—Editor ↩
The N. Engl. Dict. cites Bunyan, Walpole, Fielding, Miss Austen, and Dickens as authorities for the plural “was.” See art. “be.” Here, as elsewhere, Byron wrote as he spoke. —Editor ↩
He never shows his feelings, but his teeth.
—[MS. Alternative reading]
“Our firman arrived from Constantinople on the 30th of April (1810).”
—Travels in Albania, 1858, II 186
—Editor ↩
That each pulled, different ways—and waxing rough,
—[MS.]
Had cuffed each other, only for the cuff.
“O, who can hold a fire in his hand,
Richard II, act I sc. 3, lines 294, 295
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?”
—Editor ↩
Having had some experience in my youth.
—[MS. erased]
“Don Juan will be known, by and by, for what it is intended—a Satire on abuses in the present states of society, and not an eulogy of vice. It may be now and then voluptuous:—I can’t help that. Ariosto is worse. Smollett (see Lord Strutwell in vol. 2nd of R[oderick] R[andom] [1793, pp. 119–127]) ten times worse; and Fielding no better.”
—Letter to Murray, December 25, 1822, Letters, 1901, VI 155, 156
—Editor ↩
Vide ante, note 321.
“It seems hardly to admit of doubt, that the plain of Anatolia, watered by the Mender, and backed by a mountainous ridge, of which Kazdaghy is the summit, offers the precise territory alluded to by Homer. The long controversy, excited by Mr. Bryant’s publication, and since so vehemently agitated, would probably never have existed, had it not been for the erroneous maps of the country which, even to this hour, disgrace our geographical knowledge of that part of Asia.”
—Travels, etc., by E. D. Clarke, 1812, Part II sect, I p. 78
—Editor ↩
The pillar which records the battle of Ravenna is about two miles from the city, on the opposite side of the river to the road towards Forli. Gaston de Foix [(1489–1512) Duc de Nemours, nephew of Louis XII], who gained the battle, was killed in it: there fell on both sides twenty thousand men. The present state of the pillar and its site is described in the text.
[Beyond the Porta Sisi, about two miles from Ravenna, on the banks of the Ronco, is a square pillar (La Colonna de Francesi), erected in 1557 by Pietro Cesi, president of Romagna, as a memorial of the battle gained by the combined army of Louis XII and the Duke of Ferrara over the troops of Julius II and the King of Spain, April 11 1512. —Handbook of Northern Italy, p. 548] ↩
Compare Childe Harold, Canto IV stanza LVII line I, Poetical Works, 1899, II 371, note I. See, too, Preface to the Prophecy of Dante, Poetical Works, IV 243. —Editor ↩
Protects his tomb, but greater care is paid.
—[MS.]
With human ordure is it now defiled,
—[MS.]
As if the peasant’s scorn this mode invented
To show his loathing of the thing he soiled.
Those sufferings once reserved for Hell alone.
—[MS.]
Its fumes are frankincense; and were there nought
—[MS.]
Even of this vapour, still the chilling yoke
Of silence would not long be borne by Thought.
I have drunk deep of passions as they pass,
—[MS.]
And dearly bought the bitter power to give.
See, for instance, Wilson’s review of Don Juan, in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, August, 1819, vol. V p. 512, sq.:
“To confess … to his Maker, and to weep over in secret agonies the wildest and most fantastic transgressions of heart and mind, is the part of a conscious sinner, in whom sin has not become the sole principle of life and action. … But to lay bare to the eye of man—and of woman—all the hidden convulsions of a wicked spirit,” etc.
—Editor ↩
What! must I go with Wordy to the cooks?
—[MS.]
Read—were it but your Grandmother’s to vex—
And let me not the only minstrel be
Cut off from tasting your Castalian tea.
Compare—
“I leave them to their daily ‘tea is ready,’
Beppo, stanza LXXVI lines 7, 8, Poetical Works, 1901, IV 184, note
Snug coterie, and literary lady.”
—Editor ↩
The caged starling, by its repeated cry, “I can’t get out! I can’t get out!” cured Yorick of his sentimental yearnings for imprisonment in the Bastille. See Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, ed. 1804, pp. 100–106. —Editor ↩
In his Essay, Supplement to the Preface (Poems by William Wordsworth, ed. 1820, III 315–348), Wordsworth maintains that the appreciation of great poetry is a plant of slow growth, that immediate recognition is a mark of inferiority, or is to be accounted for by the presence of adventitious qualities:
“So strange, indeed, are the obliquities of admiration, that they whose opinions are much influenced by authority will often be tempted to think that there are no fixed principles in human nature for this art to rest upon. … Away, then, with the senseless iteration of the word popular! … The voice that issues from this spirit [of human knowledge] is that Vox Populi which the Deity inspires. Foolish must he be who can mistake for this a local acclamation, or a transitory outcry—transitory though it be for years, local though from a Nation. Still more lamentable is his error who can believe that there is anything of divine infallibility in this clamour of that small though loud portion of the community ever governed by factitious influence, which under the name of the Public, passes itself upon the unthinking
