FOOTNOTES:
[769] [Herodotus, Hist., i. 136.]
[770] [Hamlet, act ii. sc. 2, line 103.]
[771] {573}[The story is told of St. Thomas Aquinas, that he wrote a work De Omnibus Rebus, which was followed by a second treatise, De Quibusdam Aliis.]
[772] [Not St. Augustine, but Tertullian. See his treatise, De Carne Christi, cap. V. c. (Opera, 1744, p. 310): "Crucifixus est Dei filius: non pudet, quia pudendum est: et mortuus est Dei filius: prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est: et sepultus resurrexit: certum est quia impossibile est."]
[773] {574}["That the dead are seen no more," said Imlac, "I will not undertake to maintain, against the concurrent and unvaried testimony of all ages, and of all nations. There is no people, rude or unlearned, among whom apparitions of the dead are not related and believed. This opinion, which perhaps prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by its truth; those that never heard of one another would not have agreed in a tale which nothing but experience can make credible. That it is doubted by single cavillers, can very little weaken the general evidence; and some, who deny it with their tongues, confess it with their fears."—Rasselas, chap. xxx., Works, ed. 1806, iii. 372, 373.]
[774] {575}The composition of the old Tyrian purple, whether from a shell-fish, or from cochineal, or from kermes, is still an article of dispute; and even its colour—some say purple, others scarlet: I say nothing.
[Kermes is cochineal, the Greek κόκκινον. The shell-fish (murex) is the Purpura patula. Both substances were used as dyes.]
[775] [See Ovid, Heroid, Epist. ix. line 161.]
[776] [Titus used to promise to "bear in mind," "to keep on his list," the petitions of all his supplicants, and once, at dinner-time, his conscience smote him, that he had let a day go by without a single grant, or pardon, or promotion. Hence his confession. "Amici, diem perdidi!" Vide Suetonius, De XII. Cæs., "Titus," lib. viii. cap. 8.]
[777] [Tuism is not in Johnson's Dictionary. Coleridge has a note dated 1800 (Literary Remains, i. 292), on "egotizing in tuism" but it was not included in Southey's Omniana of 1812, and must have been unknown to Byron.]
[778] {576}[Sc. toilette, a Gallicism.]
[779] [Byron loved to make fact and fancy walk together, but, here, his memory played him false, or his art kept him true. The Black Friar walked and walks in the Guests' Refectory (or Banqueting Hall, or "Gallery" of this stanza), which adjoins the Prior's Parlour, but the room where Byron slept (in a four-post bed—a coronet, at each corner, atop) is on the floor above the Prior's Parlour, and can only be approached by a spiral staircase. Both rooms look west, and command a view of the "lake's billow" and the "cascade." Moreover, the Guests' Refectory was never hung with "old pictures." It would seem that Don Juan (perhaps Byron on an emergency) slept in the Prior's Parlour, and that in the visionary Newstead the pictures forsook the Grand Drawing-Room for the Hall. Hence the scene! El Libertado steps out of the Gothic Chamber "forth" into the "gallery," and lo! "a monk in cowl and beads." But, Quien sabe? The Psalmist's caution with regard to princes is not inapplicable to poets.]
[780] {577}[Compare Mariner's description of the cave in Hoonga Island (Poetical Works, 1901, v. 629, note 1).]
[781] {578}["The place," wrote Byron to Moore, August 13, 1814, "is worth seeing as a ruin, and I can assure you there was some fun there, even in my time; but that is past. The ghosts, however, and the Gothics, and the waters, and the desolation, make it very lively still." "It was," comments Moore (Life, p. 262, note 1), "if I mistake not, during his recent visit to Newstead, that he himself actually fancied he saw the ghost of the Black Friar, which was supposed to have haunted the Abbey from the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, and which he thus describes from the recollection, perhaps, of his own fantasy, in Don Juan.... It is said that the Newstead ghost appeared, also, to Lord Byron's cousin, Miss Fanny Parkins, and that she made a sketch of him from memory." The legend of the Black Friar may, it is believed at Newstead (et vide post, "Song," stanza ii. line 5, p. 583), be traced to the alarm and suspicion of the country-folk, who, on visiting the Abbey, would now and then catch sight of an aged lay-brother, or monkish domestic, who had been retained in the service of the Byrons long after the Canons had been "turned adrift." He would naturally keep out of sight of a generation who knew not monks, and, when surprised in the cloisters or ruins of the church, would glide back to his own quarters in the dormitories.]
["Shew his eyes, and grieve his heart;
Come like shadows, so depart."
Macbeth, act iv. sc. 1, lines 110, 111.]
[NZ] {582}
With that she rose as graceful as a Roe
Slips from the mountain in the month of June,
And opening her Piano 'gan to play
Forthwith—"It was a Friar of Orders Gray."—[MS. erased.]
[OA] {584}By their bed of death he receives their [breath].—[MS. erased.]
[783] {585}I think that it was a carpet on which Diogenes trod, with—"Thus I trample on the pride of Plato!"—"With greater pride," as the other replied. But as carpets are meant to be trodden upon, my memory probably misgives me, and it might be a robe, or tapestry, or a table-cloth, or some other expensive and uncynical piece of furniture.
[It was Plato's couch or lounge which Diogenes stamped upon. "So much for Plato's pride!" "And how much for yours, Diogenes?" "Calco Platonis fastum!" "Ast fastu alio?" (Vide Diogenis Laertii De Vita et Sententiis, lib. vi. ed. 1595, p. 321.)
For "Attic Bee," vide Cic. I. De Div., xxxvi. § 78, "At Platoni cum in cunis parvulo dormienti apes in labellis consedissent, responsum est, singulari illum suavitate orationis fore."]
[784] {586}[For two translations of this Portuguese song, see Poetical Works, 1900, iii. 71.]
[785] I remember that the mayoress of a provincial town, somewhat surfeited with a similar display from foreign parts, did rather indecorously break through the applauses of an intelligent audience—intelligent, I mean, as to music—for the words, besides being in recondite languages (it was some years before the peace, ere all the world had travelled, and while I was a collegian), were sorely disguised by the performers:—this mayoress, I say, broke out with, "Rot your Italianos! for my part, I loves a simple ballat!" Rossini will go a good way to bring most people to the same opinion some day. Who would imagine that he was to be the successor of Mozart? However, I state this with diffidence, as a liege and loyal admirer of Italian music in general, and of much of Rossini's; but we may say, as the connoisseur did of painting in The Vicar of Wakefield, that "the picture would be better painted if the painter had taken more pains."
[A little while, and Rossini is being lauded at the expense of a degenerate modern rival. Compare Browning's Bishop Blougram's Apology. "Where sits Rossini patient in his stall."—Poetical Works, ed. 1868, v. 276.]
[786] [Compare The Two Foscari, act iii. sc. 1, line 172, Poetical Works, 1901, v. 159, note 1.]
[787] {587}[Of Lady Beaumont, who was "weak enough" to admire Wordsworth, see The Blues, Ecl. II. line 47, sq., Poetical Works, 1901, iv. 582.]
[OB] {589}Thrower down of buildings——.—[MS. erased.]
[791] [Byron had, no doubt, inspected the plan of Colonel Wildman's elaborate restoration of the Abbey, which was carried out at a cost of one hundred thousand pounds (see stanza lix. lines 1, 2). The kitchen and domestic offices, which extended at right angles to the west front of the Abbey (see "Newstead from a Picture by Peter Tilleman, circ. 1720" Letters, 1898, i. (to face p.) 216), were pulled down and rebuilt, the massive Sussex Tower (so named in honour of H.R.H. the Duke of Sussex) was erected at the south-west corner of the Abbey, and the south front was, in part, rebuilt and redecorated. Byron had been ready to "leave everything" with regard to his beloved Newstead to Wildman's "own feelings, present or future" (see his letter, November 18, 1818, Letters, 1900, iv. 270); but when the time came, the necessary and, on the whole, judicious alterations of his successor, must have cost the "banished Lord" many a pang.]
[792] {590}"Ausu Romano, sere Veneto" is the inscription (and well inscribed in this instance) on the sea walls between the Adriatic and Venice. The walls were a republican work of the Venetians; the inscription, I believe, Imperial; and inscribed by Napoleon the First. It is time to continue to him that title—there will be a second by and by, "Spes altera mundi," if he live; let him not defeat it like his father. But in any case, he will be preferable to "Imbéciles." There is a glorious field for him, if he know how to cultivate it.
[Francis Charles Joseph Napoleon, Duke of Reichstadt, died at Vienna, July 22, 1832. But, none the less, Byron's prophecy was fulfilled.]
[793] [Burgage, or tenure in burgage, is where the king or some other person is lord of an ancient borough, in which the tenements are held by a yearly rent certain.]
["I conjure you, by that which you profess,
(Howe'er you come to know it) answer me:
Though you untie the winds, and let them fight
Against the churches."
Macbeth, act iv. sc. 1, lines 50-53.]
[795] {591}[See the lines "To my Son," Poetical Works, 1898, i. 260, note 1.]
[796] {592}[See Spenser's Faëry Queen, Book I. Canto IX. stanza 6, line 1.]
To name what passes for a puzzle rather,
Although there must be such a thing—a father.—[MS. erased.]
[797] {594}
["Rather than so, come, Fate, into the list,
And champion me to the utterance."
Macbeth, act iii. sc. 1, lines 70, 71.]
[798] {595}[For "Septemberers (Septembriseurs)," see Carlyle's French Revolution, 1839, iii. 50.]
[799] {596}["Query, Sydney Smith, author of Peter Plymley's Letters?—Printer's Devil."—Ed. 1833. Byron must have met Sydney Smith (1771-1845) at Holland House. The "fat fen vicarage" (vide infra, stanza lxxxii. line 8) was Foston-le-Clay (Foston, All Saints), near Barton Hill, Yorkshire, which Lord Chancellor Erskine presented to Sydney Smith in 1806. The "living" consisted of "three hundred acres of glebe-land of the stiffest clay," and there was no parsonage house.—See A Memoir of the Rev. Sydney Smith, by Lady Holland, 1855, i. 100-107.]
[800] ["Observe, also, three grotesque figures in the blank arches of the gable which forms the eastern end of St. Hugh's Chapel," and of these, "one is popularly said to represent the 'Devil looking over Lincoln.'"—Handbook to the Cathedrals of England, by R.J. King, Eastern Division, p. 394, note x.
The devil looked over Lincoln because the unexampled height of the central tower of the cathedral excited his envy and alarm; or, as Fuller (Worthies: Lincolnshire) has it, "overlooked this church, when first finished, with a torve and tetrick countenance, as maligning men's costly devotions." So, at least, the vanity of later ages interpreted the saying; but a time was when the devil "looked over" Lincoln to some purpose, for in A.D. 1185 an earthquake clave the Church of Remigius in twain, and in 1235 a great part of the central tower, which had been erected by Bishop Hugh de Wells, fell and injured the rest of the building.]
[OD] {597}For laughter rarely shakes these aguish folks.—[MS, erased.]
[OE] Took down the gay bon-mot——.—[MS. erased.]
[OF] To hammer half a laugh——.—[MS. erased.]
["There's a difference to be seen between a beggar and a Queen;
And I 'll tell you the reason why;
A Queen does not swagger, nor get drunk like a beggar,
Nor be half so merry as I," etc.
"There's a difference to be seen,'twixt a Bishop and a Dean,
And I'll tell you the reason why;
A Dean can not dish up a dinner like a Bishop,
And that's the reason why!"]
[802] {598}["Sine Cerere et Libero friget Venus." Terentius, Eun., act iv. sc. 5, line 6.]
[803] {601}In French "mobilité." I am not sure that mobility is English; but it is expressive of a quality which rather belongs to other climates, though it is sometimes seen to a great extent in our own. It may be defined as an excessive susceptibility of immediate impressions—at the same time without losing the past: and is, though sometimes apparently useful to the possessor, a most painful and unhappy attribute.
["That he was fully aware not only of the abundance of this quality in his own nature, but of the danger in which it placed consistency and singleness of character, did not require the note on this passage to assure us. The consciousness, indeed, of his own natural tendency to yield thus to every chance impression, and change with every passing impulse, was not only for ever present in his mind, but ... had the effect of keeping him in that general line of consistency, on certain great subjects, which ... he continued to preserve throughout life."—Life, p. 646. "Mobility" is not the tendency to yield to every impression, to change with every impulse, but the capability of being moved by many and various impressions, of responding to an ever-renewed succession of impulses. Byron is defending the enthusiastic temperament from the charge of inconstancy and insincerity.]
[804] [The first edition of Cocker's Arithmetic was published in 1677. There are many allusions to Cocker in Arthur Murphy's Apprentice (1756), whence, perhaps, the saying, "according to Cocker."]
[805] {602} "[Et Horatii] Curiosa felicitas."—Petronius Arbiter, Salyricôn, cap. cxviii.
["Damn with faint praise, assent with civil leer,
And without sneering, teach the rest to sneer."
Pope on Addison, Prologue to the Satires, lines 201, 202.]
[807] {604}[Bion, Epitaphium Adonidis, line 28.]
[808] [" ... genetrix hominum, divômque voluptas, Alma Venus!" Lucret., De Rerum Nat., lib. i. lines 1, 2.]
[809] {605}[Job iv. 13.]
[810] See the account of the ghost of the uncle of Prince Charles of Saxony, raised by Schroepfer—"Karl—Karl—was willst du mit mir?"
[For Johann Georg Schrepfer (1730(?)-1774), see J.S.B. Schlegel's Tagebuch, etc., 1806, and Schwärmer und Schwindler, von Dr. Eugen Sierke, 1874, pp. 298-332.]
[811] {606}[Inferno, Canto III. line 9.]
[OG] When once discovered it don't like to come near it.—[MS.]
[OH] {607}A beardless chin——.—[MS.]
