (see Langhorne’s Plutarch, 1838, p. 498); Pompey’s third wife, Mucia, intrigued with Caesar (vide Plutarch, p. 447); Muhammad’s favourite wife, Ayesha, on one occasion incurred suspicion; Antonina, the wife of Belisarius, was notoriously profligate (see Gibbon’s Decline and Fall, 1825, III 432, 102). —Editor ↩
Compare Sardanapalus, act I sc. 2, line 252, Poetical Works, 1901, V 23, note 1. —Editor ↩
—of ticklish dust.
—[MS. Alternative reading]
“Mr. Hobhouse is at it again about indelicacy. There is no indelicacy. If he wants that, let him read Swift, his great idol; but his imagination must be a dunghill, with a viper’s nest in the middle, to engender such a supposition about this poem.”
—Letter to Murray, May 15, 1819, Letters, 1900, IV 295
—Editor ↩
Two hundred stanzas reckoned as before.
—[MS.]
November 30, 1819. Copied in 1820 (MS. D). Moore (Life, 421) says that Byron was at work on the third canto when he stayed with him at Venice, in October, 1819. “One day, before dinner, [he] read me two or three hundred lines of it; beginning with the stanzas ‘Oh Wellington,’ etc., which, at the time, formed the opening of the third canto, but were afterwards reserved for the commencement of the ninth.” The third canto, as it now stands, was completed by November 8, 1819; see Letters, 1900, IV 375. The date on the MS. may refer to the first fair copy. —Editor ↩
And fits her like a stocking or a glove.
—[MS. D]
“On peut trouver des femmes qui n’ont jamais eu de galanterie, mais il est rare d’en trouver qui n’en aient jamais eu qu’une.”
—Réflexions … du Duc de la Rochefoucauld, No. LXXIII
Byron prefixed the maxim as a motto to his “Ode to a Lady whose Lover was killed by a Ball, which at the same time shivered a Portrait next his Heart.”—Poetical Works, 1901, IV 552. —Editor ↩
Merchant of Venice, act IV sc. 1, line 254. —Editor ↩
Had Petrarch’s passion led to Petrarch’s wedding,
—[MS.]
How many sonnets had ensued the bedding?
The Ballad of “Death and the Lady” was printed in a small volume, entitled A Guide to Heaven, 1736, 12mo. It is mentioned in The Vicar of Wakefield (chap. XVII), Works of Oliver Goldsmith, 1854, I 369. See Old
