FOOTNOTES:
[br] {205} la suite.—[MS. and First Edition.]
[248] {207} [The Battle of Poltáva on the Vórskla took place July 8, 1709. "The Swedish troops (under Rehnskjöld) numbered only 12,500 men.... The Russian army was four times as numerous.... The Swedes seemed at first to get the advantage, ... but everywhere the were overpowered and surrounded—beaten in detail; and though for two hours they fought with the fierceness of despair, they were forced either to surrender or to flee.... Over 2800 officers and men were taken prisoners."—Peter the Great, by Eugene Schuyler, 1884, ii. 148, 149.]
[249] [Napoleon began his retreat from Moscow, October 15, 1812. He was defeated at Vitepsk, November 14; Krasnoi, November 16-18; and at Beresina, November 25-29, 1812.]
[250] ["It happened ... that during the operations of June 27-28, Charles was severely wounded in the foot. On the morning of June 28 he was riding close to the river ... when a ball struck him on the left heel, passed through his foot, and lodged close to the great toe.... On the night of July 7, 1709 ... Charles had the foot carefully dressed, while he wore a spurred boot on his sound foot, put on his uniform, and placed himself on a kind of litter, in which he was drawn before the lines of the array.... [After the battle, July 8] those who survived took refuge in flight, the King—whose litter had been smashed by a cannon-ball, and who was carried by the soldiers on crossed poles—going with them, and the Russians neglecting to pursue. In this manner they reached their former camp."—Charles XII., by Oscar Browning, 1899, pp. 213, 220, 224, sq. For an account of his flight southwards into Turkish territory, vide post, p. 233, note 1. The bivouack "under a savage tree" must have taken place on the night of the battle, at the first halt, between Poltáva and the junction of the Vórskla and Dniéper.]
[251] {208}[Compare—
"Thus elms and thus the savage cherry grows."
Dryden's Georgics, ii. 24.]
[252] {209}[For some interesting particulars concerning the Hetman Mazeppa, see Barrow's Memoir of the Life of Peter the Great, 1832, pp. 181-202.]
[253] {211}[The Dniéper.]
[254] [John Casimir (1609-1672), Jesuit, cardinal, and king, was a Little-Polander, not to say a pro-Cossack, and suffered in consequence. At the time of his proclamation as King of Poland, November, 1649, Poland was threatened by an incursion of Cossacks. The immediate cause was, or was supposed to be, the ill treatment which [Bogdán Khmelnítzky] a Lithuanian had received at the hands of the Polish governor, Czaplinski. The governor, it was alleged, had carried off, ravished, and put to death Khmelnítzky's wife, and, not content with this outrage, had set fire to the house of the Cossack, "in which perished his infant son in his cradle." Others affirmed that the Cossack had begun the strife by causing the governor "to be publicly and ignominiously whipped," and that it was the Cossack's mill and not his house which he burnt. Be that as it may, Casimir, on being exhorted to take the field, declined, on the ground that the Poles "ought not to have set fire to Khmelnítzky's house." It is probably to this unpatriotic determination to look at both sides of the question that he earned the character of being an unwarlike prince. As a matter of fact, he fought and was victorious against the Cossacks and Tartars at Bereteskow and elsewhere. (See Mod. Univ. Hist., xxxiv. 203, 217; Puffend, Hist. Gener., 1732, iv. 328; and Histoire des Kosaques, par M. (Charles Louis) Le Sur, 1814, i. 321.)]
[255] [A.D. 1660 or thereabouts.]
[256] {212}[According to the editor of Voltaire's Works (Oeuvres, Beuchot, 1830, xix. 378, note 1), there was a report that Casimir, after his retirement to Paris in 1670, secretly married "Marie Mignot, fille d'une blanchisseuse;" and there are other tales of other loves, e.g. Ninon de Lenclos.]
[257] [According to the biographers, Mazeppa's intrigue took place after he had been banished from the court of Warsaw, and had retired to his estate in Volhynia. The pane [Lord] Falbowsky, the old husband of the young wife, was a neighbouring magnate. It was a case of "love in idlenesse."—Vide ante, "The Introduction to Mazeppa," p. 201.]
[258] This comparison of a "salt mine" may, perhaps, be permitted to a Pole, as the wealth of the country consists greatly in the salt mines.
[259] {213}[It is improbable that Byron, when he wrote these lines, was thinking of Theresa Gamba, Countess Guiccioli. He met her for the first time "in the autumn of 1818, three days after her marriage," but it was not till April, 1819, that he made her acquaintance. (See Life, p. 393, and Letters, 1900, iv. 289.) The copy of Mazeppa sent home to Murray is in the Countess Guiccioli's handwriting, but the assertion (see Byron's Works, 1832, xi. 178), that "it is impossible not to suspect that the Poet had some circumstances of his own personal history, when he portrayed the fair Polish Theresa, her faithful lover, and the jealous rage of the old Count Palatine," is open to question. It was Marianna Segati who had "large, black, Oriental eyes, with that peculiar expression in them which is seen rarely among Europeans ... forehead remarkably good" (see lines 208-220); not Theresa Guiccioli, who was a "blonde," with a "brilliant complexion and blue eyes." (See Letters to Moore, November 17, 1816; and to Murray, May 6, 1819: Letters, 1900, iv. 8, 289, note 1.) Moreover, the "Maid of Athens" was called Theresa. Dr. D. Englaender, in his exhaustive monologue, Lord Byron's Mazeppa, pp. 48, sq., insists on the identity of the Theresa of the poem with the Countess Guiccioli, but from this contention the late Professor Kölbing (see Englische Studien, 1898, vol. xxiv. pp 448-458) dissents.]
[bs] {214} Until it proves a joy to die.—[MS. erased.]
[260] {215}[For the use of "electric" as a metaphor, compare Parisina, line 480, Poetical Works, 1900, iii. 524, note i.]
[bt] {216}
——but not
For that which we had both forgot.—[MS. erased.]
[261] {217}[Compare—
"We loved, Sir, used to meet:
How sad, and bad, and mad it was!
But then how it was sweet!"
Confessions, by Robert Browning.]
[262] {220}[Compare—
"In sleep I heard the northern gleams; ...
In rustling conflict through the skies,
I heard, I saw the flashes drive."
The Complaint, stanza i. lines 3, 5, 6.
See, too, reference to Hearne's Journey from Hudson's Bay, etc., in prefatory note, Works of W. Wordsworth, 1889, p. 86.]
[263] [As Dr. Englaender points out (Mazeppa, 1897, p. 73), it is probable that Byron derived his general conception of the scenery of the Ukraine from passages in Voltaire's Charles XII., e.g.: "Depuis Grodno jusqu'au Borysthene, en tirant vers l'orient ce sont des marais, des déserts, des forêts immenses" (Oeuvres, 1829, xxiv. 170). The exquisite beauty of the virgin steppes, the long rich grass, the wild-flowers, the "diviner air," to which the Viscount de Vogüé testifies so eloquently in his Mazeppa, were not in the "mind's eye" of the poet or the historian.]
[bu] {222}
And stains it with a lifeless red.—[MS.]
Which clings to it like stiffened gore.—[MS. erased.]
[264] {223}[The thread on which the successive tropes or images are loosely strung seems to give if not to snap at this point. "Considering that Mazeppa was sprung of a race which in moments of excitement, when an enemy has stamped upon its vitals, springs up to repel the attack, it was only to be expected that he should sink beneath the blow—and sink he did." The conclusion is at variance with the premiss.]
[265] {224}[Compare—
"'Alas,' said she, 'this ghastly ride,
Dear Lady! it hath wildered you.'"
Christabel, Part I. lines 216, 217.]
[266] {225}[Compare—
"How long in that same fit I lay,
I have not to declare."
Ancient Mariner, Part V. lines 393, 394.]
[267] [Compare—
"From precipices of distempered sleep."
Sonnet, "No more my visionary soul shall dwell," by S. T. Coleridge, attributed by Southey to Favell.—Letters of S. T. Coleridge, 1895, i. 83; Southey's Life and Correspondence, 1849, i. 224.]
[268] {226}[Compare Werner, iii. 3—
"Burn still,
Thou little light! Thou art my ignis fatuus.
My stationary Will-o'-the-wisp!—So! So!"
Compare, too, Don Juan, Canto XI. stanza xxvii. line 6, and Canto XV, stanza liv. line 6.]
[bv] {227}
Rose crimson, and forebade the stars
To sparkle in their radiant cars.—[MS, erased.]
[269] [Compare—
"What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn."
Lycidas, line 28.]
[270] [Compare—
"Was it the wind through some hollow stone?"
Siege of Corinth, line 521,
Poetical Works, 1900, iii. 471, note 1.]
[271] {230}[Compare—
"The Architect ... did essay
To extricate remembrance from the clay,
Whose minglings might confuse a Newton's thought."
Churchill's Grave, lines 20-23 (vide ante, p. 47).]
[272] [Compare—
" ... that strange shape drove suddenly
Betwixt us and the Sun."
Ancient Mariner, Part III. lines 175, 176.]
"The scalps were in the wild dog's maw,
The hair was tangled round his jaw:
But close by the shore, on the edge of the gulf,
There sat a vulture flapping a wolf."
Siege of Corinth, lines 471-474,
Poetical Works, 1900, iv. 468.]
[274] {232}[Compare—
"Her eyes were eloquent, her words would pose,
Although she told him, in good modern Greek,
With an Ionian accent, low and sweet,
That he was faint, and must not talk but eat.
"Now Juan could not understand a word,
Being no Grecian; but he had an ear,
And her voice was the warble of a bird,
So soft, so sweet, so delicately clear."
Don Juan, Canto II. stanza cl. line 5 to stanza cli. line 4.]
[275] {233}["By noon the battle (of Poltáva) was over.... Charles had been induced to return to the camp and rally the remainder of the army. In spite of his wounded foot, he had to ride, lying on the neck of his horse.... The retreat (down the Vórskla to the Dniéper) began towards evening.... On the afternoon of July 11 the Swedes arrived at the little town of Perevolótchna, at the mouth of the Vórskla, where there was a ferry across the Dniéper ... the king, Mazeppa, and about 1000 men crossed the Dniéper.... The king, with the Russian cavalry in hot pursuit, rode as fast as he could to the Bug, where half his escourt was captured, and he barely escaped. Thence he went to Bender, on the Dniester, and for five years remained the guest of Turkey."—Peter the Great, by Eugene Schuyler, 1884, ii. 149-151.]
