FOOTNOTES
[364] {321} [Compare Canto IV. stanza clxiv.—
"But where is he, the Pilgrim of my Song....
He is no more—these breathings are his last."]
[365] {322} [His marriage. Compare the epigram, "On my Wedding-Day," sent in a letter to Moore, January 2, 1820—
"Here's a happy new year!—but with reason
I beg you'll permit me to say—
Wish me many returns of the season,
But as few as you please of the day."]
[366] {323} [Some fancy me no Chinese, because I am formed more like a man than a monster; and others wonder to find one born five thousand miles from England, endued with common sense.... He must be some Englishman in disguise."—The Citizen of the World; or a Series of Letters from a Chinese Philosopher at London, to his Friends in the East, 1762, Letter xxxiii.]
[368] {324} [Antonio Canova, sculptor, 1757-1822; Vincenzo Monti, 1754-1828; Ugo Foscolo, 1776-1827 (see Life, p. 456, etc.); Ippolito Pindemonte, 1753-1828 (see Letter to Murray, June 4, 1817), poets; Ennius Quirinus Visconti, 1751-1818, the valuer of the Elgin marbles, archæologist; Giacomo Morelli, 1745-1819, bibliographer and scholar (the architect Cosimo Morelli, born 1732, died in 1812); Leopoldo Conte de Cicognara, 1767-1834, archæologist; the Contessa Albrizzi, 1769?-1836, authoress of Ritratti di Uomini Illustri (see Life, pp. 331, 413, etc.); Giuseppe Mezzofanti, 1774-1849, linguist; Angelo Mai (cardinal), 1782-1854, philologist; Andreas Moustoxides, 1787-1860, a Greek archæologist, who wrote in Italian; Francesco Aglietti (see Life, p. 378, etc.), 1757-1836; Andrea Vacca Berlinghieri, 1772-1826 (see Life, p. 339).
For biographical essays on Monti, Foscolo, and Pindemonte, see "Essay on the Present Literature of Italy" (Hobhouse's Historical Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold, 1818, pp. 347, sq.). See, too, Italian Literature, by R. Garnett, C.B., LL.D., 1898, pp. 333-337, 337-341, 341-342.]
[369] {325} [Shelley (notes M. Darmesteter), in his preface to the Prometheus Unbound, "emploie le mot sans demander pardon." "The mass of capabilities remains at every period materially the same; the circumstances which awaken it to action perpetually change." "Capability" in the sense of "undeveloped faculty or property; a condition physical or otherwise, capable of being converted or turned to use" (N. Eng. Dict.), appertains rather to material objects. To apply the term figuratively to the forces inherent in national character savoured of a literary indecorum. Hence the apology.]
[370] [Addison, Cato, act v. sc. 1, line 3—
"It must be so—Plato, thou reason'st well!—
Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
This longing after immortality?"]
[371] [Shelley chose this refrain as the motto to his unfinished lines addressed to his infant son—
"My lost William, thou in whom
Some bright spirit lived——"]
[372] [Scott commented severely on this opprobrious designation of "the great and glorious victory of Waterloo," in his critique on the Fourth Canto, Q. R., No. xxxvii., April, 1818.]
[373] {326} [The substance of some letters written by an Englishman resident in Paris during the last Reign of the Emperor Napoleon. 1816. 2 vols.]
[374] [In 1817.]
[377] [Compare Mysteries of Udolpho, by Mrs. Ann Radcliffe, 1794, ii. 35, 36—
"Its terraces crowned with airy yet majestic fabrics ... appeared as if they had been called up from the Ocean by the wand of an enchanter."]
[lb] {328} ——throned on her Seventy Isles.—[MS. M. altern. reading, D.]
[378] Sabellicus, describing the appearance of Venice, has made use of the above image, which would not be poetical were it not true.—"Quo fit ut qui supernè [ex specula aliqua eminentiore] urbem contempletur, turritam telluris imaginem medio Oceano figuratam se putet inspicere." [De Venetæ Urbis situ Narratio, lib. i. Ital. Ill. Script., 1600, p. 4. Marcus Antonius Coccius Sabellicus (1436-1506) wrote, inter alia, a History of Venice, published in folio in 1487, and Rhapsodiæ Historiarum Enneades, a condito mundo, usque ad A.C. 1504. His description of Venice (vide supra) was published after his death in 1527. Hofmann does not give him a good character: "Obiit A.C. 1506, turpi morbo confectus, ætat. 70, relicto filio notho." But his Αὐτοεπιτάφιον implies that he was satisfied with himself.
"Quem non res hominum, non omnis ceperat ætas,
Scribentem capit hæc Coccion urna brevis."
Lexicon Universale, art. "Marcus," etc.
Cybele (sometimes written Cybelle and Cybēle), the "mother of the Goddesses," was represented as wearing a mural crown—"coronamque turritam gestare dicitur" (Albricus Phil., De Imag. Deor., xii.). Venice with her tiara of proud towers is the earth-goddess Cybele, having "suffered a sea-change."]
[lc] {329} From spoils of many nations and the East.—[MS. M., D. erased.]
[379] ["Gems wrought into drinking-vessels, among which the least precious were framed of turquoise, jasper, or amethyst ... unnumbered jacinths, emeralds, sapphires, chrysolites, and topazes, and, lastly, those matchless carbuncles which, placed on the High Altar of St. Mark's, blazed with intrinsic light, and scattered darkness by their own beams;—these are but a sample of the treasures which accrued to Venice" (Villehardouin, lib. in. p. 129). (See Sketches from Venetian History, 1831, i. 161.)]
[380] [After the fall of Constantinople, in 1204, "the illustrious Dandolo ... was permitted to tinge his buskins in the purple hue distinctive of the Imperial Family, to claim exemption from all feudal service to the Emperor, and to annex to the title of Doge of Venice the proud style of Despot of Romania, and Lord of One-fourth and One-eighth of the Roman Empire" (ibid., 1831, i. 167).]
[ld] Monarchs sate down——.—[D. erased.]
[381] [The gondoliers (see Hobhouse's note ii.) used to sing alternate stanzas of the Gerusalemme Liberata, capping each other like the shepherds in the Bucolics. The rival reciters were sometimes attached to the same gondola; but often the response came from a passing gondolier, a stranger to the singer who challenged the contest. Rogers, in his Italy, laments the silence which greeted the swan-song of his own gondolier—
"He sung,
As in the time when Venice was Herself,
Of Tancred and Erminia. On our oars
We rested; and the verse was verse divine!
We could not err—Perhaps he was the last—
For none took up the strain, none answer'd him;
And, when he ceased, he left upon my ear
A something like the dying voice of Venice!"
The Gondola (Poems, 1852, ii. 79).
Compare, too, Goethe's "Letters from Italy," October 6, 1786: "This evening I bespoke the celebrated song of the mariners, who chaunt Tasso and Ariosto to melodies of their own. This must actually be ordered, as it is not to be heard as a thing of course, but rather belongs to the half-forgotten traditions of former times. I entered a gondola by moonlight, with one singer before and the other behind me. They sing their song, taking up the verses alternately....
"Sitting on the shore of an island, on the bank of a canal, or on the side of a boat, a gondolier will sing away with a loud penetrating voice—the multitude admire force above everything—anxious only to be heard as far as possible. Over the silent mirror it travels far."—Travels in Italy, 1883, p. 73.]
[le] {330} The pleasure-place of all festivity.—[MS. M.]
[382] {331} [The Rialto, or Rivo alto, "the middle group of islands between the shore and the mainland," on the left of the Grand Canal, was the site of the original city, and till the sixteenth century its formal and legal designation. The Exchange, or Banco Giro, was held in the piazza, opposite the church of San Giacomo, which stands at the head of the canal to the north of the Ponto di Rialto. It was on the Rialto that Antonio rated Shylock about his "usances." "What news on the Rialto?" asks Solanio (Merchant of Venice, act i. sc. 3, line 102; act iii. sc. 1, line 1). Byron uses the word symbolically for Venetian commerce.]
[383] [Pierre is the hero of Otway's Venice Preserved. Shylock and the Moor stand where they did, but what of Pierre? If the name of Otway—"master of the tragic art"—and the title of his masterpiece—Venice Preserved, or The Plot Discovered (first played 1682)—are not wholly forgotten, Pierre and Monimia and Belvidera have "decayed," and are memorable chiefly as favourite characters of great actors and actresses. Genest notes twenty revivals of the Venice Preserved, which was played as late as October 27, 1837, when Macready played "Pierre," and Phelps "Jaffier." "No play that I know," says Hartley Coleridge (Essays, 1851, ii. 56), "gains so much by acting as Venice Preserved.... Miss O'Neill, I well remember, made me weep with Belvidera; but she would have done the same had she spoken in an unknown tongue." Byron, who professed to be a "great admirer of Otway," in a letter to Hodgson, August 22, 1811 (Letters, 1898, i. 339, note 1), alludes to some lines from Venice Preserved (act ii. sc. 3), which seem to have taken his fancy. Two lines spoken by Belvidera (act ii.), if less humorous, are more poetical—
"Oh, the day
Too soon will break, and wake us to our sorrow;
Come, come to bed, and bid thy cares Good night!"]
[384] {332} [Compare The Dream, i.—
"The mind can make
Substance, and people planets of its own
With beings brighter than have been, and give
A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh."
The ideal personages of the poet's creations have the promise of immortality. The ideal forms which people his imagination transfigure and supplant the dull and grievous realities of his mortal being and circumstance; but there are "things" more radiant, more enchanting still, the "strong realities" of the heart and soul—hope, love, joy. But they pass! We wake, and lo! it was a dream.]
[lf] Denies to the dull trick of life——.—[MS. erased.]
["In youth I wrote because my mind was full,
And now because I feel it growing dull."
Don Juan, Canto XIV. stanza x.
In youth the poet takes refuge, in the ideal world, from the crowd and pressure of blissful possibilities; and in age, when hope is beyond hope, he peoples the solitude with beings of the mind.]
[lg] {333} And this worn feeling——.—[Editions 1816-1891.]
And, may be, that which { springs } spreads ——.—[MS. M.]
[li] Outshines our Fairies—things in shape and hue.—[MS. M.]
[lj] {334} ——and though I leave behind.—[MS. M.]
[lk] And make myself a home beside a softer sea.—[MS. erased.]
——to pine
Albeit is not my nature, and I twine.—[MS. M. erased]
[386] [In another mood he wrote to Murray (June 7, 1819), "I trust they won't think of 'pickling, and bringing me home to Clod or Blunderbuss Hall' [see The Rivals, act v. sc. 3]. I am sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country." In this half-humorous outburst he deprecates, or pretends to deprecate, the fate which actually awaited his remains—burial in the family vault at Hucknall Torkard. There is, of course, no reference to a public funeral and a grave in Westminster Abbey. In the next stanza (x. line 1) he assumes the possibility of his being excluded from the Temple of Fame; but there is, perhaps, a tacit reference to burial in the Abbey. If the thought, as is probable, occurred to him, he veils it in a metaphor.]
[387] {335} The answer of the mother of Brasidas, the Lacedæmonian general, to the strangers who praised the memory of her son.
[Βρασίδας γὰρ ἦν μὲν ἀνὴρ ἀγαθὸς, ῇῃπολλοὶ δ' ἐκείνου κρείσσονες ἐν τῇ Σπάρτῃ. Plutarchi Moralia, Apophthegmata Laconica (Tauchnitz, 1820), ii. 127.]
[lm] The widowed Adriatic mourns her Doge.—[MS. M erased.]
[388] [The Bucentaur, "the state barge in which, on Ascension Day, the Doge of Venice used to wed the Adriatic by dropping a ring into it," was broken up and rifled by the French in 1797 (note, by Rev. E. C. Owen, Childe Harold, 1897, p. 197).
Compare Goethe's "Letters from Italy," October 5, 1786: "To give a notion of the Bucentaur in one word, I should say that it is a state-galley. The older one, of which we still have drawings, justified this appellation still more than the present one, which, by its splendour, makes us forget the original....
"The vessel is all ornament; we ought to say, it is overladen with ornament; it is altogether one piece of gilt carving, for no other use.... This state-galley is a good index to show what the Venetians were, and what they considered themselves."—Travels in Italy, 1883, p. 68.
Compare, too, Wordsworth's sonnet "On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic"—
"She was a maiden City, bright and free;
No guile seduced, no force could violate;
And when she took unto herself a Mate,
She must espouse the everlasting Sea."
Works, 1888, p. 180.]
[389] {336} [For "Lion," see Hobhouse's note iii. The "Horses of St. Mark" (vide post, stanza xiii. line 1), which, according to history or legend, Augustus "conveyed" from Alexandria to Rome, Constantine from Rome to Constantinople, Dandolo, in 1204, from Constantinople to Venice, Napoleon, in 1797, from Venice to Paris, and which were restored to the Venetians by the Austrians in 1815, were at one time supposed to belong to the school of Lysippus. Haydon, who published, in 1817, a curious etching of "The Elgin Horse's Head," placed side by side with the "Head of one of the Horses ... now at Venice," subscribes the following critical note: "It is astonishing that the great principles of nature should have been so nearly lost in the time between Phidias and Lysippus. Compare these two heads. The Elgin head is all truth, the other all manner." Hobhouse pronounces the "Horses" to be "irrevocably Chian," but modern archæologists regard both "school" and exact period as uncertain.]
[ln] Even on the pillar——.—[MS. M., D. erased.]
[390] [According to Milman (Hist. of Lat. Christianity, v. 144), the humiliation of Barbarossa at the Church of St. Mark took place on Tuesday, July 24, 1177. À propos of the return of the Pope and Emperor to the ducal palace, he quotes "a curious passage from a newly recovered poem, by Godfrey of Viterbo, an attendant on the Emperor. So great was the press in the market that the aged Pope was thrown down—
"Jam Papa perisset in arto,
Cæsar ibi vetulum ni relevasset eum."
"This," he remarks, "is an odd contrast of real life with romance."]
[391] {337} ["Oh, for one hour of Dundee!" was the exclamation of a Highland chieftain at the battle of Sheriff-muir, November 13, 1715 (Scott's Tales of a Grandfather, III. Series, chap. x.; Prose Works, Paris, 1830, vii. 768). Wordsworth makes the words his own in the sonnet, "In the Pass of Killicranky (an Invasion being expected, October, 1803)" (Works, 1888, p. 201)—
"O for a single hour of that Dundee,
Who on that day the word of onset gave!"
And Coleridge, in a letter to Wordsworth (February 8, 1804), thinking, perhaps, less of the chieftain than the sonnet, exclaims, "'Oh for one hour of Dundee!' How often shall I sigh, 'Oh for one hour of The Recluse!'"—an aspiration which Byron would have worded differently.]
——who quelled the imperial foe.—[MS. M. erased.]
——empire's all-conquering foe.—[MS. M.]
[392] [Compare Marino Faliero, act iv. sc. 2, lines 157, 158—
"Doge Dandolo survived to ninety summers,
To vanquish empires, and refuse their crown."
"The vessels that bore the bishops of Soissons and Troyes, the Paradise and the Pilgrim, were the first which grappled with the Towers of Constantinople [April, 1204].... The bishops of Soissons and of Troyes would have placed the blind old Doge Dandolo on the imperial throne; his election was opposed by the Venetians.... But probably the wise patriotism of Dandolo himself, and his knowledge of the Venetian mind, would make him acquiesce in the loss of an honour so dangerous to his country.... Venice might have sunk to an outpost, as it were, of the Eastern Empire."—Milman's Hist. of Lat. Christianity, v. 350, 353, 354.]
[393] {338} [Hobhouse's version (see Hist. Notes, No. vi.) of the war of Chioggia is not borne out by modern research. For example, the long speech which Chinazzo attributes to the Genoese admiral, Pietro Doria, is probably mythical. The actual menace of the "bitting and bridling the horses of St. Mark" is assigned by other historians to Francesco Carrara. Doria was not killed by a stone bullet from the cannon named The Trevisara, but by the fall of the Campanile in Chioggia, which had been struck by the bullet. (Venice, an Historical Sketch of the Republic, by Horatio F. Brown, 1893, pp. 225-234.)]
[lp] ——into whence she rose.—[Editions 1818-1891.]
[394] [Compare the opening lines of Byron's Ode on Venice—
"Oh Venice! Venice! when thy marble walls
Are level with the waters, there shall be
A cry of nations o'er thy sunken halls,
A loud lament along the sweeping sea!"
Shelley, too, in his Lines written among the Euganean Hills, bewailed the approaching doom of the "sea-girt city." But threatened cities, like threatened men, live long, and since its annexation to Italy, in 1866, a revival of trade and the re-establishment of the arsenal have brought back a certain measure of prosperity.]
[lq] {339} Even in Destruction's heart——.—[MS. M.]
[395] That is, the Lion of St. Mark, the standard of the republic, which is the origin of the word Pantaloon—Piantaleone, Pantaleon, Pantaloon.
[The Venetians were nicknamed Pantaloni. Byron, who seems to have relied on the authority of a Venetian glossary, assumes that the "by-word" may be traced to the patriotism of merchant-princes "who were reputed to hoist flags with the Venetian lion waving to the breeze on every rock and barren headland of Levantine waters" (Memoirs of Count Carlo Gozzi, translated by J. Addington Symonds, 1890, Introd. part ii. p. 44), and that in consequence of this spread-eagleism the Venetians were held up to scorn by their neighbours as "planters of the lion"—a reproach which conveyed a tribute to their prowess. A more probable explanation is that the "by-word," with its cognates "Pantaleone," the typical masque of Italian comedy—progenitor of our "Pantaloon;" and "pantaloni," "pantaloons," the typical Venetian costume—derive their origin from the baptismal name "Pantaleone," frequently given to Venetian children, in honour of St. Pantaleon of Nicomedia, physician and martyr, whose cult was much in vogue in Northern Italy, and especially in Venice, where his relics, which "coruscated with miracles," were the object of peculiar veneration.
St. Pantaleon was known to the Greek Church as Παντελεήμων, that is, the "all-pitiful;" and in Latin his name is spelled Pantaleymon and Pantaleemon. Hagiologists seem to have been puzzled, but the compiler of the Acta Sanctorum, for July 27, St. Pantaleon's Day in the Roman calendar (xxxiii. 397-426), gives the preference to Pantaleon, and explains that he was hailed as Pantaleemon by a divine voice at the hour of his martyrdom, which proclaimed "eum non amplius esse vocandum Pantaleonem, sed Pantaleemonem."
The accompanying woodcut is the reproduction of the frontispiece of a black-letter tract, composed by Augustinus de Cremâ, in honour of the "translation" of one of the sainted martyr's arms to Crema, in Lombardy. It was printed at Cremona, in 1493.]
[396] {340} Shakespeare is my authority for the word "Ottomite" for Ottoman. "Which Heaven hath forbid the Ottomites" (see Othello, act ii. sc. 3, line 161).—[MS. D.]
[397] ["On 29th September (1669) Candia, and the island of Candia, passed away from Venice, after a defence which had lasted twenty-five years, and was unmatched for bravery in the annals of the Republic."—Venice, an Historical Sketch, by Horatio F. Brown, 1893, p. 378.]
[398] ["The battle of Lepanto [October 7, 1571] lasted five hours.... The losses are estimated at 8000 Christians and 30,000 Turks.... The chief glory of the victory rests with Sebastian Veniero and the Venetians."—Venice, etc., 1893, p. 368.]
[399] {341} [The story is told in Plutarch's Life of Nicias, cap. xxix. (Plut. Vit., Lipsiæ, 1813, v. 154). "The dramas of Euripides were so popular throughout all Sicily, that those Athenian prisoners who knew ... portions of them, won the affections of their masters.... I cannot refrain from mentioning this story, though I fear its trustworthiness ... is much inferior to its pathos and interest."—Grote's History of Greece, 1869, vii. 186.]
[lr] And won her hopeless children from afar.—[MS. M., D. erased.]
And sends him ransomeless to bless his poet's strains.—[MS. M.]
or, And sends him home to bless the poet for his strains.—
[MS. D. erased.]
[lt] {342} Thy love of Tassa's verse should cut the knot.—[MS. M.]
[400] [By the Treaty of Paris, May 3, 1814, Lombardy and Venice, which since the battle of Austerlitz had formed part of the French kingdom of Naples, were once more handed over to Austria. Great Britain was represented by "a bungler even in its disgusting trade" (Don Juan, Dedication, stanza xiv.), Lord Castlereagh.]
[lu] ——for come it will and shall.—[MS. M., D. erased.]
[lv] And Otway's—Radcliffe's—Schiller's—Shakspeare's art.—[MS. M., D.]
[401] Venice Preserved; Mysteries of Udolpho; The Ghost-Seer, or Armenian; The Merchant of Venice; Othello.
[For Venice Preserved, vide ante, stanza iv. line 7, note. To the Mysteries of Udolpho Byron was indebted for more than one suggestion, vide ante, stanza i. line 4, note, and Mysteries, etc., London, 1794, 2. 39: "The air bore no sounds, but those of sweetness echoing along each margin of the canal and from gondolas on its surface, while groups of masks were seen dancing on the moonlit terraces, and seemed almost to realize the romance of fairy-land." The scene of Schiller's Der Geisterseher (Werke, 1819, x. 97, sq.) is laid at Venice. "This [the Doge's palace] was the thing that most struck my imagination in Venice—more than the Rialto, which I visited for the sake of Shylock; and more, too, than Schiller's Armenian, a novel which took a great hold of me when a boy. It is also called the Ghost Seer, and I never walked down St. Mark's by moonlight without thinking of it, and 'at nine o'clock he died!' [For allusion to the same incident, see Rogers's Italy (Poems, 1852, ii. 73).] But I hate things all fiction; and therefore the Merchant and Othello have no great associations for me: but Pierre has."—Letter to Murray, Venice, April 2, 1817. (For an earlier reference to the Ghost-seer, see Oscar of Alva: Poetical Works, 1898, i. 131, note.)]
[lw] {343} Though I have found her thus we will not part.—[MS. M.]
[402] [Shelley, in his Lines written among the Euganean Hills, allows to Venice one lingering glory "one remembrance more sublime"—
"That a tempest-cleaving swan
Of the songs of Albion,
Driven from his ancestral streams
By the might of evil dreams,
Found a nest in thee; and Ocean
Welcomed him with such emotion,
That its joy grew his, and sprung
From his lips like music flung
O'er a mighty thunder-fit,
Chastening terror."]
The Past at least is mine—whate'er may come.
But when the heart is full the lips must needs lie dumb.—
[MS. M. erased.]
——or else mine now were cold and dumb.—[MS. M.]
[403] {344} Tannen is the plural of tanne, a species of fir peculiar to the Alps, which only thrives in very rocky parts, where scarcely soil sufficient for its nourishment can be found. On these spots it grows to a greater height than any other mountain tree.
[Byron did not "know German" (Letter to Murray, June 7, 1820), and he may, as Mr. Tozer suggests, have supposed that the word "tannen" denoted not "fir trees" generally, but a particular kind of fir tree. He refers, no doubt, to the Ebeltanne (Abies pectinata), which is not a native of this country, but grows at a great height on the Swiss Alps and throughout the mountainous region of Central Europe.]
[ly] But there are minds which as the Tannen grow.—[MS. erased.]
[lz] Of shrubless granite——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[ma] {345} In rocks and unsupporting places——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[404] [Cicero, De Finibus, II. xxix., controverts the maxim of Epicurus, that a great sorrow is necessarily of short duration, a prolonged sorrow necessarily light: "Quod autem magnum dolorem brevem longinquum levem esse dicitis, id non intelligo quale sit, video enim et magnos et eosdem bene longinquos dolores." But the sentiment is adopted by Montaigne (1. xiv.), ed. 1580, p. 66: "Tu ne la sentiras guiere long temps, si tu la sens trop; elle mettra fin à soy ou à toy; l'un et l'autre revient a un." ("Si tu ne la portes; elle t'emportera," note.) And again by Sir Thomas Brown, "Sense endureth no extremities, and sorrows destroy us or themselves" (see Darmesteter, Childe Harold, 1882, p. 193). Byron is not refining upon these conceits, but is drawing upon his own experience. Suffering which does not kill is subject to change, and "continueth not in one stay;" but it remains within call, and returns in an hour when we are not aware.]
[405] {346} [Compare Bishop Blougram's lament on the instability of unfaith—
"Just when we are safest, there's a sunset-touch,
A fancy from a flower-bell, some one's death,
A chorus-ending from Euripides,—
And that's enough for fifty hopes and fears.
To rap and knock and enter in our soul,
Take hands and dance there."
Browning's Poetical Works, 1869, v. 268.]
A tone of music—eventide in spring.
or, ——twilight—eve in spring.—[MS. M, erased.]
[406] {347} [Compare Scott's Lady of the Lake, I. xxxiii. lines 21, 22—
"They come, in dim procession led,
The cold, the faithless, and the dead."]
[407] {348} ["Friuli's mountains" are the Julian Alps, which lie to the north of Trieste and north-east of Venice, "the hoar and aëry Alps towards the north," which Julian and Count Maddalo (vide post, p. 349) saw from the Lido. But the Alpine height along which "a sea of glory" streamed—"the peak of the far Rhætian hill" (stanza xxviii. line 4)—must lie to the westward of Venice, in the track of the setting sun.]
[408] The above description may seem fantastical or exaggerated to those who have never seen an Oriental or an Italian sky; yet it is but a literal and hardly sufficient delineation of an August evening (the eighteenth), as contemplated in one of many rides along the banks of the Brenta, near La Mira.
[Compare Shelley's Julian and Maddalo (Poetical Works, 1895, i. 343)—
"How beautiful is sunset, when the glow
Of Heaven descends upon a land like thee,
Thou Paradise of exiles, Italy!
... We stood
Looking upon the evening, and the flood,
Which lay between the city and the shore,
Paved with the image of the sky ... the hoar
And aëry Alps towards the north appeared,
Thro' mist, an heaven-sustaining bulwark reared
Between the East and West; and half the sky
Was roofed with clouds of rich emblazonry,
Dark purple at the zenith, which still grew
Down the steep West into a wondrous hue,
Brighter than burning gold."]
[409] {349} [The Brenta rises in Tyrol, and flowing past Padua falls into the Lagoon at Fusina. Mira, or La Mira, where Byron "colonized" in the summer of 1817, and again in 1819, is on the Brenta, some six or seven miles inland from the Lagoon.]
[410] {350} [The Abbé de Sade, in his Mémoires pour la vie de Pétrarque (1767), affirmed, on the strength of documentary evidence, that the Laura of the sonnets, born de Noves, was the wife of his ancestor, Hugo de Sade, and the mother of a large family. "Gibbon," says Hobhouse (note viii.), "called the abbé's memoirs a 'labour of love' (see Decline and Fall, chap. lxx. note 1), and followed him with confidence and delight;" but the poet James Beattie (in a letter to the Duchess of Gordon, August 17, 1782) disregarded them as a "romance," and, more recently, "an ingenious Scotchman" [Alexander Fraser Tytler (Lord Woodhouselee)], in an Historical and Critical Essay on the Life and Character of Petrarch (1810), had re-established "the ancient prejudice" in favour of Laura's virginity. Hobhouse appears, but his note is somewhat ambiguous, to adopt the view of "the ingenious Scotchman." To pass to contemporary criticism, Dr. Garnett, in his History of Italian Literature, 1898 (pp. 66-71), without attempting to settle "the everlasting controversy," regards the abbé's documentary evidence as for the most part worthless, and, relying on the internal evidence of the sonnets and the dialogue, and on the facts of Petrarch's life as established by his correspondence (a complete series of Petrarch's letters was published by Giuseppe Fracassetti, in 1859), inclines to the belief that it was the poet's status as a cleric, and not a husband and family, which proved a bar to his union with Laura. With regard, however, to "one piece of documentary evidence," namely, Laura de Sade's will, Dr. Garnett admits that, if this were producible, and, on being produced, proved genuine, the coincidence of the date of the will, April 3, 1348, with a note in Petrarch's handwriting, dated April 6, 1348, which records the death of Laura, would almost establish the truth of the abbé's theory "in the teeth of all objections."]
[411] {351} ["He who would seek, as I have done, the last memorials of the life and death of Petrarch in that sequestered Euganean village [Arquà is about twelve miles south-west of Padua], will still find them there. A modest house, apparently of great antiquity, passes for his last habitation. A chair in which he is said to have died is shown there. And if these details are uncertain, there is no doubt that the sarcophagus of red marble, supported on pillars, in the churchyard of Arquà, contains, or once contained, his mortal remains. Lord Byron and Mr. Hobhouse visited the spot more than sixty years ago in a sceptical frame of mind; for doubts had at that time been thrown on the very existence of Laura; and the varied details of the poet's life, which are preserved with so much fidelity in his correspondence, were almost forgotten."—Petrarch, by H. Reeve, 1879, p. 14. In a letter to Hoppner, September 12, 1817, Byron says that he was moved "to turn aside in a second visit to Arquà." Two years later, October, 1819, he in vain persuaded Moore "to spare a day or two to go with me to Arquà. I should like," he said, "to visit that tomb with you—a pair of poetical pilgrims—eh, Tom, what say you?" But "Tom" was for Rome and Lord John Russell, and ever afterwards bewailed the lost opportunity "with wonder and self-reproach" (Life, p. 423; Life, by Karl Elze, 1872, p. 235).]
[mc] {352} His mansion and his monument——.—[MS. M., D. erased.]
[md] ——formed his sepulchral fane.—[MS. M.]
[412] [Compare Wordsworth's Ode, "Intimations of," etc., xi. lines 9-11—
"The clouds that gather round the setting sun
Do take a sober colouring from an eye
That hath kept watch o'er man's mortality."]
[413] ["Euganeis istis in collibus ... domum parvam sed delectabilem et honestam struxi ... hic quanquam æger corpore, tranquillus animo frater dego, sine tumultibus, sine erroribus, sine curis, legens semper et scribens, Deum laudans."—Petrarca, Epistolæ Seniles, xiv. 6 (Opera, Basileæ, 1581, p. 938).
See, too, the notes to Arquà (Rogers's Italy: Poems, 1852, ii. 105-109), which record the pilgrimage of other poets, Boccaccio and Alfieri, to the great laureate's tomb; and compare with Byron's stanzas the whole of that exquisite cameo, delicate and yet durable as if graved on chalcedony.]
[me] {353} Society's the school where taught to live.—[MS. M. erased.]
[mf] ——the soul with God must strive.—[MS. M. erased.]
[414] The struggle is to the full as likely to be with demons as with our better thoughts. Satan chose the wilderness for the temptation of our Saviour. And our unsullied John Locke preferred the presence of a child to complete solitude.
["He always chose to have company with him, if it were only a child; for he loved children, and took pleasure in talking with those that had been well trained" (Life of John Locke, by H. R. Fox-Bourne, ii. 537). Lady Masham's daughter Esther, and "his wife" Betty Clarke, aged eleven years, were among his child-friends.]
[mg] {354} Which dies not nor can ever pass away.—[MS. M. erased.]
[mh] The tomb a hell—and life one universal gloom.—[MS. M. erased.]
[415] [Byron passed a single day at Ferrara in April, 1817; went over the castle, cell, etc., and a few days after wrote The Lament of Tasso, the manuscript of which is dated April 20, 1817. The Fourth Canto of Childe Harold was not begun till the end of June in the same year.]
[416] [Of the ancient family of Este, Marquesses of Tuscany, Azzo V. was the first who obtained power in Ferrara in the twelfth century. A remote descendant, Nicolo III. (b. 1384, d. 1441), founded the University of Parma. He married for his second wife Parisina Malatesta (the heroine of Byron's Parisina, published February, 1816), who was beheaded for adultery in 1425. His three sons, Lionel (d. 1450), the friend of Poggio Bracciolini; Borso (d. 1471), who established printing in his states; and Ercolo (d. 1505), the friend of Boiardo,—were all patrons of letters and fosterers of the Renaissance. Their successor, Alphonso I. (1486-1534), who married Lucrezia Borgia, 1502, honoured himself by attaching Ariosto to his court, and it was his grandson, Alphonso II. (d. 1597), who first befriended and afterwards, on the score of lunacy, imprisoned Tasso in the Hospital of Sant' Anna (1579-86).]
[417] {355} [It is a fact that Tasso was an involuntary inmate of the Hospital of Sant' Anna at Ferrara for seven years and four months—from March, 1579, to July, 1586—but the causes, the character, and the place of his imprisonment have been subjects of legend and misrepresentation. It has long been known and acknowledged (see Hobhouse's Historical Illustrations, 1818, pp. 5-31) that a real or feigned passion for Duke Alphonso's sister, Leonora d'Este, was not the cause or occasion of his detention, and that the famous cell or dungeon ("nine paces by six, and about seven high") was not "the original place of the poet's confinement." It was, as Shelley says (see his letter to Peacock, November 7, 1818), "a very decent dungeon;" but it was not Tasso's. The setting of the story was admitted to be legendary, but the story itself, that a poet was shut up in a madhouse because a vindictive magnate resented his love of independence and impatience of courtly servitude, was questioned, only to be reasserted as historical. The publication of Tasso's letters by Guasti, in 1853, a review of Tasso's character and career in Symonds's Renaissance in Italy, and, more recently, Signor Angelo Solerti's monumental work, Vita di Torquato Tasso (1895), which draws largely upon the letters of contemporaries, the accounts of the ducal court, and other documentary evidence, have in a great measure exonerated the duke at the expense of the unhappy poet himself. Briefly, Tasso's intrigues with rival powers—the Medici at Florence, the papal court, and the Holy Office at Bologna—aroused the alarm and suspicion of the duke, whilst his general demeanour and his outbursts of violence and temper compelled, rather than afforded, a pretext for his confinement. Before his final and fatal return to Ferrara, he had been duly warned that he must submit to be treated as a person of disordered intellect, and that if he continued to throw out hints of designs upon his life and of persecution in high places, he would be banished from the ducal court and dominions. But return he would, and at an inauspicious moment, when the duke was preoccupied with the ceremonies and festivities of a third marriage. No one attended to him or took heed of his arrival; and, to quote his own words, "in a fit of madness" he broke out into execrations of the ducal court and family, and of the people of Ferrara. For the offence he was shut up in the Hospital of Sant' Anna, and for many months treated as an ordinary lunatic. Of the particulars of his treatment during these first eight months of his confinement, apart from Tasso's own letters, there is no evidence. The accounts of the hospital are lost, and the Libri di spesa (R. Arch. di Stato in Modena; Camer. Ducale: Casa; Amministrazione, Solerti, iii. Docu. 47) do not commence till November 20, 1579. Two years later, the Libri di spenderia (Solerti, in. Docu. 51), from January, 1582, onward, show that he was put on a more generous diet; and it is known that a certain measure of liberty and other indulgences were gradually accorded. There can, however, be little doubt that for many months his food was neglected and medical attendance withheld. His statement, that he was denied the rites of the Church, cannot be gainsaid. He was regarded as a lunatic, and, as such, he would not be permitted either to make his confession or to communicate. Worse than all, there was the terrible solitude. "E sovra tutto," he writes (May, 1580), "m'affligge la solitudine, mia crudele e natural nimica." No wonder the attacks of delirium, the "unwonted lights," the conference with a familiar spirit, followed in due course. Byron and Shelley were ignorant of the facts; and we know that their scorn and indignation were exaggerated and misplaced. But the "pity of it" remains, that the grace and glory of his age was sacrificed to ignorance and fear, if not to animosity and revenge. (See Tasso, by E. J. Hasell; History of the Italian Renaissance, by J. A. Symonds; Quart. Rev., October, 1895, No. 364, art. x.; Vita di Torquato Tasso, 1895, i. 312-314, 410-412, etc.)]
[mi] {357} And thou for no one useful purpose born.—[MS. M. erased.]
[418] [Solerti (Vita, i. 418) combats the theory advanced by Hobhouse (see note x.), that Lionardo Salviati, in order to curry favour with Alphonso, was responsible for "the opposition which the Jerusalem encountered from the Cruscan Academy." He assigns their unfavourable criticism to literary sentiment or prejudice, and not to personal animosity or intrigue. The Gerusalemme Liberata was dedicated to the glory of the house of Este; and, though the poet was in disgrace, the duke was not to be propitiated by an attack upon the poem. Moreover, Salviati did not publish his theses in his own name, but under a nom de guerre, "L'Infarinato."]
[mj] {358} And baffled Gaul whose rancour could allow.—[MS. M. erased.]
[mk] Which grates upon the teeth——.—[MS. M. erased.]
"Tous les jours, à la cour, un sot de qualité
Peut juger de travers avec impunité,
A Malherbe, à Racan, préfère Théophile,
Et le clinquant du Tasse à tout l'or de Virgile."
Perhaps he divined that the phrase, "un sot de qualité," might glance back on a "noble author," who was about to admit that he could not savour Horace, and who turned aside from Mantua and memories of Virgil to visit Ferrara and the "cell" where Tasso was "encaged." (See Darmesteter's Notes to Childe Harold, pp. 201, 217.)
If "the Youth with brow serene," as Hugo calls him, had lived to read Dédain. A Lord Byron, en 1811, he would have passed a somewhat different criticism on French poetry in general—
"En vain vos légions l'environnent sans nombre,
Il n'a qu'à se lever pour couvrir de son ombre
A la fois tous vos fronts;
Il n'a qu'à dire un mot pour couvrir vos voix grèles,
Comme un char en passant couvre le bruit des ailes
De mille moucherons!"
Les Feuilles d'Automne, par Victor Hugo, Bruxelles, 1833, pp. 59, 63.]
[ml] {359} Could mount into a mind like thine——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[mm] ——they would not form the Sun.—[MS. M.]
[420] [In a letter to Murray (August 7, 1817) Byron throws out a hint that Scott might not like being called "the Ariosto of the North," and Murray seems to have caught at the suggestion. "With regard to 'the Ariosto of the North,'" rejoins Byron (September 17, 1817), "surely their themes, Chivalry, war, and love, were as like as can be; and as to the compliment, if you knew what the Italians think of Ariosto, you would not hesitate about that.... If you think Scott will dislike it, say so, and I will expunge." Byron did not know that when Scott was at college at Edinburgh he had "had the audacity to produce a composition in which he weighed Homer against Ariosto, and pronounced him wanting in the balance," or that he "made a practice of reading through ... the Orlando of Ariosto once every year" (see Memoirs of the Life, etc., 1871, pp. 12, 747); but the parallel had suggested itself. The key-note of "the harpings of the north," the chivalrous strain of "shield, lance, and brand, and plume and scarf," of "gentle courtesy," of "valour, lion-mettled lord," which the "Introduction to Marmion" preludes, had been already struck in the opening lines of the Orlando Furioso—
"Le Donne, i Cavaliér', l'arme, gli amori,
Le cortesíe, l'audaci imprese io canto."
Scott, we may be assured, was neither disconcerted nor uplifted by the parallel. Many years before (July 6, 1812), Byron had been at pains to inform him that so august a critic as the Prince Regent "preferred you to every bard past and present," and "spoke alternately of Homer and yourself." Of the "placing" and unplacing of poets there is no end. Byron had already been sharply rebuked by the Edinburgh Review for describing Christabel as a "wild and singularly original and beautiful poem," and his appreciation of Scott provoked the expostulation of a friendlier critic. "Walter Scott," wrote Francis Hodgson, in his anonymous Monitor of Childe Harold (1818), "(credite posteri, or rather præposteri), is designated in the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold as 'the Northern Ariosto,' and (droller still) Ariosto is denominated 'the Southern Scott.' This comes of mistaking horse-chestnuts for chestnut horses."]
[421] {361} The two stanzas xlii. and xliii. are, with the exception of a line or two, a translation of the famous sonnet of Filicaja:—"Italia, Italia, O tu, cui feo la sorte!"—Poesie Toscane 1823, p. 149.
["Italia, Italia, o tu cui feo la sorte
Dono infelice di bellezza, ond'hai
Funesta dote d'infiniti guai
Che in fronte scritti per gran doglia porte:
Deh fossi tu men bella, o almen più forte,
Onde assai più ti paventasse, o assai
T'amasse men, chi del tuo bello ai rai
Par che si strugga, e pur ti sfida a morte,
Chè or giù dall' Alpi non vedrei torrenti
Scender d'armati, nè di sangue tinta
Bever l'onda del Po gallici armenti;
Nè te vedrei, del non tuo ferro cinta,
Pugnar col braccio di straniere genti,
Per servir sempre, o vincitrice, o vinta."]
And on thy brow in characters of flame
To write the words of sorrow and of shame.—[MS. M. erased.]
——unbetrayed
To death by thy vain charms——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[422] {362} The celebrated letter of Servius Sulpicius to Cicero, on the death of his daughter, describes as it then was, and now is, a path which I often traced in Greece, both by sea and land, in different journeys and voyages. "On my return from Asia, as I was sailing from Ægina towards Megara, I began to contemplate the prospect of the countries around me: Ægina was behind, Megara before me; Piræus on the right, Corinth on the left: all which towns, once famous and flourishing, now lie overturned and buried in their ruins. Upon this sight, I could not but think presently within myself, Alas! how do we poor mortals fret and vex ourselves if any of our friends happen to die or be killed, whose life is yet so short, when the carcasses of so many noble cities lie here exposed before me in one view."—See Middleton's Cicero, 1823, ii. 144.
[The letter is to be found in Cicero's Epist. ad Familiares, iv. 5. Byron, on his return from Constantinople on July 14, 1810, left Hobhouse at the Island of Zea, and made his own way to Athens. As the vessel sailed up the Saronic Gulf, he would observe the "prospect" which Sulpicius describes.]
[mp] {363} These carcases of cities——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[423] ["By the events of the years 1813 and 1814, the house of Austria gained possession of all that belonged to her in Italy, either before or in consequence of the Peace of Campo Formio (October 17, 1797). A small portion of Ferrara, to the north of the Po (which had formed part of the Papal dominions), was ceded to her, as were the Valteline, Bormio, Chiavenna, and the ancient republic of Ragusa. The emperor constituted all these possessions into a separate and particular state, under the title of the kingdom of Venetian Lombardy."—Koch's History of Europe, p. 234.]
[424] {364} It is Poggio, who, looking from the Capitoline hill upon ruined Rome, breaks forth into the exclamation, "Ut nunc omni decore nudata, prostrata jaceat, instar Gigantei cadaveris corrupti atque undique exesi."
[See De Fortunæ Varietate, ap. Nov. Thes. Ant. Rom., ap. Sallengre, i. 502.]
[425] [Compare Milton, Sonnet xxii.—
" ... my noble task,
Of which all Europe talks from side to side."]
[mq] {365}
Where Luxury might willingly be born.
And buried Learning looks forth into fresher morn,—[MS. M. erased.]
[426] [The wealth which permitted the Florentine nobility to indulge their taste for modern, that is, refined luxury was derived from success in trade. For example, Giovanni de' Medici (1360-1428), the father of Cosmo and great-grand-father of Lorenzo de' Medici, was a banker and Levantine merchant. As for the Renaissance, to say nothing of Petrarch of Florentine parentage, two of the greatest Italian scholars and humanists—Ficino, born A.D. 1430, and Poliziano, born 1454—were Florentines; and Poggio was born A.D. 1380, at Terra Nuova on Florentine soil.]
[mr] There, too, the Goddess breathes in stone and fills.—[MS. M.]
[427] [The statue of Venus de' Medici, which stands in the Tribune of the Uffizzi Gallery at Florence, is said to be a late Greek (first or second century B.C.) copy of an early reproduction, of the Cnidian Aphrodite, the work, perhaps, of one of his sons, Kephisodotos or Timarchos. (See Histoire de la Sculpture Grecque, par Maxime Collignon, Paris, 1897, ii. 641.) In a Catalogue Raissonné of La Galerie de Florence, 1804, in the editor's possession, which opens with an eloquent tribute to the enlightenment of the Medici, la fameuse Vénus is conspicuous by her absence. She had been deported to Paris by Napoleon, but when Lord Byron spent a day in Florence in April, 1817, and returned "drunk with Beauty" from the two galleries, the lovely lady, thanks to the much-abused "Powers," was once more in her proper shrine.]
——and we draw
As from a fountain of immortal hills.—[MS. M. erased.]
[428] {366} [Byron's contempt for connoisseurs and dilettanti finds expression in English Bards, etc., lines 1027-1032, and, again, in The Curse of Minerva, lines 183, 184. The "stolen copy" of The Curse was published in the New Monthly Magazine (Poetical Works, 1898, i. 453) under the title of The Malediction of Minerva; or, The Athenian Marble-Market, a title (see line 7) which must have been invented by and not for Byron. He returns to the charge in Don Juan, Canto 11. stanza cxviii. lines 5-9—
" ... a statuary,
(A race of mere impostors, when all's done—
I've seen much finer women ripe and real,
Than all the nonsense of their stone ideal)."
Even while confessing the presence and power of "triumphal Art" in sculpture, one of "the two most artificial of the Arts" (see his letter to Murray, April 26, 1817), then first revealed to him at Florence, he took care that his enthusiasm should not be misunderstood. He had made bitter fun of the art-talk of collectors, and he was unrepentant, and, moreover, he was "not careful" to incur a charge of indifference to the fine arts in general. Among the "crowd" which found their place in his complex personality, there was "the barbarian," and there was "the philistine," and there was, too, the humourist who took a subtle pleasure in proclaiming himself "a plain man," puzzled by subtleties, and unable to catch the drift of spirits finer than his own.]
[429] {367}
Ὀφθαλμοὺς ἑστιᾶν
"Atque oculos pascat uterque suos."
Ovid., Amor., lib. ii. [Eleg. 2, line 6].
[Compare, too, Lucretius, lib. i. lines 36-38—
"Atque ita, suspiciens tereti cervice reposta,
Pascit amore avidos, inhians in te, Dea, visus;
Eque tuo pendet resupini spiritus ore;"
and Measure for Measure, act ii. sc. 2, line 179—
"And feast upon her eyes."]
[mt] {368} Glowing and all-diffused——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[430] [As the immortals, for love's sake, divest themselves of their godhead, so do mortals, in the ecstasy of passion, recognize in the object of their love the incarnate presence of deity. Love, like music, can raise a "mortal to the skies" and "bring an angel down." In this stanza there is, perhaps, an intentional obscurity in the confusion of ideas, which are "thrown out" for the reader to shape for himself as he will or can.]
[mu] ——and our Fate——[MS. M.]
[431] {369} ["The church of Santa Croce contains much illustrious nothing. The tombs of Macchiavelli, Michael Angelo, Galileo Galilei, and Alfieri make it the Westminster Abbey of Italy" (Letter to Murray, April 26, 1817). Michael Angelo, Alfieri, and Macchiavelli are buried in the south aisle of the church; Galileo, who was first buried within the convent, now rests with his favourite pupil, Vincenzo Viviani, in a vault in the south aisle. Canova's monument to Alfieri was erected at the expense of his so-called widow, Louise, born von Stolberg, and (1772-78) consort of Prince Charles Edward.]
[432] [Vittorio Alfieri (1749-1803) is one of numerous real and ideal personages with whom, as he tells us (Life, p. 644), Byron was wont to be compared. Moore perceives and dwells on the resemblance. A passage in Alfieri's autobiography (La Vie de V. A. écrite par Lui-même, Paris, 1809, p. 17) may have suggested the parallel—
"Voici une esquisse du caractère que je manifestais dans les premières anneés de ma raison naissante. Taciturne et tranquille pour l'ordinaire, mais quelquefois extrêmement pétulant et babillard, presque toujours dans les extrêmes, obstiné et rebelle à la force, fort soumis aux avis qu'on me donnait avec amitié, contenu plutôt par la crainte d'être grondé que par toute autre chose, d'une timidité excessive, et inflexible quand on voulait me prendre à rebours."
The resemblance, as Byron admits, "related merely to our apparent personal dispositions." Both were noble, both were poets, both were "patrician republicans," and both were lovers of pleasure as well as lovers and students of literature; but their works do not provoke comparison. "The quality of 'a narrow elevation' which [Matthew] Arnold finds in Alfieri," is not characteristic of the author of Childe Harold and Don Juan.
Of this stanza, however, Alfieri's fine sonnet to Florence may have been the inspiration. I have Dr. Garnett's permission to cite the following lines of his admirable translation (Italian Literature, 1898, p. 321):—
"Was Angelo born here? and he who wove
Love's charm with sorcery of Tuscan tongue,
Indissolubly blent? and he whose song
Laid bare the world below to world above?
And he who from the lonely valley clove
The azure height and trod the stars among?
And he whose searching mind the monarch's wrong,
Fount of the people's misery did prove?"]
[mv] {370} Might furnish forth a Universe——.—[MS. M.]
And ruin of thy beauty, shall deny
And hath denied, to every other sky
Spirits that soar like thine; from thy decay
{ Still springs some son of the Divinity
Still springs some work of the Divinity—[D.]
And gilds thy ruins with reviving ray—
And what these were of yore—Canova is to-day.—[MS. M.]
[433] [Compare "Lines on the Bust of Helen by Canova," which were sent in a letter to Murray, November 25, 1816—
"In this beloved marble view,
Above the works and thoughts of man,
What nature could, but would not, do,
And Beauty and Canova can."
In Beppo (stanza xlvi.), which was written in October, 1817, there is a further allusion to the genius of Canova.]
[mx] {371} Their great Contemporary——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[434] [Dante died at Ravenna, September 14, 1321, and was buried in the Church of S. Francesco. His remains were afterwards transferred to a mausoleum in the friars' cemetery, on the north side of the church, which was raised to his memory by his friend and patron, Guido da Polenta. The mausoleum was restored more than once, and rebuilt in its present form in 1780, at the cost of Cardinal Luigi Valenti Gonzaga. On the occasion of Dante's sexcentenary, in 1865, it was discovered that at some unknown period the skeleton, with the exception of a few small bones which remained in an urn which formed part of Gonzaga's structure, had been placed for safety in a wooden box, and enclosed in a wall of the old Braccioforte Chapel, which lies outside the church towards the Piazza. "The bones found in the wooden box were placed in the mausoleum with great pomp and exultation, the poet being now considered the symbol of a united Italy. The wooden box itself has been removed to the public library."—Handbook far Northern Italy, p. 539, note.
The house which Byron occupied during his first visit to Ravenna—June 8 to August 9, 1819—is close to the Cappella Braccioforte. In January, 1820, when he wrote the Fourth Canto of Don Juan ("I pass each day where Dante's bones are laid," stanza civ.), he was occupying a suite of apartments in the Palazzo Guiccioli, No. 328 in the Via di Porta Adriana. Compare Rogers's Italy, "Bologna," Poems, ii. 118—
"Ravenna! where from Dante's sacred tomb
He had so oft, as many a verse declares,
Drawn inspiration."]
[435] [The story is told in Livy, lib. xxxviii. cap. 53. "Thenceforth no more was heard of Africanus. He passed his days at Liternum [on the shore of Campania], without thought or regret of Rome. Folk say that when he came to die he gave orders that he should be buried on the spot, and that there, and not at Rome, a monument should be raised over his sepulchre. His country had been ungrateful—no Roman funeral for him." It is said that his sepulchre bore the inscription: "Ingrata patria, cineres meos non habebis." According to another tradition, he was buried with his family at the Porta Capena, by the Cælian Hill.]
[436] [Compare Lucan, Pharsalia, i. I—"Bella per Emathios plusquam civilia campos."]
[437] [Petrarch's Africa brought him on the same day (August 23, 1340) offers of the laurel wreath of poetry from the University of Paris and from the Senate of Rome. He chose in favour of Rome, and was crowned on the Capitol, Easter Day, April 8, 1341. "The poet appeared in a royal mantle ... preceded by twelve noble Roman youths clad in scarlet, and the heralds and trumpeters of the Roman Senate."—Petrarch, by Henry Reeve, p. 92.]
[438] {372} [Tomasini, in the Petrarca Redivivus (pp. 168-172, ed. 1650), assigns the outrage to a party of Venetians who "broke open Petrarch's tomb, in 1630, and took away some of his bones, probably with the object of selling them." Hobhouse, in note ix., says, "that one of the arms was stolen by a Florentine," but does not quote his authority. (See the notes to H. F. Tozer's Childe Harold, p. 302.)]
[439] [Giovanni Boccaccio was born at Paris (or Certaldo) in 1313, passed the greater part of his life at Florence, died and was buried at Certaldo, whence his family are said to have sprung, in 1375. His sepulchre, which stood in the centre of the Church of St. Michael and St. James, known as the Canonica, was removed in 1783, on the plea that a recent edict forbidding burial in churches applied to ancient interments. "The stone that covered the tomb was broken, and thrown aside as useless into the adjoining cloisters" (Handbook for Central Italy, p. 171). "Ignorance," pleads Hobhouse, "may share the crime with bigotry." But it is improbable that the "hyæna bigots," that is, the ecclesiastical authorities, were ignorant that Boccaccio was a bitter satirist of Churchmen, or that "he transferred the functions and histories of Hebrew prophets and prophetesses, and of Christian saints and apostles, nay, the highest mysteries and most awful objects of Christian Faith, to the names and drapery of Greek and Roman mythology."—(Unpublished MS. note of S. T. Coleridge, written in his copy of Boccaccio's Opere, 4 vols. 1723.) They had their revenge on Boccaccio, and Byron has had his revenge on them.]
Boccaccio to his parent earth, bequeathed
The dust derived from thence—doth it not lie
With many a sweet and solemn requiem breathed
O'er him who formed the tongue of Italy
That music in itself whose harmony
Asks for no tune to make it song; No—torn
From earth—and scattered while the silent sky
Hushed its indignant Winds—with quiet scorn
The Hyæna bigots thus forbade a World to mourn.—[D. erased.]
[440] {374} [Compare Beppo, stanza xliv.—
"I love the language, that soft bastard Latin,
Which melts like kisses from a female mouth,
And sounds as if it should be writ on satin,
With syllables which breathe of the sweet South."
Compare, too, the first sentence of a letter which Byron wrote "on a blank leaf of the volume of 'Corinne,'" which Teresa [Guiccioli] left in forgetfulness in a garden in Bologna: "Amor Mio,—How sweet is this word in your Italian language!" (Life of Lord Byron, by Emilio Castelar, P. 145).]
[441] [By "Cæsar's pageant" Byron means the pageant decreed by Tiberius Cæsar. Compare Don Juan, Canto XV. stanza xlix.—
"And this omission, like that of the bust
Of Brutus at the pageant of Tiberius."
At the public funeral of Junia, wife of Cassius and sister of Brutus, A.D. 22, the busts of her husband and brother were not allowed to be carried in the procession, because they had taken part in the assassination of Julius Cæsar. But none the less, "Præfulgebant Brutus et Cassius eo ipso quod effigies eorum non videbantur" (Tacitus, Ann., iii. 76). Their glory was conspicuous in men's minds, because their images were withheld from men's eyes. As Tacitus says elsewhere (iv. 26), "Negatus honor gloriam intendit."]
[mz] {375} Shelter of exiled Empire——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[442] [The inscription on Ricci's monument to Dante, in the Church of Santa Croce—"A majoribus ter frustra decretum" —refers to the vain attempts which Florence had made to recover the remains of her exiled and once-neglected poet.]
[443] ["I also went to the Medici chapel—fine frippery in great slabs of various expensive stones, to commemorate fifty rotten and forgotten carcasses. It is unfinished, and will remain so" (Letter to Murray, April 26, 1817). The bodies of the grand-dukes lie in the crypt of the Cappella dei Principi, or Medicean Chapel, which forms part of the Church of San Lorenzo. The walls of the chapel are encrusted with rich marbles and "stones of price, to garniture the edifice." The monuments to Giuliano and Lorenzo de' Medici, son and grandson of Lorenzo the Magnificent, with Michael Angelo's allegorical figures of Night and Morning, Aurora and Twilight, are in the adjoining Cappella dei Depositi, or Sagrestia Nuova.]
[444] {376} [The Duomo, crowned with Brunelleschi's cupola, and rich in sculpture and stained glass, is, as it were, a symbol of Florence, the shrine of art. Browning, in his inspired vision of St. Peter's at Rome in Christmas Eve, catches Byron's note to sound a loftier strain—
"Is it really on the earth
This miraculous dome of God?"
"It is somewhere mentioned that Michael Angelo, when he set out from Florence to build the dome of St. Peter's, turned his horse round in the road to contemplate that of the cathedral, as it rose in the grey of the morning from among the pines and cypresses of the city, and that he said, after a pause, 'Come te non voglio! Meglio di te non posso.' He never, indeed, spoke of it but with admiration; and, if we may believe tradition, his tomb, by his own desire, was to be so placed in the Santa Croce as that from it might be seen, when the doors of the church stood open, that noble work of Brunelleschi."—Rogers's Italy: Poems, ii. 315, note to p. 133, line 5—"Beautiful Florence."]
[445] {377} [Byron, contrary to traditional use (see Wordsworth's sonnet, "Near the Lake of Thrasymene;" and Rogers's Italy, see note, p. 378), sounds the final vowel in Thrasymēné. The Greek, Latin, and Italian equivalents bear him out; but, most probably, he gave Thrasymene and himself an extra syllable "vel metri vel euphoniæ causâ."]
[na] Where Courage perished in unyielding files.—[MS. M.]
[446] ["Tantusque fuit ardor armorum, adeo intentus pugnæ animus, ut eum motum terræ, qui multarum urbium Italiæ magnas partes, prostravit, avertitque cursu rapidos amnes, marce fluminibus invexit, montes lapsu ingenti proruit, nemo pugnantium senserit" (Livy, xxii. 5). Polybius says nothing about an earthquake; and Ihne (Hist, of Rome, ii. 207-210) is also silent; but Pliny (Hist. Nat., ii. 84) and Coelius Antipater (ap. Cic., De Div., i. 35), who wrote his Annales about a century after the battle of Lake Thrasymenus (B.C. 217), synchronize the earthquake and the battle. Compare, too, Rogers's Italy, "The Pilgrim:" Poems, 1852, ii. 152—
"From the Thrasymene, that now
Slept in the sun, a lake of molten gold,
And from the shore that once, when armies met,
Rocked to and fro unfelt, so terrible
The rage, the slaughter, I had turned away."
Compare, too, Wordsworth's sonnet (No. xii.), "Near the Lake of Thrasymene" (Works, 1888, p. 756)—
"When here with Carthage Rome to conflict came,
An earthquake, mingling with the battle's shock,
Checked not its rage; unfelt the ground did rock,
Sword dropped not, javelin kept its deadly aim,—
Now all is sun-bright peace."]
Fly to the clouds for refuge and withdraw
From their unsteady nests——.—[MS. M.]
[nc] {379} Made fat the earth——.—[MS. M. erased]
[447] No book of travels has omitted to expatiate on the temple of the Clitumnus, between Foligno and Spoleto; and no site, or scenery, even in Italy, is more worthy a description. For an account of the dilapidation of this temple, the reader is referred to Historical Illustrations of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold, p. 35.
[448] [Compare Virgil, Georg., ii. 146—
"Hinc albi, Clitumne, greges et maxuma taurus
Victima, sæpe tuo perfusi flumine sacro."
The waters of certain rivers were supposed to possess the quality of making the cattle which drank from them white. (See Pliny, Hist. Nat., ii. 103; and compare Silius Italicus, Pun., iv. 545, 546—
" ...et patulis Clitumnus in arvis
Candentes gelido perfundit flumine tauros.")
For a charming description of Clitumnus, see Pliny's letter "Romano Suo," Epist., viii. 8: "At the foot of a little hill covered with old and shady cypress trees, gushes out a spring, which bursts out into a number of streamlets, all of different sizes. Having struggled, so to speak, out of its confinement, it opens out into a broad basin, so clear and transparent, that you may count the pebbles and little pieces of money which are thrown into it.... The banks are clothed with an abundance of ash and poplar, which are so distinctly reflected in the clear water that they seem to be growing at the bottom of the river, and can easily be counted.... Near it stands an ancient and venerable temple, in which is a statue of the river-god Clitumnus."—Pliny's Letters, by the Rev. A. Church and the Rev. W. J. Brodribb, 1872, p. 127.]
[449] {380} [The existing temple, now used as a chapel (St. Salvatore), can hardly be Pliny's templum priscum. Hobhouse, in his Historical Illustrations, pp. 37-41, defends the antiquity of the "façade, which consists of a pediment supported by four columns and two Corinthian piers, two of the columns with spiral fluting, the others covered with fish-scaled carvings" (Handbook for Central Italy, p. 289); but in the opinion of modern archæologists the whole of the structure belongs to the fourth or fifth century of the Christian era. It is, of course, possible, indeed probable, that ancient materials were used when the building was reconstructed. Pliny says the "numerous chapels" dedicated to other deities were scattered round the shrine of Clitumnus.]
[nd] Upon a green declivity——.—[MS. M.]
[450] {381} ["On my way back [from Rome], close to the temple by its banks, I got some famous trout out of the river Clitumnus, the prettiest little stream in all poesy."—Letter to Murray, June 4, 1817.]
[ne] There is a course where Lovers' evening tales.—[MS. M. erased.]
[451] [By "disgust," a prosaic word which seems to mar a fine stanza, Byron does not mean "distaste," aversion from the nauseous, but "tastelessness," the inability to enjoy taste. Compare the French "Avoir du dégout pour la vie," "To be out of conceit with life." Byron was "a lover of Nature," but it was seldom that he felt her "healing power," or was able to lose himself in his surroundings. But now, for the moment, he experiences that sudden uplifting of the spirit in the presence of natural beauty which brings back "the splendour in the grass, the glory in the flower!"]
[nf] {382} Making it as an emerald——.—[D.]
[ng] Leaps on from rock to rock—with mighty bound.—[MS. M.]
[452] {383} I saw the Cascata del Marmore of Terni twice, at different periods—once from the summit of the precipice, and again from the valley below. The lower view is far to be preferred, if the traveller has time for one only; but in any point of view, either from above or below, it is worth all the cascades and torrents of Switzerland put together: the Staubach, Reichenbach, Pisse Vache, fall of Arpenaz, etc., are rills in comparative appearance. Of the fall of Schaffhausen I cannot speak, not yet having seen it.
[The Falls of Reichenbach are at Rosenlaui, between Grindelwald and Meiringen; the Salanfe or Pisse-Vache descends into the valley of the Rhone near Martigny; the Nant d'Arpenaz falls into the Arve near Magland, on the road between Cluses and Sallanches.]
[453] Of the time, place, and qualities of this kind of iris, the reader will see a short account, in a note to Manfred.[A] The fall looks so much like "the Hell of waters," that Addison thought the descent alluded to by the gulf in which Alecto[B] plunged into the infernal regions. It is singular enough, that two of the finest cascades in Europe should be artificial—this of the Velino, and the one at Tivoli. The traveller is strongly recommended to trace the Velino, at least as high as the little lake called Pie' di Lup. The Reatine territory was the Italian Tempe (Cicer., Epist. ad Attic., lib. iv. 15), and the ancient naturalists ["In lacu Velino nullo non die apparere arcus"] (Plin., Hist. Nat., lib. ii. cap. lxii.), amongst other beautiful varieties, remarked the daily rainbows of the lake Velinus. A scholar of great name has devoted a treatise to this district alone. See Ald. Manut., De Reatina Urb Agroque, ap. Sallengre, Nov. Thes. Ant. Rom., 1735, tom. i. p.773, sq.
[The "Falls of the Anio," which passed over a wall built by Sixtus V., and plunged into the Grotto of Neptune, were greatly diminished in volume after an inundation which took place in 1826. The New Falls were formed in 1834.]
[[A] Manfred, act ii. sc. 1, note. This Iris is formed by the rays of the sun on the lower part of the Alpine torrents; it is exactly like a rainbow come down to pay a visit, and so close that you may walk into it: this effect lasts till noon.]
[[B] "This is the gulf through which Virgil's Alecto shoots herself into hell; for the very place, the great reputation of it, the fall of waters, the woods that encompass it, with the smoke and noise that arise from it, are all pointed at in the description ...
"'Est locus Italiæ ...
... densis hunc frondibus atrum
Urguet utrimque latus nemoris, medioque fragosus
Dat sonitum saxis et torto vertice torrens.
Hic specus horrendum et sævi spiracula Ditis
Monstrantur, ruptoque ingens Acheronte vorago
Pestiferas aperit fauces.'
Æneid, vii. 563-570.
It was indeed the most proper place in the world for a Fury to make her exit ... and I believe every reader's imagination is pleased when he sees the angry Goddess thus sinking, as it were, in a tempest, and plunging herself into Hell, amidst such a scene of horror and confusion."—Remarks on several Parts of Italy, by Joseph Addison, Esq., 1761, pp. 100. 101.
[nh] {385}
Dares not ascend the summit——
or, Clothes a more rocky summit——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[454] In the greater part of Switzerland, the avalanches are known by the name of lauwine.
[Byron is again at fault with his German. "Lawine" (see Schiller, Wilhelm Tell, act iii. sc. 3) signifies an avalanche, not avalanches. In stanza xii. line 7 a similar mistake occurs. It may seem strange that, for the sake of local colouring, or for metrical purposes, he should substitute a foreign equivalent which required a note, for a fine word already in vogue. But in 1817 "avalanche" itself had not long been naturalized. Fifty years before, the Italian valanca and valanche had found their way into books of travel, but "avalanche" appears first (see N. Eng. Dict., art. "Avalanche") in 1789, in Coxe's Trav. Switz., xxxviii. ii. 3, and in poetry, perhaps, in Wordsworth's Descriptive Sketches, which were written in 1791-2. Like "cañon" and "veldt" in our own day, it might be regarded as on probation. But the fittest has survived, and Byron's unlovely and misbegotten "lauwine" has died a natural death.]
[ni] But I have seen the virgin Jungfrau rear.—[D.]
[455] {386} These stanzas may probably remind the reader of Ensign Northerton's remarks, "D—n Homo," etc.;[A] but the reasons for our dislike are not exactly the same. I wish to express, that we become tired of the task before we can comprehend the beauty; that we learn by rote before we can get by heart; that the freshness is worn away, and the future pleasure and advantage deadened and destroyed, by the didactic anticipation, at an age when we can neither feel nor understand the power of compositions which it requires an acquaintance with life, as well as Latin and Greek, to relish, or to reason upon. For the same reason, we never can be aware of the fulness of some of the finest passages of Shakspeare ("To be or not to be," for instance), from the habit of having them hammered into us at eight years old, as an exercise, not of mind, but of memory: so that when we are old enough to enjoy them, the taste is gone, and the appetite palled. In some parts of the continent, young persons are taught from more common authors, and do not read the best classics till their maturity. I certainly do not speak on this point from any pique or aversion towards the place of my education. I was not a slow, though an idle boy; and I believe no one could, or can be, more attached to Harrow than I have always been, and with reason;—a part of the time passed there was the happiest of my life; and my preceptor, the Rev. Dr. Joseph Drury, was the best and worthiest friend I ever possessed, whose warnings I have remembered but too well, though too late when I have erred,—and whose counsels I have but followed when I have done well or wisely. If ever this imperfect record of my feelings towards him should reach his eyes, let it remind him of one who never thinks of him but with gratitude and veneration—of one who would more gladly boast of having been his pupil, if, by more closely following his injunctions, he could reflect any honour upon his instructor.
[[A] "'Don't pretend to more ignorance than you have, Mr. Northerton; I suppose you have heard of the Greeks and Trojans, though, perhaps, you have never read Pope's Homer.'—'D—n Homer with all my heart,' says Northerton: 'I have the marks of him ... yet. There's Thomas of our regiment always carries a Homo in his pocket.'"—The History of Tom Jones, by H. Fielding, vii. 12.]
[456] [The construction is somewhat involved, but the meaning is obvious. As a schoolboy, the Horatian Muse could not tempt him to take the trouble to construe Horace; and, even now, Soracte brings back unwelcome memories of "confinement's lingering hour," say, "3 quarters of an hour past 3 o'clock in the afternoon, 3rd school" (see Life, p. 28). Moore says that the "interlined translations" on Byron's school-books are "a proof of the narrow extent of his classical attainments." He must soon have made up for lost time, and "conquered for the poet's sake," as numerous poetical translations from the classics, including the episode of Nisus and Euryalus, evidently a labour of love, testify. Nor, too, does the trouble he took and the pride he felt in Hints from Horace correspond with this profession of invincible distaste.]
[nj] {388} My mind to analyse——.—[MS. M.]
[nk] Yet such the inveterate impression——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[nl] ——but what it then abhorred must still abhor.—[MS. M.]
[nm] {389} ——in her tearless woe.—[MS. M.]
[457] [The tomb of the Scipios, by the Porta Latina, was discovered by the brothers Sassi, in May, 1780. It consists of "several chambers excavated in the tufa." One of the larger chambers contained the famous sarcophagus of L. Scipio Barbatus, the great-grandfather of Scipio Africanus, which is now in the Vatican in the Atrio Quadrate. When the sarcophagus was opened, in 1780, the skeleton was found to be entire. The bones were collected and removed by Angelo Quirini to his villa at Padua. The chambers contained numerous inscriptions, which were detached and removed to the Vatican. Hobhouse (Hist. Illust., pp. 169-171) is at pains to point out that the discovery of 1780 confirmed the authenticity of an inscription to Lucius, son of Barbatus Scipio, which had been brought to light in 1615, and rejected by the Roman antiquaries as a forgery. He prints two of the inscriptions (Handbook for Rome, pp. 278, 350, 351, ed. 1899).]
[458] [The sepulchres were rifled, says Hobhouse (ibid., p. 173), "either to procure the necessary relics for churches dedicated to Christian saints or martyrs, or" (a likelier hypothesis) "with the expectation of finding the ornaments ... buried with the dead. The sarcophagi were sometimes transported from their site and emptied for the reception of purer ashes." He instances those of Innocent II. and Clement XII., "which were certainly constructed for heathen tenants."]
[459] {390} [The reference is to the historical inundations of the Tiber, of which a hundred and thirty-two have been recorded from the foundation of the city down to December, 1870, when the river rose to fifty-six feet—thirty feet above its normal level.]
[460] [The Goths besieged and sacked Rome under Alaric, A.D. 410, and Totila, 546. Other barbarian invaders—Genseric, a Vandal, 455; Ricimer, a Sueve, 472; Vitiges, a Dalmatian, 537; Arnulph, a Lombard, 756—may come under the head of "Goth." "The Christian," "from motives of fanaticism"—Theodosius, for instance, in 426; and Stilicho, who burned the Sibylline books—despoiled, mutilated, and pulled down temples. Subsequently, popes, too numerous to mention, laid violent hands on the temples for purposes of repair, construction, and ornamentation of Christian churches. More than once ancient structures were converted into cannon-balls. There were, too, Christian invaders and sackers of Rome: Robert Guiscard (Hofmann calls him Wiscardus), in 1004; Frederic Barbarossa, in 1167; the Connétable de Bourbon, in 1527, may be instanced. "Time and War" speak for themselves. For "Flood," vide supra. As for "Fire," during the years 1082-84 the Emperor Henry IV. burnt "a great part of the Leonine city;" and Guiscard "burnt the town from the Flaminian gate to the Antonine column, and laid waste the Esquiline to the Lateran; thence he set fire to the region from that church to the Coliseum and the Capitol." Of earthquakes Byron says nothing; but there were earthquakes, e.g. in 422 and 1349. Another foe, a destroying angel who "wasteth at noonday," modern improvement, had not yet opened a seventh seal. (See Historical Illustrations, pp. 91-168.)]
[nn] {391} She saw her glories one by one expire.—[MS. M.]
[461] [Compare Macaulay's Lays of Ancient Rome, "Prophecy of Capys," stanza xxx.—
"Blest and thrice blest the Roman
Who sees Rome's brightest day,
Who sees that long victorious pomp
Wind down the Sacred Way,
And through the bellowing Forum,
And round the Suppliant's Grove,
Up to the everlasting gates
Of Capitolian Jove."]
[no] The double night of Ruin——.—[MS. M.]
[462] [The construction is harsh and puzzling. Apparently the subject of "hath wrapt" is the "double night of ages;" the subjects of "wrap," the "night of ages" and the "night of Ignorance;" but, even so, the sentence is ambiguous. Not less amazing is the confusion of metaphors. Rome is a "desert," through which we steer, mounted, presumably, on a camel—the "ship of the desert." Mistaken associations are, as it were, stumbling-blocks; and no sooner have we verified an association, discovered a ruined temple in the exact site which Livy's "pictured page" has assigned to it—a discovery as welcome to the antiquarian as water to the thirsty traveller—than our theory is upset, and we perceive that we have been deluded by a mirage.]
[463] {392} Orosius gives 320 for the number of triumphs [i.e. from Romulus to the double triumph of Vespasian and Titus (Hist., vii. 9)]. He is followed by Panvinius; and Panvinius by Mr. Gibbon and the modern writers.
Alas, for Tully's voice, and Titus' sway
And Virgil's verse; the first and last must be
Her Resurrection——.—[MS. M.]
[464] Certainly, were it not for these two traits in the life of Sylla, alluded to in this stanza, we should regard him as a monster unredeemed by any admirable quality. The atonement of his voluntary resignation of empire may perhaps be accepted by us, as it seems to have satisfied the Romans, who if they had not respected must have destroyed him. There could be no mean, no division of opinion; they must have all thought, like Eucrates, that what had appeared ambition was a love of glory, and that what had been mistaken for pride was a real grandeur of soul.—("Seigneur, vous changez toutes mes idées, de la façon dont je vous vois agir. Je croyois que vous aviez de l'ambition, mais aucun amour pour la gloire; je voyois bien que votre âme étoit haute; mais je ne soupçonnois pas qu'elle fut grande."—Dialogue de Sylla et d'Eucrate.) Considérations ... de la Grandeur des Romains, etc., Paris, 1795, ii. 219. By Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu.
[Stanza lxxxiii. indicates the following events in the life of Sulla. In B.C. 81 he assumed the name of Felix (or, according to Plutarch, Epaphroditus, Plut, Vitæ, 1812, iv. 287), (line 1). Five years before this, B.C. 86, during the consulship of Marius and Cinna, his party had been overthrown, and his regulations annulled; but he declined to return to Italy until he had brought the war against Mithridates to a successful conclusion, B.C. 83 (lines 3-6). In B.C. 81 he was appointed dictator (line 7), and B.C. 79 he resigned his dictatorship and retired into private life (line 9).]
[nq] {394}
——how supine
Into such dust deserted Rome should fade,
or, In self-woven sackcloth Rome should thus be laid.—
[MS. M. erased.]
The Earth beneath her shadow and displayed
Her wings as with the horizon and was hailed,
or, The rushings of his wings and was Almighty hailed.—[MS. M. erased.]
Sylla supreme of Victors—save our own
The ablest of Usurpers—Cromwell—he
Who swept off Senates—while he hewed the Throne
Down to a block—immortal Villain! See
What crimes, etc.—[MS. M.]
[465] On the 3rd of September Cromwell gained the victory of Dunbar [1650]; a year afterwards he obtained "his crowning mercy" of Worcester [1651]; and a few years after [1658], on the same day, which he had ever esteemed the most fortunate for him, died.
[466] {395} [The statue of Pompey in the Sala dell' Udinanza of the Palazzo Spada is no doubt a portrait, and belongs to the close of the Republican period. It cannot, however, with any certainty be identified with the statue in the Curia, at whose base "great Cæsar fell." (See Antike Bildwerke in Rom., F. Matz, F. von Duhn, i. 309.)]
[467] {396} [The bronze "Wolf of the Capitol" in the Palace of the Conservators is unquestionably ancient, belonging to the end of the sixth or beginning of the fifth century B.C., and probably of Græco-Italian workmanship. The twins, as Winckelmann pointed out (see Hobhouse's note), are modern, and were added under the impression that this was the actual bronze described by Cicero, Cat., iii. 8, and Virgil, Æn., viii. 631. (See Monuments de l'Art Antique, par Olivier Rayet, Paris, 1884, Livraison II, Planche 7.)]
[468] [The Roman "things" whom the world feared, set the fashion of shedding their blood in the pursuit of glory. The nations, of modern Europe, "bastard" Romans, have followed their example.]
[469] {397} [Compare The Age of Bronze, v.—"The king of kings, and yet of slaves the slave."]
[470] [In Comparison of the Present State of France with that of Rome, etc., published in the Morning Post, September 21, 1802, Coleridge speaks of Buonaparte as the "new Cæsar," but qualifies the expression in a note: "But if reserve, if darkness, if the employment of spies and informers, if an indifference to all religions, except as instruments of state policy, with a certain strange and dark superstition respecting fate, a blind confidence in his destinies,—if these be any part of the Chief Consul's character, they would force upon us, even against our will, the name and history of Tiberius."—Essays on His Own Times, ii. 481.]
[471] [According to Suetonius, i. 37, the famous words, Veni Vidi, Vici, were blazoned on litters in the triumphal procession which celebrated Cæsar's victory over Pharnaces II., after the battle of Zela (B.C. 47).]
[472] {398} [By "flee" in the "Gallic van," Byron means "fly towards, not away from, the foe." He was, perhaps, thinking of the Biblical phrases, "flee like a bird" (Ps. xi. 1), and "flee upon horses" (Isa. xxx. 16); but he was not careful to "tame down" words to his own use and purpose.]
[nt] Of pettier passions which raged angrily.—[MS. M. erased.]
[nu] At what? can he reply? his lusting is unnamed.—[MS. M. erased.]
[nv] ——How oft—how long, oh God!—[MS. M. erased.]
[473] {399} ——"Omnes poene veteres; qui nihil cognosci, nihil percipi, nihil sciri posse dixerunt; augustos sensus, imbecillos animos, brevia curricula vitar, et (ut Democritus) in profundo veritatem esse demersam; opinionibus et institutis omnia teneri; nihil veritati relinqui: deinceps omnia tenebris circumfusa esse dixerunt."—Academ., lib. I. cap. 12. The eighteen hundred years which have elapsed since Cicero wrote this, have not removed any of the imperfections of humanity: and the complaints of the ancient philosophers may, without injustice or affectation, be transcribed in a poem written yesterday.
[474] [Compare Gray's Elegy, stanza xv.—
"Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear."]
[nw] And thus they sleep in some dull certainty.—[MS. M. erased.]
[475] [Compare As You Like It, act ii. sc. 7, lines 26-28—
"And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe,
And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot;
And thereby hangs a tale."]
[nx] {400}
For such existence is as much to die.—[MS. M. erased.]
or, Bequeathing their trampled natures till they die.—
[MS. M. erased.]
[476] [In his speech On the Continuance of the War with France, which Pitt delivered in the House of Commons, February 17, 1800, he described Napoleon as "the child and champion of Jacobinism." At least the phrase occurs in the report which Coleridge prepared for the Morning Post of February 18, 1800, and it appears in the later edition in the Collection of Pitt's speeches. "It does not occur in the speech as reported by the Times." It is curious that in the jottings which Coleridge, Parliamentary reporter pro hac vice, scrawled in pencil in his note-book, the phrase appears as "the nursling and champion of Jacobinism;" and it is possible that the alternative of the more rhetorical but less forcible "child" was the poet's handiwork. It became a current phrase, and Coleridge more than once reverts to it in the articles which he contributed to the Morning Post in 1802. (See Essays on His Own Times, ii. 293, and iii. 1009-1019; and Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, 1895, i. 327, note.)]
[ny] {401} Deep in the lone Savannah——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[nz] Too long hath Earth been drunk with blood and crime.—[MS. M. erased.]
Her span of freedom hath but fatal been
To that of any coming age or clime.—[MS. M.]
[477] {402} [By the "base pageant" Byron refers to the Congress of Vienna (September, 1815); the "Holy Alliance" (September 26), into which the Duke of Wellington would not enter; and the Second Treaty of Paris, November 20, 1815.]
[478] [Compare Shelley's Hellas: Poems, 1895, ii. 358—
"O Slavery! thou frost of the world's prime,
Killing its flowers, and leaving its thorns bare!"]
[479] [Shelley chose the first two lines of this stanza as the motto for his Ode to Liberty.]
[480] Alluding to the tomb of Cecilia Metella, called Capo di Bove. [Four words, and two initials, compose the whole of the transcription which, whatever was its ancient position, is now placed in front of this towering sepulchre: "Cæciliæ. Q. Cretici. F. Metellæ. Crassi."
"The Savelli family were in possession of the fortress in 1312, and the German army of Henry VII. marched from Rome, attacked, took, and burnt it, but were unable to make themselves, by force, masters of the citadel—that is, the tomb." The "fence of stone" refers to the quadrangular basement of concrete, on which the circular tower rests. The tower was originally coated with marble, which was stripped off for the purpose of making lime. The work of destruction is said to have been carried out during the interval between Poggio's (see his De Fort. Var., ap. Sall., Nov. Thes. Ant. Rom., 1735, i. 501, sq.) first and second visits to Rome. (See Hobhouse's Hist. Illust., pp. 202, 203; Handbook for Rome, p. 360.)]
[ob] {403} So massily begirt—what lay?——.—[MS. M.]
[oc] {404} Love from her duties—still a conqueress in the war.—[MS. M. erased.]
Ον οἱ θεοὶ φιλοῦσιν ἀποθνήσκει νέος
Τὸ γὰρ θανεῖν οὐχ αἰσχρὸν, ἀλλ' αἰσχρῶς θανεῖν.
Gnomici Poetæ Græci, R. F. P. Brunck, 1784, p. 231.
[482] {405} ["It is more likely to have been the pride than the love of Crassus which raised so superb a memorial to a wife whose name is not mentioned in history, unless she be supposed to be that lady whose intimacy with Dolabella was so offensive to Tullia, the daughter of Cicero, or she who was divorced by Lentulus Spinther, or she, perhaps the same person, from whose ear the son of Æsopus transferred a precious jewel to enrich his daughter (vide Hor., Sat., ii. 3. 239)" (Hist. Illust., p. 200). The wealth of Crassus was proverbial, as his agnomen, Dives, testifies (Plut., Crassus, ii., iii., Lipsiæ, 1813, v. 156, sq.).]
[od] {406}
Till I had called forth even from the mind.—[MS. M. erased.]
——with heated mind.—[MS. M.]
[oe] I have no home——.—[MS. M.]
[483] {407} [Compare Rogers's Italy: "Rome" (Poems, 1852), ii. 169—
"Or climb the Palatine,
Long while the seat of Rome, hereafter found
Less than enough (so monstrous was the brood
Engendered there, so Titan-like) to lodge
One in his madness; and inscribe my name—
My name and date, on some broad aloe-leaf
That shoots and spreads within those very walls
Where Virgil read aloud his tale divine,
When his voice faltered and a mother wept
Tears of delight!"[*]
And compare Shelley's Poetical Works, 1895, iii. 276—
"Rome has fallen; ye see it lying
Heaped in undistinguished ruin:
Nature is alone undying."]
[*] [At the words Tu Marcellus eris, etc. (vide Tib. Cl. Donatus, Life of Virgil (Virg., Opera), Leeuwarden, 1627, vol. i.).]
——wherein have creeped
The Reptiles which.——
or, Scorpion and blindworm——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[484] The Palatine is one mass of ruins, particularly on the side towards the Circus Maximus. The very soil is formed of crumbled brickwork. Nothing has been told—nothing can be told—to satisfy the belief of any but the Roman antiquary. [The Palatine was the site of the successive "Domus" of Augustus, Tiberius, and Caligula, and of the Domus Transitoria of Nero, which perished when Rome was burnt. Later emperors—Vespasian, Domitian, Septimius Severus—added to the splendour of the name-giving Palatine. "The troops of Genseric," says Hobhouse (Hist. Illust., p. 206), "occupied the Palatine, and despoiled it of all its riches... and when it again rises, it rises in ruins." Systematic excavations during the last fifty years have laid bare much that was hidden, and "learning and research" have in parts revealed the "obliterated plan;" but, in 1817, the "shapeless mass of ruins" defied the guesses of antiquarians. "Your walks in the Palatine ruins ... will be undisturbed, unless you startle a fox in breaking through the brambles in the corridors, or burst unawares through the hole of some shivered fragments into one of the half-buried chambers, which the peasants have blocked up to serve as stalls for their jackasses, or as huts for those who watch the gardens" (Hist. Illust., p. 212).]
[485] {408} The author of the Life of Cicero, speaking of the opinion entertained of Britain by that orator and his contemporary Romans, has the following eloquent passage:—"From their railleries of this kind, on the barbarity and misery of our island, one cannot help reflecting on the surprising fate and revolutions of kingdoms; how Rome, once the mistress of the world, the seat of arts, empire, and glory, now lies sunk in sloth, ignorance, and poverty; enslaved to the most cruel as well as to the most contemptible of tyrants, superstition and religious imposture; while this remote country, anciently the jest and contempt of the polite Romans, is become the happy seat of liberty, plenty, and letters; flourishing in all the arts and refinements of civil life; yet running, perhaps, the same course which Rome itself had run before it, from virtuous industry to wealth; from wealth to luxury; from luxury to an impatience of discipline and corruption of morals: till, by a total degeneracy and loss of virtue, being grown ripe for destruction, it fall a prey at last to some hardy oppressor, and, with the loss of liberty, losing everything that is valuable, sinks gradually again into its original barbarism." (See Life of M. Tullius Cicero, by Conyers Middleton, D.D., 1823, sect. vi. vol. i. pp. 399, 400.)
[og] {409} Oh, ho, ho, ho—thou creature of a Man.—[MS. M. erased.]
And show of Glory's gewgaws in the van
And the Sun's rays with flames more dazzling filled.—[MS. M.]
[486] [The "golden roofs" were those of Nero's Domus Aurea, which extended from the north-west corner of the Palatine to the Gardens of Mæcenas, on the Esquiline, spreading over the sites of the Temple of Vesta and Rome on the platform of the Velia, the Colosseum, and the Thermæ of Titus, as far as the Sette Sale. "In the fore court was the colossal statue of Nero. The pillars of the colonnade, which measured a thousand feet in length, stood three deep. All that was not lake, or wood, or vineyard, or pasture, was overlaid with plates of gold, picked out with gems and mother-of-pearl" (Suetonius, vi. 31; Tacitus, Ann., xv. 42). Substructions of the Domus Aurea have been discovered on the site of the Baths of Titus and elsewhere, but not on the Palatine itself. Martial, Epig. 695 (Lib. Spect., ii.), celebrates Vespasian's restitution of the Domus Aurea and its "policies" to the people of Rome.
"Hic ubi sidereus propius videt astra colossus
Et crescunt media pegmata celsa via,
Invidiosa feri radiabant atria regis
Unaque jam tola stabat in urbe domus."
"Here where the Sun-god greets the Morning Star,
And tow'ring scaffolds block the public way,
Fell Nero's loathed pavilion flashed afar,
Erect and splendid 'mid the town's decay."]
[487] {410} [By the "nameless" column Byron means the column of Phocas, in the Forum. But, as he may have known, it had ceased to be nameless when he visited Rome in 1817. During some excavations which were carried out under the auspices of the Duchess of Devonshire, in 1813, the soil which concealed the base was removed, and an inscription, which attributes the erection of the column to the Exarch Smaragdus, in honour of the Emperor Phocas, A.D. 608, was brought to light. The column was originally surmounted by a gilded statue, but it is probable that both column and statue were stolen from earlier structures and rededicated to Phocas. Hobhouse (Hist. Illust., pp. 240-242) records the discovery, and prints the inscription in extenso.]
[oi] ——all he doth deface.—[MS. M.]
[488] The column of Trajan is surmounted by St. Peter; that of Aurelius by St. Paul. (See Hist. Illust., p. 214.)
[The column was excavated by Paul III. in the sixteenth century. In 1588 Sixtus V. replaced the bronze statue of Trajan holding a gilded globe, which had originally surmounted the column, by a statue of St. Peter, in gilt bronze. The legend was that Trajan's ashes were contained in the globe. They are said to have been deposited by Hadrian in a golden urn in a vault under the column. It is certain that when Sixtus V. opened the chamber he found it empty. A medal was cast in honour of the erection of the new statue, inscribed with the words of the Magnificat, "Exaltavit humiles."]
[489] {411} Trajan was proverbially the best of the Roman princes; and it would be easier to find a sovereign uniting exactly the opposite characteristics, than one possessed of all the happy qualities ascribed to this emperor. "When he mounted the throne," says the historian Dion, "he was strong in body, he was vigorous in mind; age had impaired none of his faculties; he was altogether free from envy and from detraction; he honoured all the good, and he advanced them: and on this account they could not be the objects of his fear, or of his hate; he never listened to informers; he gave not way to his anger; he abstained equally from unfair exactions and unjust punishments; he had rather be loved as a man than honoured as a sovereign; he was affable with his people, respectful to the senate, and universally beloved by both; he inspired none with dread but the enemies of his country." (See Eutrop., Hist. Rom. Brev. lib. viii. cap. v.; Dion, Hist. Rom., lib. lxiii. caps, vi., vii.)
[M. Ulpius Trajanus (A.D. 52-117) celebrated a triumph over the Dacians in 103 and 106. It is supposed that the column which stands at the north end of the Forum Trajanum commemorated the Dacian victories. In 115-16 he conquered the Parthians, and added the province of Armenia Minor to the empire. It was not, however, an absolute or a final victory. The little desert stronghold of Atræ, or Hatra, in Mesopotamia, remained uncaptured; and, instead of incorporating the Parthians in the empire, he thought it wiser to leave them to be governed by a native prince under the suzerainty of Rome. His conquests were surrendered by Hadrian, and henceforth the tide of victory began to ebb. He died on his way back to Rome, at Selinus, in Cilicia, in August, 117.
Trajan's "moderation was known unto all men." Pliny, in his Panegyricus (xxii.), describes his first entry into Rome. He might have assumed the state of a monarch or popular hero, but he walked afoot, conspicuous, pre-eminent, a head and shoulders above the crowd—a triumphal entry; but it was imperial arrogance, not civil liberty, over which he triumphed. "You were our king," he says, "and we your subjects; but we obeyed you as the embodiment of our laws." Martial (Epig., x. 72) hails him not as a tyrant, but an emperor—yea, more than an emperor—as the most righteous of lawgivers and senators, who had brought back plain Truth to the light of day; and Claudian (viii. 318) maintains that his glory will live, not because the Parthians had been annexed, but because he was "mitis patriæ." The divine honours which he caused to be paid to his adopted father, Nerva, he refused for himself. "For just reasons," says Pliny, "did the Senate and people of Rome assign thee the name and title of Optimus." Another honour awaited him: "Il est seul Empereur," writes M. De La Berge, "dont les restes aient reposé dans l'enceinte de la ville Eternelle." (See Pliny's Panegyricus, passim; and Essai sur le règne de Trajan, Bibliothèque de L'Ecole des Hautes Études, Paris, 1877.)]
[490] {412} [The archæologists of Byron's day were unable to fix the exact site of the temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the Capitoline. "On which side," asks Hobhouse (Hist. Illust., p. 224), "stood the citadel, on what the great temple of the Capitol; and did the temple stand in the citadel?" Excavations which were carried on in 1876-7 by Professors Jordan and Lanciani enabled them to identify with "tolerable certainty" the site of the central temple and its adjacent wings, with the site of the Palazzo Caffarelli and its dependencies which occupy the south-east section of the Mons Capitolinus. There are still, however, rival Tarpeian Rocks—one (in the Vicolo della Rupe Tarpea) on the western edge of the hill facing the Tiber, and the other (near the Casa Tarpea) on the south-east towards the Palatine. But if Dionysius, who describes the "Traitor's Leap" as being in sight of the Forum, is to be credited, the "actual precipice" from which traitors (and other criminals, e.g. "bearers of false witness") were thrown must have been somewhere on the southern and now less precipitous escarpment of the mount.]
[oj] {413} The State Leucadia——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[491] [M. Manlius, who saved the Capitol from the Gauls in B.C. 390, was afterwards (B.C. 384) arraigned on a charge of high treason by the patricians, condemned, and by order of the tribunes thrown down the Tarpeian Rock. Livy (vi. 20) credits him with a "foeda cupiditas regni"—a "depraved ambition for assuming the kingly power."]
There first did Tully's burning accents glow?
Yes—eloquently still—the echoes tell me so.—[D.]
[492] [Compare Gray's Odes, "The Progress of Poesy," iii. 3, line 4—"Thoughts that breathe, and words that burn."]
[493] {414} [Nicolas Gabrino di' Rienzo, or Rienzi, commonly called Cola di' Rienzi, was born in 1313. The son of a Roman innkeeper, he owed his name and fame to his own talents and natural gifts. His mission, or, perhaps, ambition, was to free Rome from the tyranny and oppression of the great nobles, and to establish once more "the good estate," that is, a republic. This for a brief period Rienzi accomplished. On May 20, 1347, he was proclaimed tribune and liberator of the Holy Roman Republic "by the authority of the most merciful Lord Jesus Christ." Of great parts, and inspired by lofty aims, he was a poor creature at heart—a "bastard" Napoleon—and success seems to have turned his head. After eight months of royal splendour, purchased by more than royal exactions, the tide of popular feeling turned against him, and he was forced to take refuge in the Castle of St. Angelo (December 15, 1347). Years of wandering and captivity followed his first tribunate; but at length, in 1354, he was permitted to return to Rome, and, once again, after a rapid and successful reduction of the neighbouring states, he became the chief power in the state. But an act of violence, accompanied by treachery, and, above all, the necessity of imposing heavier taxes than the city could bear, roused popular discontent; and during a revolt (October 8, 1354), after a dastardly attempt to escape and conceal himself, he was recognized by the crowd and stabbed to death.
Petrarch first made his acquaintance in 1340, when he was summoned to Rome to be crowned as poet laureate. Afterwards, when Rienzi was imprisoned at Avignon, Petrarch interceded on his behalf with the pope, but, for a time, in vain. He believed in and shared his enthusiasms; and it is probable that the famous Canzone, "Spirto gentil, che quelle membra reggi," was addressed to the Last of the Tribunes.
Rienzi's story forms the subject of a tragedy by Gustave Drouineau, which was played at the Odéon, January 28, 1826; of Bulwer Lytton's novel The Last of the Tribunes, which was published in 1835; and of an opera (1842) by Richard Wagner.
(See Encyc. Met., art. "Rome," by Professor Villari; La Rousse, G. Dict. Univ., art. "Rienzi;" and a curious pamphlet by G. W. Meadley, London, 1821, entitled Two Pairs of Historical Portraits, in which an attempt is made to trace a minute resemblance between the characters and careers of Rienzi and the First Napoleon.)]
[494] {415} [The word "nympholepsy" may be paraphrased as "ecstatic vision." The Greeks feigned that one who had seen a nymph was henceforth possessed by her image, and beside himself with longing for an impossible ideal. Compare stanza cxxii. line 7—"The unreached Paradise of our despair." Compare, too, Kubla Khan, lines 52, 53—
"For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise."]
[ol] The lovely madness of some fond despair.—[MS. M.]
[495] {416} [Byron is describing the so-called Grotto of Egeria, which is situated a little to the left of the Via Appia, about two miles to the south-east of the Porta di Sebastiano: "Here, beside the Almo rivulet [now the Maranna d. Caffarella], is a ruined nymphæum ... which was called the 'Grotto of Egeria,' till ... the discovery of the true site of the Porta Capena fixed that of the grotto within the walls.... It is now known that this nymphæum ... belonged to the suburban villa called Triopio of Herodes Atticus." The actual site of Egeria's fountain is in the grounds of the Villa Mattei, to the south-east of the Cælian, and near the Porta Metronia. "It was buried, in 1867, by the military engineers, while building their new hospital near S. Stefano Rotondo" (Prof. Lanciani).
In lines 5-9 Byron is recalling Juvenal's description of the valley of Egeria, under the mistaken impression that here, and not by "dripping Capena," was the trysting-place of Numa and the goddess. Juvenal has accompanied the seer Umbritius, who was leaving Rome for Capua, as far as the Porta Capena; and while the one waggon, with its slender store of goods, is being loaded, the friends take a stroll—
"In vallem Egeriæ; descendimus et speluncas
Dissimiles veris. Quanto præstantius esset
Numen aquæ, viridi si margine clauderet undas
Herba, nec ingenuum violarent marmora tophum?"
Sat. I. iii. 17-20.
The grove and shrine of the sacred fountain, which had been let to the Jews (lines 13-16), are not to be confounded with the "artificial caverns" near Herod's Nymphæum, which Juvenal thought were in bad taste, and Byron rejoiced to find reclaimed and reclothed by Nature.]
[496] {417} [Compare Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, act iv. (Poetical Works, 1893, ii. 97)—
"As a violet's gentle eye
Gazes on the azure sky
Until its hue grows like what it beholds."]
[497] {418} [Compare Kubla Khan, lines 12, 13—
"But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!"]
[498] [Compare Hamlet, act ii. sc. 1, line 292—"This most excellent canopy the Air."]
Feel the quick throbbing of a human heart
And the sweet sorrows of its deathless dying.—[MS. M. erased.]
or, And the sweet sorrow which exults in dying.—[MS. M. erased.]
[on] {419}
Oh Love! thou art no habitant of Earth
An unseen Seraph we believe in thee
And can point out thy time and place of birth.—[D. erased.]
[499] [M. Darmesteter traces the sentiment to a maxim (No. 76) of La Rochefoucauld: "Il est du véritable amour comme de l'apparition des esprits: tout le monde en parle, mais pen de gens en out vu."]
[500] {420} [Compare Dryden on Shaftesbury (Absalom and Achitophel, pt. i. lines 156-158)—
"A fiery soul which, working out its way,
Fretted the pigmy-body to decay,
And o'er-informed the tenement of clay."]
[501] [The Romans had more than one proverb to this effect; e.g. "Amantes Amentes sunt" (Adagia Veterum, 1643, p. 52); "Amare et sapere vix Deo conceditur" (Syri Sententiæ. 1818, p. 5).]
[oo] {421} For all are visions with a separate name.—[D. erased.]
[502] [Circumstance is personified as halting Nemesis—"Pede poena claudo." Hor., Odes, III. ii. 32.
Perhaps, too, there is the underlying thought of his own lameness, of Mary Chaworth, and of all that might have been, if the "unspiritual God" had willed otherwise.]
[503] {422} [Compare Milton's Samson Agonistes, lines 617-621—
"My griefs not only pain me
As a lingering disease,
But, finding no redress, ferment and rage;
Nor less than wounds immedicable
Rankle."]
[504] "At all events," says the author of the Academical Questions [Sir William Drummond], "I trust, whatever may be the fate of my own speculations, that philosophy will regain that estimation which it ought to possess. The free and philosophic spirit of our nation has been the theme of admiration to the world. This was the proud distinction of Englishmen, and the luminous source of all their glory. Shall we then forget the manly and dignified sentiments of our ancestors, to prate in the language of the mother or the nurse about our good old prejudices? This is not the way to defend the cause of truth. It was not thus that our fathers maintained it in the brilliant periods of our history. Prejudice may be trusted to guard the outworks for a short space of time, while reason slumbers in the citadel; but if the latter sink into a lethargy, the former will quickly erect a standard for herself. Philosophy, wisdom, and liberty support each other: he, who will not reason, is a bigot; he, who cannot, is a fool; and he, who dares not, is a slave."—Vol. i. pp. xiv., xv.
[For Sir William Drummond (1770-1828), see Letters, 1898, ii. 79, note 3. Byron advised Lady Blessington to read Academical Questions (1805), and instanced the last sentence of this passage "as one of the best in our language" (Conversations, pp. 238, 239).]
[505] {423} [Compare Macbeth, act iii. sc. 4, lines 24, 25—
"But now I am cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd, bound in
To saucy doubts and fears."]
[506] [Compare The Deformed Transformed, act i. sc. 2, lines 49, 50—
"Those scarce mortal arches,
Pile above pile of everlasting wall."
The first, second, and third stories of the Flavian amphitheatre or Colosseum were built upon arches. Between the arches, eighty to each story or tier, stood three-quarter columns. "Each tier is of a different order of architecture, the lowest being a plain Roman Doric, or perhaps, rather, Tuscan, the next Ionic, and the third Corinthian." The fourth story, which was built by the Emperor Gordianus III., A.D. 244, to take the place of the original wooden gallery (manianum summum in ligneis), which was destroyed by lightning, A.D. 217, was a solid wall faced with Corinthian pilasters, and pierced by forty square windows or openings. It has been conjectured that the alternate spaces between the pilasters were decorated with ornamental metal shields. The openings of the outer arches of the second and third stories were probably decorated with statues. The reverse of an aureus of the reign of Titus represents the Colosseum with these statues and a quadriga in the centre. About one-third of the original structure remains in situ. The prime agent of destruction was probably the earthquake ("Petrarch's earthquake") of September, 1349, when the whole of the western side fell towards the Cælian, and gave rise to a hill or rather to a chain of hills of loose blocks of travertine and tufa, which supplied Rome with building materials for subsequent centuries. As an instance of wholesale spoliation or appropriation, Professor Lanciani refers to "a document published by Müntz, in the Revue Arch., September, 1876," which "certifies that one contractor alone, in the space of only nine months, in 1452, could carry off 2522 cartloads" of travertine (Smith's Dict. of Gr. and Rom. Ant., art. "Amphitheatrum;" Ruins and Excavations of Ancient Rome, by R. Lanciani, 1897, p. 375).]
[507] {424} [For a description of the Colosseum by moonlight, see Goethe's letter from Rome, February 2, 1787 (Travels in Italy, 1883, p. 159): "Of the beauty of a walk through Rome by moonlight, it is impossible to form a conception ... Peculiarly beautiful at such a time is the Coliseum." See, too, Corinne, ou L'Italie, xv. 4, 1819, iii. 32—
"Ce n'est pas connaítre l'impression du Colisée que de ne l'avoir vu que de jour ... la lune est l'astre des ruines. Quelque fois, à travers les ouvertures de l'amphithéàtre, qui semble s'élever jusqu'aux nues, une partie de la voûte du ciel paraît comme un rideau d'un bleu sombre placé derrière l'édifice."
For a fine description of the Colosseum by starlight, see Manfred, act iii. sc. 4, lines 8-13.]
[508] {425} [When Byron visited Rome, and for long afterwards, the ruins of the Colosseum were clad with a multitude of shrubs and wild flowers. Books were written on the "Flora of the Coliseum," which were said to number 420 species. But, says Professor Lanciani, "These materials for a hortus siccus, so dear to the visitors of our ruins, were destroyed by Rosa in 1871, and the ruins scraped and shaven clean, it being feared by him that the action of roots would accelerate the disintegration of the great structure." If Byron had lived to witness these activities, he might have devoted a stanza to the "tender mercies" of this zealous archæologist.]
[509] {426} [The whole of this appeal to Nemesis (stanzas cxxx.-cxxxviii.) must be compared with the "Domestic Poems" of 1816, the Third Canto of Childe Harold (especially stanzas lxix.-lxxv., and cxi.-cxviii.), and with the "Invocation" in the first act of Manfred. It has been argued that Byron inserted these stanzas with the deliberate purpose of diverting sympathy from his wife to himself. The appeal, no doubt, is deliberate, and the plea is followed by an indictment, but the sincerity of the appeal is attested by its inconsistency. Unlike Orestes, who slew his mother to avenge his father, he will not so deal with the "moral Clytemnestra of her lord," requiting murder by murder, but is resolved to leave the balancing of the scale to the omnipotent Time-spirit who rights every wrong and will redress his injuries. But in making answer to his accusers he outruns Nemesis, and himself enacts the part of a "moral" Orestes. It was true that his hopes were "sapped" and "his name blighted," and it was natural, if not heroic, first to persuade himself that his suffering exceeded his fault, that he was more sinned against than sinning, and, so persuaded, to take care that he should not suffer alone. The general purport of plea and indictment is plain enough, but the exact interpretation of his phrases, the appropriation of his dark sayings, belong rather to the biography of the poet than to a commentary on his poems. (For Lady Byron's comment on the "allusions" to herself in Childe Harold, vide ante, p. 288, note 1.)]
[op] {427} Or for my fathers' faults——-.-[MS. M.]
[oq] {428}
'tis not that now
And if my voice break forth—it is not that
I shrink from what is suffered—let him speak
decline upon my
Whohumbler in
What hath beheld me quiver on my brow
seen my mind's convulsion leave it blenched or weak?
Or my internal spirit changed or weak
found my mind convulsed
a
But in this page the record which I seek
will
from out of the deep
stands and of that remorse
Shall stand and when that hour shall come and come
Shall come—though I be ashes—and shall pile heap
It will come and wreak
In fire the measure
The fiery prophecy
The fullness of my
The fullness of my prophecy or heap
The mountain of my curse
Not in the air shall these my words disperse
'Tis written that an hour of deep remorse
Though I be ashes a deep far hour shall wreak
The fullness Thee this
The deep prophetic fullness of my verse
And pile on human heads the mountain of my curse.—[MS. M.]
[or] {429}
If to forgive be "heaping coals of Fire"
As God hath spoken—on the heads of foes
Mine should lie a Volcano-and rise higher
Than o'er the Titans crushed Olympus rose
Than Athos soars, or blazing Ætna glows:
True—they who stung were petty things—but what
Than serpent's sting produce more deadly throes.
The Lion may be tortured by the Gnat—
Who sucks the slumberer's blood—the Eagle? no, the Bat.[A]—
[MS. M.]
[A] [The "Bat" was "a sobriquet by which Lady Caroline Lamb was well known in London society." An Italian translation of her novel, Glenarvon, was at this time in the press at Venice (see letter to Murray, August 7, 1817), and it is probable that Byron, who declined to interdict its publication, took his revenge in a petulant stanza, which, on second thoughts, he decided to omit. (See note by Mr. Richard Edgcumbe, Notes and Queries eighth series, 1895, viii. 101.)]
[510] [Compare "Lines on hearing that Lady Byron was ill," lines 53-55.]
[511] {431} Whether the wonderful statue which suggested this image be a laquearian gladiator, which, in spite of Winckelmann's criticism, has been stoutly maintained; or whether it be a Greek herald, as that great antiquary positively asserted;[A] or whether it is to be thought a Spartan or barbarian shieldbearer, according to the opinion of his Italian editor; it must assuredly seem a copy of that masterpiece of Ctesilaus which represented "a wounded man dying, who perfectly expressed what there remained of life in him." Montfaucon and Maffei thought it the identical statue; but that statue was of bronze. The Gladiator was once in the Villa Ludovisi, and was bought by Clement XII. The right arm is an entire restoration of Michael Angelo.
[There is no doubt that the statue of the "Dying Gladiator" represents a dying Gaul. It is to be compared with the once-named "Arria and Pætus" of the Villa Ludovisi, and with other sculptures in the museums of Venice, Naples, and Rome, representing "Gauls and Amazons lying fatally wounded, or still in the attitude of defending life to the last," which belong to the Pergamene school of the second century B.C. M. Collignon hazards a suggestion that the "Dying Gaul" is the trumpet-sounder of Epigonos, in which, says Pliny (Hist. Nat., xxxiv. 88), the sculptor surpassed all his previous works ("omnia fere prædicta imitatus præcessit in tubicine"); while Dr. H. S. Urlichs (see The Elder Pliny's Chapters on the History of Art, translated by K. Jex-Blake, with Commentary and Historical Illustrations, by E. Sellers, 1896, p. 74, note) falls back on Winckelmann's theory that the "statue ... may have been simply the votive-portrait of the winner in the contest of heralds, such as that of Archias of Hybla in Delphoi." (See, too, Helbig's Guide to the Collection of Public Antiquities in Rome, Engl. transl., 1895. i. 399; History of Greek Sculpture, by A. S. Murray, L.L.D., F.S.A., 1890, ii. 381-383.)]
[A] Either Polyphontes, herald of Laïus, killed by Oedipus; or Kopreas, herald of Eurystheus, killed by the Athenians when he endeavoured to drag the Heraclidæ from the altar of mercy, and in whose honour they instituted annual games, continued to the time of Hadrian; or Anthemocritus, the Athenian herald, killed by the Megarenses, who never recovered the impiety. [See Hist, of Ancient Art, translated by G. H. Lodge, 1881, ii. 207.]
[os] Leaning upon his hand, his mut[e] brow Yielding to death but conquering agony.—[MS. M. erased.]
[ot] {432} From the red gash fall bigly——.—[MS. M.]
[ou] Like the last of a thunder-shower——.—[MS. M.]
[ov] The earth swims round him——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[ow] {433} Slaughtered to make a Roman holiday.—[MS. M. erased.]
[ox] Was death and life——.—[MS. M.]
[oy] My voice is much——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[oz] Yet the colossal skeleton ye pass.—[MS. M. erased.]
[pa] {434} The ivy-forest, which its walls doth wear.—[MS. M. erased.]
[512] Suetonius [Lib. i. cap. xlv.] informs us that Julius Cæsar was particularly gratified by that decree of the senate which enabled him to wear a wreath of laurel on all occasions. He was anxious not to show that he was the conqueror of the world, but to hide that he was bald. A stranger at Rome would hardly have guessed at the motive, nor should we without the help of the historian.
[pb] The Hero race who trod—the imperial dust ye tread.—[MS. M. erased.]
[513] This is quoted in the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, as a proof that the Coliseum was entire, when seen by the Anglo-Saxon pilgrims at the end of the seventh, or the beginning of the eighth, century. A notice on the Coliseum may be seen in the Historical Illustrations, p. 263.
["'Quamdiu stabit Colyseus, stabit et Roma; quando cadet Colyseus, cadet Roma; quando cadet Roma, cadet et mundus.' (Beda in 'Excerptis seu Collectaneis,' apud Ducange, Glossarium ad Scriptores Med., et Infimæ Latinitatis, tom. ii. p. 407, edit. Basil.) This saying must be ascribed to the Anglo-Saxon pilgrims who visited Rome before the year 735, the æra of Bede's death; for I do not believe that our venerable monk ever passed the sea."—Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1855, viii. 281, note.]
[514] {435} "Though plundered of all its brass, except the ring which was necessary to preserve the aperture above; though exposed to repeated fires; though sometimes flooded by the river, and always open to the rain, no monument of equal antiquity is so well preserved as this rotundo. It passed with little alteration from the Pagan into the present worship; and so convenient were its niches for the Christian altar, that Michael Angelo, ever studious of ancient beauty, introduced their design as a model in the Catholic church."—Forsyth's Italy, 1816, p. 137.
[The Pantheon consists of two parts, a porch or pronaos supported by sixteen Corinthian columns, and behind it, but "obviously disjointed from it," a rotunda or round temple, 143 feet high, and 142 feet in diameter. The inscription on the portico (M. AGRIPPA, L. F. Cos. tertium. Fecit.) affirms that the temple was built by Agrippa (M. Vipsanius), B.C. 27.
It has long been suspected that with regard to the existing building the inscription was "historically and artistically misleading;" but it is only since 1892 that it has been known for certain (from the stamp on the bricks in various parts of the building) that the rotunda was built by Hadrian. Difficulties with regard to the relations between the two parts of the Pantheon remain unsolved, but on the following points Professor Lanciani claims to speak with certainty:—
(1) "The present Pantheon, portico included, is not the work of Agrippa, but of Hadrian, and dates from A.D. 120-124.
(2) "The columns, capital, and entablature of the portico, inscribed with Agrippa's name, may be original, and may date from 27-25 B.C., but they were first removed and then put together by Hadrian.
(3) "The original structure of Agrippa was rectangular instead of round, and faced the south instead of the north."—Ruins and Excavations, etc., by R. Lanciani, 1897, p. 483.]
[pc] {436} ——the pride of proudest Rome.—[MS. M. erased.]
[515] {437} The Pantheon has been made a receptacle for the busts of modern great, or, at least, distinguished men. The flood of light which once fell through the large orb above on the whole circle of divinities, now shines on a numerous assemblage of mortals, some one or two of whom have been almost deified by the veneration of their countrymen.
["The busts of Raphael, Hannibal Caracci, Pierrin del Vaga, Zuccari, and others ... are ill assorted with the many modern contemporary heads of ancient worthies which now glare in all the niches of the Rotunda."—Historical Illustrations, p. 293.]
[516] This and the three next stanzas allude to the story of the Roman daughter, which is recalled to the traveller by the site, or pretended site, of that adventure, now shown at the Church of St. Nicholas in Carcere. The difficulties attending the full belief of the tale are stated in Historical Illustrations, p. 295.
[The traditional scene of the "Caritas Romana" is a cell forming part of the substructions of the Church of S. Nicola in Carcere, near the Piazza Montanara. Festus (De Verb. Signif., lib. xiv., A. J. Valpy, 1826, ii. 594), by way of illustrating Pietas, tells the story in a few words: "It is said that Ælius dedicated a temple to Pietas on the very spot where a woman dwelt of yore. Her father was shut up in prison, and she kept him alive by giving him the breast by stealth, and, as a reward for her deed, obtained his forgiveness and freedom." In Pliny (Hist. Nat., vii. 36) and in Valerius Maximus (V. 4) it is not a father, but a mother, whose life is saved by a daughter's piety.]
[pd] {438} Two isolated phantoms——.—[MS. M.]
[pe] With her unkerchiefed neck——.—[MS. M. erased.]
Or even the shrill impatient [cries that brook].
or, Or even the shrill small cry——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[pg] No waiting silence or suspense——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[517] {439} [It was fabled of the Milky Way that when Mercury held up the infant Hercules to Juno's breast, that he might drink in divinity, the goddess pushed him away, and that drops of milk fell into the void, and became a multitude of tiny stars. The story is told by Eratosthenes of Cyrene (B.C. 276), in his Catasterismi (Treatise on Star Legends), No. 44: Opusc. Mythol., Amsterdam, 1688, p. 136.]
To its original fountain but repierce
Thy sire's heart——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[518] The castle of St. Angelo. (See Historical Illustrations.)
[Hadrian's mole or mausoleum, now the Castle of St. Angelo, is situated on the banks of the Tiber, on the site of the "Horti Neronis." "It is composed of a square basement, each side of which measures 247 feet.... A grand circular mole, nearly 1000 feet in circumference, stands on the square basement," and, originally, "supported in its turn a cone of earth covered with evergreens, like the mausoleum of Augustus." A spiral way led to a central chamber in the interior of the mole, which contained, presumably, the porphyry sarcophagus in which Antoninus Pius deposited the ashes of Hadrian, and the tomb of the Antonines. Honorius (A.D. 428) was probably the first to convert the mausoleum into a fortress. The bronze statue of the Destroying Angel, which is placed on the summit, dates from 1740, and is the successor to five earlier statues, of which the first was erected in 1453. The conception and execution of the Moles Hadriana are entirely Roman, and, except in size and solidity, it is in no sense a mimic pyramid.—Ruins and Excavations, etc., by R. Lanciani, 1897, p. 554, sq.]
[pi] {440}
The now spectator with a sanctioned mirth
To view the vast design——.—[MS. M.]
[519] This and the next six stanzas have a reference to the Church of St. Peter's. (For a measurement of the comparative length of this basilica and the other great churches of Europe, see the pavement of St. Peter's, and the Classical Tour through Italy, ii. 125, et seq., chap, iv.)
[pj] Look to the dome——.—[MS. M.]
[520] [Compare The Prophecy of Dante, iv. 49-53—
"While still stands
The austere Pantheon, into heaven shall soar
A dome, its image, while the base expands
Into a fane surpassing all before,
Such as all flesh shall flock to kneel in—"
Compare, too, Browning's Christmas Eve, sect, x.—
"Is it really on the earth,
This miraculous dome of God?
Has the angel's measuring-rod
Which numbered cubits, gem from gem,
'Twixt the gates of the new Jerusalem,
Meted it out,—and what he meted,
Have the sons of men completed?
—Binding ever as he bade,
Columns in the colonnade,
With arms wide open to embrace
The entry of the human race?"]
[pk] {441} Lo Christ's great dome——.—[MS.M.]
[521] [The ruins which Byron and Hobhouse explored, March 25, 1810 (Travels in Albania, ii. 68-71), were not the ruins of the second Temple of Artemis, the sixth wonder of the world (vide Philo Byzantius, De Septem Orbis Miraculis), but, probably, those of "the great gymnasium near the port of the city." In 1810, and for long afterwards, the remains of the temple were buried under twenty feet of earth, and it was not till 1870 that the late Mr. J. T. Wood, the agent of the Trustees of the British Museum, had so far completed his excavations as to discover the foundations of the building on the exact spot which had been pointed out by Guhl in 1843. Fragments of the famous sculptured columns, thirty-six in number, says Pliny (Hist. Nat., xxxvi. 95), were also brought to light, and are now in the British Museum. (See Modern Discoveries on the Site of Ancient Ephesus, by J. T. Wood, 1890; Hist. of Greek Sculpture, by A. S. Murray, ii. 304.)]
[522] [Compare Don Juan, Canto IX. stanza xxvii. line 2—"I have heard them in the Ephesian ruins howl."]
[pl] {442} ——round roofs swell.—[MS. M., D.]
[pm] Their glittering breastplate in the sun——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[523] [Compare Canto II. stanza lxxix. lines 2, 3—
"Oh Stamboul! once the Empress of their reign,
Though turbans now pollute Sophia's shrine."]
[524] [The emphasis is on the word "fit." The measure of "fitness" is the entirety of the enshrinement or embodiment of the mortal aspiration to put on immortality. The vastness and the sacredness of St. Peter's make for and effect this embodiment. So, too, the living temple "so defined," great with the greatness of holiness, may become the enshrinement and the embodiment of the Spirit of God.]
[pn] {443} His earthly palace——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[525] [This stanza may be paraphrased, but not construed. Apparently, the meaning is that as the eye becomes accustomed to the details and proportions of the building, the sense of its vastness increases. Your first impression was at fault, you had not begun to realize the almost inconceivable vastness of the structure. You had begun to climb the mountain, and the dazzling peak seemed to be close at your head, but as you ascend, it recedes. "Thou movest," but the building expands; "thou climbest," but the Alp increases in height. In both cases the eye has been deceived by gigantic elegance, by the proportion of parts to the whole.]
[po] And fair proportions which beguile the eyes.—[MS. M. erased.]
Painting and marble of so many dyes—
And glorious high altar where for ever burn.—[MS. M. erased.]
Its Giant's limbs and by degrees——
or, The Giant eloquence and thus unroll.—[MS. M. erased.]
——our narrow sense
Cannot keep pace with mind——[MS. M. erased.]
[ps] {445} What Earth nor Time—nor former Thought could frame.—[MS. M. erased.]
[pt] Before your eye—and ye return not as ye came.—[MS. M. erased.]
[pu] In that which Genius did, what great Conceptions can.—[MS. M. erased.]
[526] [Pliny tells us (Hist. Nat., xxxvi. 5) that the Laocoon which stood in the palace of Titus was the work of three sculptors, natives of Rhodes; and it is now universally admitted that the statue which was found (January 14, 1516) in the vineyard of Felice de' Freddi, not far from the ruins of the palace, and is now in the Vatican, is the statue which Pliny describes. M. Collignon, in his Histoire de la Sculpture Grecque, gives reasons for assigning the date of the Laocoon to the first years of the first century B.C. It follows that the work is a century later than the frieze of the great altar of Pergamos, which contains the figure of a young giant caught in the toils of Athena's serpent—a theme which served as a model for later sculptors of the same school. In 1817 the Laocoon was in the heyday of its fame, and was regarded as the supreme achievement of ancient art. Since then it has been decried and dethroned. M. Collignon protests against this excessive depreciation, and makes himself the mouthpiece of a second and more temperate reaction: "On peut ... gôuter mediocrement le mélodrame, sans méconnaître pour cela les réelles qualités du groupe. La composition est d'une structure irréprochable, d'une harmonie de lignes qui défie toute critique. Le torse du Laocoon trahit une science du nu pen commune" (Hist. de la Sculp. Grecque, 1897, ii. 550, 551).]
[pv] {446} ——the writhing boys.—[MS. M. erased.]
[pw] Shackles its living rings, and——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[527] [In his description of the Apollo Belvidere, Byron follows the traditional theory of Montorsoli, the pupil of Michael Angelo, who restored the left hand and right forearm of the statue. The god, after his struggle with the python, stands forth proud and disdainful, the left hand holding a bow, and the right hand falling as of one who had just shot an arrow. The discovery, in 1860, of a bronze statuette in the Stroganoff Collection at St. Petersburg, which holds something like an ægis and a mantle in the left hand, suggested to Stephani a second theory, that the Belvidere Apollo was a copy of a statue of Apollo Boëdromios, an ex-voto offering on the rout of the Gauls when they attacked Delphi (B.C. 278). To this theory Furtwaengler at one time assented, but subsequently came to the conclusion that the Stroganoff bronze was a forgery. His present contention is that the left hand held a bow, as Montorsoli imagined, whilst the right grasped "a branch of laurel, of which the leaves are still visible on the trunk which the copyist added to the bronze original." The Apollo Belvidere is, he concludes, a copy of the Apollo Alexicacos of Leochares (fourth century B.C.), which stood in the Cerameicos at Athens. M. Maxime Collignon, who utters a word of warning as to the undue depreciation of the statue by modern critics, adopts Furtwaengler's later theory (Masterpieces of Ancient Greek Sculpture, by A. Furtwaengler, 1895, ii. 405, sq.).]
[528] {447} [The "delicate" beauty of the statue recalled the features of a lady whom he had once thought of making his wife. "The Apollo Belvidere," he wrote to Moore (May 12, 1817), "is the image of Lady Adelaide Forbes. I think I never saw such a likeness."]
[529] [It is probable that lines 1-4 of this stanza contain an allusion to a fact related by M. Pinel, in his work, Sur l'Insanité, which Milman turned to account in his Belvidere Apollo, a Newdigate Prize Poem of 1812—
"Beauteous as vision seen in dreamy sleep
By holy maid on Delphi's haunted steep,
'Mid the dim twilight of the laurel grove,
Too fair to worship, too divine to love.
Yet on that form in wild delirious trance
With more than rev'rence gazed the Maid of France,
Day after day the love-sick dreamer stood
With him alone, nor thought it solitude!
To cherish grief, her last, her dearest care,
Her one fond hope—to perish of despair."
Milman's Poetical Works, Paris, 1829, p. 180.
Compare, too, Coleridge's Kubla Khan, lines 14-16—
"A savage place, as holy and enchanted,
As e'er beneath a wailing moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon-lover."
Poetical Works, 1893, p. 94.]
[px] {448} Before its eyes unveiled to image forth a God!—[MS. M. erased.]
[530] [The fire which Prometheus stole from heaven was the living soul, "the source of all our woe." (Compare Horace, Odes, i. 3. 29-31—
"Post ignem ætheriâ domo
Subductum, Macies et nova Febrium
Terris incubuit cohors.")]
[py] {449} The phantom fades away into the general mass.—[MS. M. erased.]
[531] {450} [Compare Hamlet, act iii. sc. 1, line 76—"Who would these fardels bear?"]
[532] [Charlotte Augusta (b. January 7, 1796), only daughter of the Prince Regent, was married to Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, May 2, 1816, and died in childbirth, November 6, 1817.
Other poets produced their dirges; but it was left to Byron to deal finely, and as a poet should, with a present grief, which was felt to be a national calamity.
Southey's "Funeral Song for the Princess Charlotte of Wales" was only surpassed in feebleness by Coleridge's "Israel's Lament." Campbell composed a laboured elegy, which was "spoken by Mr ... at Drury Lane Theatre, on the First Opening of the House after the Death of the Princess Charlotte, 1817;" and Montgomery wrote a hymn on "The Royal Infant, Still-born, November 5, 1817."
Not a line of these lamentable effusions has survived; but the poor, pitiful story of common misfortune, with its tragic irony, uncommon circumstance, and far-reaching consequence, found its vates sacer in the author of Childe Harold.]
[pz] {451}
Her prayers for thee and in thy coming power
Beheld her Iris—Thou too lonely Lord
And desolate Consort! fatal is thy dower,
The Husband of a year—the Father of an——[? hour].—[D. erased.]
[533] {452} [Compare Canto III. stanza xxxiv. lines 6, 7—
"Like to the apples on the Dead Sea's shore,
All ashes to the taste."]
[534] [Mr. Tozer traces the star simile to Homer (Iliad, viii. 559)— Πάντα δέ τ' εἴδεται ἄστρα, γέγηθε δέ τε φρένα ποιμήν
[535] [Compare Macbeth, act iii. sc. 2, lines 22, 23—
"Duncan is in his grave;
After life's fitful fever he sleeps well."]
[536] [Compare Coriolanus, act iii. sc. 3, lines 121, 122—
"You common cry of curs! whose breath I hate
As reek o' the rotten fens."]
[537] {453} Mary died on the scaffold; Elizabeth, of a broken heart; Charles V., a hermit; Louis XIV., a bankrupt in means and glory; Cromwell, of anxiety; and, "the greatest is behind," Napoleon lives a prisoner. To these sovereigns a long but superfluous list might be added of names equally illustrious and unhappy.
[qa] Which sinks——.—[MS. M.]
[538] [The simile of the "earthquake" was repeated in a letter to Murray, dated December 3, 1817: "The death of the Princess Charlotte has been a shock even here, and must have been an earthquake at home.... The death of this poor Girl is melancholy in every respect, dying at twenty or so, in childbed—of a boy too, a present princess and future queen, and just as she began to be happy, and to enjoy herself, and the hopes which she inspired."]
[539] {454} The village of Nemi was near the Arician retreat of Egeria, and, from the shades which embosomed the temple of Diana, has preserved to this day its distinctive appellation of The Grove. Nemi is but an evening's ride from the comfortable inn of Albano.
[The basin of the Lago di Nemi is the crater of an extinct volcano. Hence the comparison to a coiled snake. Its steel-blue waters are unruffled by the wind which lashes the neighbouring ocean into fury. Hence its likeness to "cherished hate," as contrasted with "generous and active wrath."]
[qb] And calm as speechless hate——.—[MS. M.]
[540] [The spectator is supposed to be looking towards the Mediterranean from the summit of Monte Cavo. Tusculum, where "Tully reposed," lies to the north of the Alban Hills, on the right; but, as Byron points to a spot "beneath thy right," he probably refers to the traditional site of the Villa Ciceronis at Grotta Ferrata, and not to an alternative site at the Villa Ruffinella, between Frascati and the ruins of Tusculum. Horace's Sabine farm, on the bank of Digentia's "ice-cold rivulet," is more than twenty miles to the north-east of the Alban Hills. The mountains to the south and east of Tusculum intercept the view of the valley of the Licenza (Digentia), where the "farm was tilled." Childe Harold had bidden farewell to Horace, once for all, "upon Soracte's ridge," but recalls him to keep company with Virgil and Cicero.]
[qc] {455}
Of girdling mountains circle on the sight
The Sabine farm was tilled, the wearied Bard's delight.—
[MS. M.]
[541] ["Calpe's rock" is Gibraltar (compare Childe Harold, Canto II. stanza xxii. line i). "Last" may be the last time that Byron and Childe Harold saw the Mediterranean together. Byron had last seen it—"the Midland Ocean"—by "Calpe's rock," on his return journey to England in 1811. Or by "last" he may mean the last time that it burst upon his view. He had not seen the Mediterranean on his way from Geneva to Venice, in October-November, 1816, or from Venice to Rome, April—May, 1817; but now from the Alban Mount the "ocean" was full in view.]
[qd] {456} ——much suffering and some tears.—[MS. M.]
[542] ["After the stanza (near the conclusion of Canto 4th) which ends with the line—
"'As if there was no man to trouble what is clear,'
insert the two following stanzas (clxxvii., clxxviii.). Then go on to the stanza beginning, 'Roll on thou,' etc., etc. You will find the place of insertion near the conclusion—just before the address to the Ocean.
"These two stanzas will just make up the number of 500 stanzas to the whole poem.
"Answer when you receive this. I sent back the packets yesterday, and hope they will arrive in safety."—D.]
[543] [His desire is towards no light o' love, but for the support and fellowship of his sister. Compare the opening lines of the Epistle to Augusta—
"My sister! my sweet sister! if a name
Dearer and purer were, it should be thine;
Mountains and seas divide us, but I claim
No tears, but tenderness to answer mine:
Go where I will, to me thou art the same—
A loved regret which I would not resign.
There yet are two things in my destiny,—
A world to roam through and a home with thee.
"The first were nothing—had I still the last,
It were the haven of my happiness."]
[544] {457} [Compare Childe Harold, Canto III. stanza lxxii. lines 8, 9; and Epistle to Augusta, stanza xi.]
[qe] {458} ——unearthed, uncoffined, and unknown.—[MS. M.]
[545] [Compare Ps. cvii. 26, "They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths."]
[qf] And dashest him to earth again: there let him lay!—[D.]
[546] ["Lay" is followed by a plainly marked period in both the MSS. (M. and D.) of the Fourth Canto of Childe Harold. For instances of the same error, compare "The Adieu," stanza 10, line 4, and ["Pignus Amoris"], stanza 3, line 3 (Poetical Works, 1898, i. 232, note, and p. 241). It is to be remarked that Hobhouse, who pencilled a few corrections on the margin of his own MS. copy, makes no comment on this famous solecism. The fact is that Byron wrote as he spoke, with the "careless and negligent ease of a man of quality," and either did not know that "lay" was not an intransitive verb or regarded himself as "super grammaticam."]
[547] {459} [Compare Campbell's Battle of the Baltic (stanza ii. lines 1, 2)—
"Like leviathans afloat,
Lay their bulwarks on the brine."]
[qg] These oaken citadels which made and make.—[MS. M. erased.]
[548] The Gale of wind which succeeded the battle of Trafalgar destroyed the greater part (if not all) of the prizes—nineteen sail of the line—taken on that memorable day. I should be ashamed to specify particulars which should be known to all—did we not know that in France the people were kept in ignorance of the event of this most glorious victory in modern times, and that in England it is the present fashion to talk of Waterloo as though it were entirely an English triumph—and a thing to be named with Blenheim and Agincourt—Trafalgar and Aboukir. Posterity will decide; but if it be remembered as a skilful or as a wonderful action, it will be like the battle of Zama, where we think of Hannibal more than of Scipio. For assuredly we dwell on this action, not because it was gained by Blucher or Wellington, but because it was lost by Buonaparte—a man who, with all his vices and his faults, never yet found an adversary with a tithe of his talents (as far as the expression can apply to a conqueror) or his good intentions, his clemency or his fortitude.
Look at his successors throughout Europe, whose imitation of the worst parts of his policy is only limited by their comparative impotence, and their positive imbecility.—[MS. M.]
[549] {460} ["When Lord Byron wrote this stanza, he had, no doubt, the following passage in Boswell's Johnson floating in his mind.... 'The grand object of all travelling is to see the shores of the Mediterranean. On those shores were the four great empires of the world—the Assyrian, the Persian, the Grecian, and the Roman' (Life of Johnson, 1876, p. 505)."—Note to Childe Harold, Canto IV. stanza clxxxii. ed. 1891.]
[550] [See letter to Murray, September 24, 1818: "What does 'thy waters wasted them' mean (in the Canto)? That is not me. Consult the MS. always." Nevertheless, the misreading appeared in several editions. (For a correspondence on the subject, see Notes and Queries, first series, vol. i. pp. 182, 278, 324, 508; vol. ix. p. 481; vol. x. pp. 314, 434.)]
[qh] Thy waters wasted them while they were free.—[Editions 1818, 1819, 1823, and Galignani, 1825.]
[qi] Unchangeable save calm thy tempests ply.—[MS. M., D.]
[qj] {461}
The image of Eternity and Space
For who hath fixed thy limits——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[551] [Compare Tennyson's In Memoriam, lv. stanza 6—
"Dragons of the prime,
That tare each other in their slime,
Were mellow music match'd with him."]
[552] ["While at Aberdeen, he used often to steal from home unperceived; sometimes he would find his way to the seaside" (Life, p. 9). For an account of his feats in swimming, see Letters, 1898, i. 263, note 1; and letter to Murray, February 21, 1821. See, too, for a "more perilous, but less celebrated passage" (from Old Lisbon to Belem Castle), Travels in Albania, ii. 195.]
[553] ["It was a thought worthy of the great spirit of Byron, after exhibiting to us his Pilgrim amidst all the most striking scenes of earthly grandeur and earthly decay ... to conduct him and us at last to the borders of 'the Great Deep.' ... The image of the wanderer may well be associated, for a time, with the rock of Calpe, the shattered temples of Athens, or the gigantic fragments of Rome; but when we wish to think of this dark personification as of a thing which is, where can we so well imagine him to have his daily haunt as by the roaring of the waves? It was thus that Homer represented Achilles in his moments of ungovernable and inconsolable grief for the loss of Patroclus. It was thus he chose to depict the paternal despair of Chryseus—" Βή δ' ἀκέων παρὰ θῖνα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης." Note by Professor Wilson, ed. 1837.]
[qk] {462}
Is dying in the echo—it is time
To break the spell of this protracted dream
And what will be the fate of this my rhyme
May not be of my augury——.—[MS. M. erased.]
[ql] Fatal—and yet it shakes me not—farewell.—[MS. M.]
[qm] Ye! who have traced my Pilgrim to the scene.—[MS. M.]
[554] {463} At end—
Laus Deo!
Byron.
July 19th, 1817.
La Mira, near Venice.
Laus Deo!
Byron.
La Mira, near Venice,
Sept. 3, 1817.
