Part III

Part III

SCENE I.--A Castle in the Apennines, surrounded by a wild but smiling Country. Chorus of Peasants singing before the Gates.

Chorus.

I.

The wars are over, The spring is come; The bride and her lover Have sought their home: They are happy, we rejoice; Let their hearts have an echo in every voice!

II.

The spring is come; the violet's gone, The first-born child of the early sun:[dt] With us she is but a winter's flower, The snow on the hills cannot blast her bower, 10 And she lifts up her dewy eye of blue To the youngest sky of the self-same hue.

III.

And when the spring comes with her host Of flowers, that flower beloved the most Shrinks from the crowd that may confuse Her heavenly odour and virgin hues.

IV.

Pluck the others, but still remember Their herald out of dim December-- The morning star of all the flowers, The pledge of daylight's lengthened hours; 20 Nor, midst the roses, e'er forget The virgin--virgin Violet.

Enter CÆSAR.

Cæs. (singing). The wars are all over, Our swords are all idle, The steed bites the bridle, The casque's on the wall. There's rest for the rover; But his armour is rusty, And the veteran grows crusty, As he yawns in the hall. 30 He drinks--but what's drinking? A mere pause from thinking! No bugle awakes him with life-and-death call.

Chorus.

But the hound bayeth loudly, The boar's in the wood, And the falcon longs proudly To spring from her hood: On the wrist of the noble She sits like a crest, And the air is in trouble 40 With birds from their nest.

Cæs. Oh! shadow of Glory! Dim image of War! But the chase hath no story, Her hero no star, Since Nimrod, the founder Of empire and chase, Who made the woods wonder And quake for their race. When the lion was young, 50 In the pride of his might, Then 'twas sport for the strong To embrace him in fight; To go forth, with a pine For a spear, 'gainst the mammoth, Or strike through the ravine[du] At the foaming behemoth; While man was in stature As towers in our time, The first born of Nature, 60 And, like her, sublime!

Chorus.

But the wars are over, The spring is come; The bride and her lover Have sought their home: They are happy, and we rejoice; Let their hearts have an echo from every voice! [Exeunt the Peasantry, singing.

FRAGMENT OF THE THIRD PART OF THE DEFORMED TRANSFORMED.

Chorus.

When the merry bells are ringing, And the peasant girls are singing, And the early flowers are flinging Their odours in the air; And the honey bee is clinging To the buds; and birds are winging Their way, pair by pair: Then the earth looks free from trouble With the brightness of a bubble: Though I did not make it, 10 I could breathe on and break it; But too much I scorn it, Or else I would mourn it, To see despots and slaves Playing o'er their own graves.

Enter COUNT ARNOLD.

{Mem. Jealous--Arnold of Cæsar. {Olympia at first not liking Cæsar {--then?--Arnold jealous of himself {under his former figure, owing to {the power of intellect, etc., etc., etc.

Arnold. You are merry, Sir--what? singing too?

Cæsar. It is The land of Song--and Canticles you know Were once my avocation.

Arn. Nothing moves you; You scoff even at your own calamity-- And such calamity! how wert thou fallen 20 Son of the Morning! and yet Lucifer Can smile.

Cæs. His shape can--would you have me weep, In the fair form I wear, to please you?

Arn. Ah!

Cæs. You are grave--what have you on your spirit!

Arn. Nothing.

Cæs. How mortals lie by instinct! If you ask A disappointed courtier--What's the matter? "Nothing"--an outshone Beauty what has made Her smooth brow crisp--"Oh, Nothing!"--a young heir When his Sire has recovered from the Gout, What ails him? "Nothing!" or a Monarch who 30 Has heard the truth, and looks imperial on it-- What clouds his royal aspect? "Nothing," "Nothing!" Nothing--eternal nothing--of these nothings All are a lie--for all to them are much! And they themselves alone the real "Nothings." Your present Nothing, too, is something to you-- What is it?

Arn. Know you not?

Cæs. I only know What I desire to know! and will not waste Omniscience upon phantoms. Out with it! If you seek aid from me--or else be silent. 40 And eat your thoughts--till they breed snakes within you.

Arn. Olimpia!

Cæs. I thought as much--go on.

Arn. I thought she had loved me.

Cæs. Blessings on your Creed! What a good Christian you were found to be! But what cold Sceptic hath appalled your faith And transubstantiated to crumbs again The body of your Credence?

Arn. No one--but-- Each day--each hour--each minute shows me more And more she loves me not--

Cæs. Doth she rebel?

Arn. No, she is calm, and meek, and silent with me, 50 And coldly dutiful, and proudly patient-- Endures my Love--not meets it.

Cæs. That seems strange. You are beautiful and brave! the first is much For passion--and the rest for Vanity.

Arn. I saved her life, too; and her Father's life, And Father's house from ashes.

Cæs. These are nothing. You seek for Gratitude--the Philosopher's stone.

Arn. And find it not.

Cæs. You cannot find what is not. But found would it content you? would you owe To thankfulness what you desire from Passion? 60 No! No! you would be loved--what you call loved-- Self-loved--loved for yourself--for neither health, Nor wealth, nor youth, nor power, nor rank, nor beauty-- For these you may be stript of--but beloved As an abstraction--for--you know not what! These are the wishes of a moderate lover-- And so you love.

Arn. Ah! could I be beloved, Would I ask wherefore?

Cæs. Yes! and not believe The answer--You are jealous.

Arn. And of whom?

Cæs. It may be of yourself,[252] for Jealousy 70 Is as a shadow of the Sun. The Orb Is mighty--as you mortals deem--and to Your little Universe seems universal; But, great as He appears, and is to you, The smallest cloud--the slightest vapour of Your humid earth enables you to look Upon a Sky which you revile as dull; Though your eyes dare not gaze on it when cloudless. Nothing can blind a mortal like to light. Now Love in you is as the Sun--a thing 80 Beyond you--and your Jealousy's of Earth-- A cloud of your own raising.

Arn. Not so always! There is a cause at times.

Cæs. Oh, yes! when atoms jostle, The System is in peril. But I speak Of things you know not. Well, to earth again! This precious thing of dust--this bright Olimpia-- This marvellous Virgin, is a marble maid-- An Idol, but a cold one to your heat Promethean, and unkindled by your torch.

Arn. Slave!

Cæs. In the victor's Chariot, when Rome triumphed, 90 There was a Slave of yore to tell him truth! You are a Conqueror--command your Slave.

Arn. Teach me the way to win the woman's love.

Cæs. Leave her.

Arn. Where that the path--I'd not pursue it.

Cæs. No doubt! for if you did, the remedy Would be for a disease already cured.

Arn. All wretched as I am, I would not quit My unrequited love, for all that's happy.

Cæs. You have possessed the woman--still possess. What need you more?

Arn. To be myself possessed-- 100 To be her heart as she is mine.

FOOTNOTES:

[201] {473}[The Three Brothers, by Joshua Pickersgill, junior, was published in 1803. There is no copy of The Three Brothers in the British Museum. The following extracts are taken from a copy in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (vol. 4, cap. xi. pp. 229-350):--

"Arnaud, the natural son of the Marquis de Souvricour, was a child 'extraordinary in Beauty and Intellect.' When travelling with his parents to Languedoc, Arnaud being 8 years old, he was shot at by banditti, and forsaken by his parents. The Captain of the band nursed him. 'But those perfections to which Arnaud owed his existence, ceased to adorn it. The ball had gored his shoulder, and the fall had dislocated it; by the latter misadventure his spine likewise was so fatally injured as to be irrecoverable to its pristine uprightness. Injuries so compound confounded the Captain, who sorrowed to see a creature so charming, at once deformed by a crooked back and an excrescent shoulder.' Arnaud was found and taken back to his parents. 'The bitterest consciousness of his deformity was derived from their indelicate, though, perhaps, insensible alteration of conduct.... Of his person he continued to speak as of an abhorrent enemy.... "Were a blessing submitted to my choice, I would say, [said Arnaud] be it my immediate dissolution." "I think," said his mother, ... "that you could wish better." "Yes," adjoined Arnaud, "for that wish should be that I ever had remained unborn."' He polishes the broken blade of a sword, and views himself therein; the sight so horrifies him that he determines to throw himself over a precipice, but draws back at the last moment. He goes to a cavern, and conjures up the prince of hell. "Arnaud knew himself to be interrogated. What he required.... What was that answer the effects explain.... There passed in liveliest portraiture the various men distinguished for that beauty and grace which Arnaud so much desired, that he was ambitious to purchase them with his soul. He felt that it was his part to chuse whom he would resemble, yet he remained unresolved, though the spectator of an hundred shades of renown, among which glided by Alexander, Alcibiades, and Hephestion: at length appeared the supernatural effigy of a man, whose perfections human artist never could depict or insculp--Demetrius, the son of Antigonus. Arnaud's heart heaved quick with preference, and strait he found within his hand the resemblance of a poniard, its point inverted towards his breast. A mere automaton in the hands of the Demon, he thrust the point through his heart, and underwent a painless death. During his trance, his spirit metempsychosed from the body of his detestation to that of his admiration ... Arnaud awoke a Julian!'"]

[202] {474}[For a résumé of M. G. Lewis's Wood Demon (afterwards re-cast as One O'clock; or, The Knight and the Wood-Demon, 1811), see "First Visit to the Theatre in London," Poems, by Hartley Coleridge, 1851, i., Appendix C, pp. cxcix.-cciii. The Wood Demon in its original form was never published.]

[203] [Mrs. Shelley inscribed the following note on the fly-leaf of her copy of The Deformed Transformed:--

"This had long been a favourite subject with Lord Byron. I think that he mentioned it also in Switzerland. I copied it--he sending a portion of it at a time, as it was finished, to me. At this time he had a great horror of its being said that he plagiarised, or that he studied for ideas, and wrote with difficulty. Thus he gave Shelley Aikins' edition of the British poets, that it might not be found in his house by some English lounger, and reported home; thus, too, he always dated when he began and when he ended a poem, to prove hereafter how quickly it was done. I do not think that he altered a line in this drama after he had once written it down. He composed and corrected in his mind. I do not know how he meant to finish it; but he said himself that the whole conduct of the story was already conceived. It was at this time that a brutal paragraph[*] alluding to his lameness appeared, which he repeated to me lest I should hear it from some one else. No action of Lord Byron's life--scarce a line he has written--but was influenced by his personal defect."

[*] It is possible that Mrs. Shelley alludes to a sentence in the Memoirs, etc., of Lord Byron. (by Dr. John Watkin), 1822, p. 46: "A malformation of one of his feet, and other indications of a rickety constitution, served as a plea for suffering him to range the hills and to wander about at his pleasure on the seashore, that his frame might be invigorated by air and exercise."]

[cv] {477} The Deformed--a drama.--B. Pisa, 1822.

[204] [Moore (Life, p. 13) quotes these lines in connection with a passage in Byron's "Memoranda," where, in speaking of his own sensitiveness on the subject of his deformed foot, he described the feeling of horror and humiliation that came over him, when his mother, in one of her fits of passion, called him "a lame brat!"... "It may be questioned," he adds, "whether that whole drama [The Deformed Transformed] was not indebted for its origin to that single recollection."

Byron's early letters (e.g. November 2, 11, 17, 1804, Letters, 1898, i. 41, 45, 48) are full of complaints of his mother's "eccentric behaviour," her "fits of phrenzy," her "caprices," "passions," and so forth; and there is convincing proof--see Life, pp. 28, 306; Letters, 1898, ii. 122 (incident at Bellingham's execution); Letters, 1901, vi. 179 (Le Diable Boiteux)--that he regarded the contraction of the muscles of his legs as a more or less repulsive deformity. And yet, to quote one of a hundred testimonies,--"with regard to Lord Byron's features, Mr. Mathews observed, that he was the only man he ever contemplated, to whom he felt disposed to apply the word beautiful" (Memoirs of Charles Matthews, 1838, ii. 380). The looker-on or the consoler computes the magnitude and the liberality of the compensation. The sufferer thinks only of his sufferings.]

[205] {478}[So, too, Prospero to Caliban, Tempest, act i. sc. 2, line 309, etc.]

[206] {479}[Compare--"Have not partook oppression." Marino Faliero, act i. sc. 2, line 468, Poetical Works, 1901, iv. 362, note 1.]

[207] {480}[Compare the story of the philosopher Jamblichus and the raising of Eros and Anteros from their "fountain-dwellings."--Manfred, act ii. sc. 2, line 93, Poetical Works, 1901, iv. 105, note 2.]

[cw] {481} Give me the strength of the buffalo's foot (which marks me).--[MS.]

[cx] The sailless dromedary----.--[MS.]

[cy] {482} Now I can gibe the mightiest.--[MS.]

[208] {483}[So, too, in The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus (Marlowe's Works, 1858, p. 112), Faustus stabs his arm, "and with his proper blood Assures his soul to be great Lucifer's."]

[cz]

Walk lively and pliant. You shall rise up as pliant.--[MS, erased.]

[209] This is a well-known German superstition--a gigantic shadow produced by reflection on the Brocken. [See Brewster's Letters on Natural Magic, 1831, p. 128.]

[da] And such my command.--[MS.]

[210] {484}["Nigris vegetisque oculis."--Suetonius, Vitæ C. Julius Cæsar, cap. xiv., Opera Omnia, 1826, i. 105.]

[211] [Vide post, p. 501, note 1.]

[212] ["Sed ante alias [Julius Cæsar] dilexit M. Bruti matrem Serviliam ... dilexit et reginas ... sed maxime Cleopatram" (ibid., i. 113, 115). Cleopatra, born B.C. 69, was twenty-one years old when she met Cæsar, B.C. 48.]

[db]

And can It be? the man who shook the earth is gone.--[MS.]

[213] {485}["Upon the whole, it may be doubted whether there be a name of Antiquity which comes down with such a general charm as that of Alcibiades. Why? I cannot answer: who can?"--Detached Thoughts (1821), No. 108, Letters, 1901, v. 461. For Sir Walter Scott's note on this passage, see Letters, 1900, iv. 77, 78, note 2.]

[214] [The outside of Socrates was that of a satyr and buffoon, but his soul was all virtue, and from within him came such divine and pathetic things, as pierced the heart, and drew tears from the hearers.--Plato, Symp., p. 216, D.]

[215] {486}["Anthony had a noble dignity of countenance, a graceful length of beard, a large forehead, an aquiline nose: and, upon the whole, the same manly aspect that we see in the pictures and statues of Hercules."--Plutarch's Lives, Langhorne's Translation, 1838, p. 634.]

[216] [As in the "Farnese" Hercules.]

[217] [The beauty and mien [of Demetrius Poliorcetes] were so inimitable that no statuary or painter could hit off a likeness. His countenance had a mixture of grace and dignity; and was at once amiable and awful; and the unsubdued and eager air of youth was blended with the majesty of the hero and the king.--Plutarch's Lives, Langhorne's Translation, 1838, p. 616.

Demetrius the Besieger rescued Greece from the sway of Ptolemy and Cassander, B.C. 307. He passed the following winter at Athens, where divine honours were paid to him under the title of "the Preserver" (ὁ Σωτήρ [o(Sôtê/r]). He was "the shame of Greece in peace," by reason of his profligacy--"the citadel was so polluted with his debaucheries, that it appeared to be kept sacred in some degree when he indulged himself only with such Hetæræ as Chrysis, Lamia, Demo, and Anticyra." He was the unspiritual ancestor of Charles the Second. Once when his father, Antigonus, had been told that he was indisposed, "he went to see him; and when he came to the door, he met one of his favourites going out. He went in, however, and, sitting down by him, took hold of his hand. 'My fever,' said Demetrius, 'has left me.' 'I knew it,' said Antigonus, 'for I met it this moment at the door.'"--Plutarch's Lives, ibid., pp. 621-623.]

[218] {488}[Spercheus was a river-god, the husband of Polydora, the daughter of Peleus. Peleus casts into the river the hair of his son Achilles, in the pious hope that his son-in-law would accept the votive offering, and grant the youth a safe return from the Trojan war. See Iliad, xxiii. 140, sqq.]

[219] {489}["Whosoever," says Bacon, "hath anything fixed in his person that doth induce contempt, hath also a perpetual spur in himself to rescue and deliver himself from scorn; therefore, all deformed persons are extreme bold; first, as in their own defence, as being exposed to scorn, but in process of time by a general habit; also it stirreth in them industry, and especially of this kind, to watch and observe the weakness of others, that they may have somewhat to repay." (Essay xliv.). Byron's "chief incentive, when a boy, to distinction was that mark of deformity on his person, by an acute sense of which he was first stung into the ambition of being great."--Life, p. 306.]

[220] [Timúr Bey, or Timúr Lang, i.e. "the lame Timúr" (A.D. 1336-1405), was the founder of the Mogul dynasty. He was the Tamerlane of history and of legend. Byron had certainly read the selections from Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great, in Lamb's _Specimens of English Dramatic Poets_.]

[221] {491}["I am black, but comely."--Song of Solomon i. 5.]

[222] Adam means "red earth," from which the first man was formed. [The word adām is said to be analogous to the Assyrian admu, "child"--i.e. "one made" by God.--Encycl. Bibl., art. "Adam."]

[dc] {492} This shape into Life.--[MS.]

[223] {493}[The reference is to the homunculi of the alchymists. See Retzsch's illustrations to Goethe's Faust, 1834, plates 3, 4, 5. Compare, too, The Second Part of Faust, act ii.--

"The glass rings low, the charming power that lives Within it makes the music that it gives. It dims! it brightens! it will shape itself. And see! a graceful dazzling little elf. He lives! he moves! spruce mannikin of fire, What more can we? what more can earth desire?"

Anster's Translation, 1886, p. 91.]

[dd] Your Interloper----.--[MS.]

[224] {494}[Compare Prisoner of Chillon, stanza ii. line 35, Poetical Works, 1091, iv. 15, note i. Compare, too, the dialogue between Mephistopheles and the Will-o'-the Wisp, in the scene on the Hartz Mountains, in Faust, Part I. (see Anster's Translation, 1886, p. 271).]

[225] {495}[The immediate reference is to the composite forces, German, French, and Spanish, of the Imperial Army under the command of Charles de Bourbon: but there is in lines 498-507 a manifest allusion to the revolutionary movements in South America, Italy, and Spain, which were at their height in 1822. (See the Age of Bronze, section vi. lines 260, sq., post, pp. 555-557.)]

[226] {496}[See Euripides, Hippolytus, line 733.]

[de] Kochlani----.--[MS.]

[227] [Kochlani horses were bred in a central province of Arabia.]

[228] [Byron's knowledge of Huon of Bordeaux was, most probably, derived from Sotheby's Oberon; or, Huon de Bourdeux: A Mask, published in 1802. For The Boke of Duke Huon of Burdeux, done into English by Sir John Bourchier, Lord Berners, see the reprint issued by the Early English Text Society (E.S., No. xliii. 1884); and for Analyse de Huon de Bordeaux, etc., see Les Epopées Françaises, by Léon Gautier, 1880, ii. 719-773.]

[229] {497}[The so-called statue of Memnon, the beautiful son of Tithonus and Eos (Dawn), is now known to be that of Amenhotep III., who reigned in the eighteenth dynasty, about 1430 B.C. Strabo, ed. 1807. p. 1155, was the first to record the musical note which sounded from the statue when it was touched by the rays of the rising sun. It used to be argued (see Gifford's note to Don Juan, Canto XIII. stanza lxiv. line 3, ed. 1837, p. 731) that the sounds were produced by a trick, but of late years it has been maintained that the Memnon's wail was due to natural causes, the pressure of suddenly-warmed currents of air through the pores and crevices of the stone. After the statue was restored, the phenomenon ceased. (See La statue vocale de Memnon, par J. A. Letronne, Paris, 1833, pp. 55, 56.)]

[df] We'll add a "Count" to it.--[MS.]

[dg] {498} ----my eyes are full.--[MS.]

[230] [Charles de Bourbon, Comte de Montpensier et de la Marche, Dauphin d'Auvergne, was born February 17, 1490. He served in Italy with Bayard, and helped to decide the victory of Agnadello (A.D. 1510). He was appointed Constable of France by Francis I., January, 1515, and fought at the battle of Marignano, September 13, 1515. Not long afterwards he lost the king's favour, who was set against him by his mother, Louise de Savoie; was recalled from his command in Italy, and superseded by Odet de Foix, brother of the king's mistress. It was not, however, till he became a widower (Susanne, Duchesse de Bourbon, died April 28, 1521) that he finally broke with Francis and attached himself to the Emperor Charles V. Madame, the king's mother, not only coveted the vast estates of the house of Bourbon, but was enamoured of the Constable's person, and, so to speak, gave him his choice between marriage and a suit for his fiefs. Charles would have nothing to say to the lady's proposals or to her son's entreaties, and seeing that rejection meant ruin, he "entered into a correspondence with the Emperor and the King [Henry VIII.] of England ... and, finding this discovered, went into the Emperor's service."

After various and varying successes, both in the South of France and in Lombardy, he found himself, in the spring of 1527, not so much the commander-in-chief as the popular capo of a mixed body of German, Spanish, and Italian condottieri, unpaid and ill-disciplined, who had mutinied more than once, who could only be kept together by the prospect of unlimited booty, and a timely concession to their demands. "To Rome! to Rome!" cried the hungry and tumultuous landsknechts, and on May 5, 1527, the "late Constable of France," at the head of an army of 30,000 troops, appeared before the walls of the sacred city. On the morning of the 6th of May, he was killed by a shot from an arquebuse. His epitaph recounts his honours: "Aucto Imperio, Gallo victo, Superatâ Italiâ, Pontifice obsesso, Româ captâ, Borbonius, Hic Jacet;" but in Paris they painted the sill of his gate-way yellow, because he was a renegade and a traitor. He could not have said, with the dying Bayard, "Ne me plaignez pas-je meurs sans avoir servi contre ma patrie, mon roy, et mon serment." (See Modern Universal History, 1760, xxiv. 150-152, Note C; Nouvelle Biographie Universelle, art. "Bourbon.")]

[231] {499}[The contrast is between imperial Rome, the Lord of the world, and papal Rome, "the great harlot which hath corrupted the earth with her fornications" (Rev. ii. 19). Compare Part II. sc. iii. line 26, vide post, p. 521.]

[232] {500}[Compare Manfred, act iii. sc. 4, line 10; and Childe Harold, Canto IV. stanza cxxviii. line 1; Poetical Works, 1901, iv. 131, 1899, ii. 423, note 2.]

[233] {501}["Calvitii vero deformitatem iniquissime ferret, sæpe obtrectatorum jocis obnoxiam expertus. Ideoque et deficientem capillum revocare a vertice assuerat, et ex omnibus decretis sibi a Senatu populoque honoribus non aliud aut recepit aut usurpavit libentius, quam jus laureæ coronæ perpetuo gestandæ."--Suetonius, Opera Omnia, 1826, pp. 105, 106.]

[234] {503}[Francis the First was taken prisoner at the Battle of Pavia, February 24, 1525.]

[dh] With a soldier's firm foot.--[MS.]

[235] [Compare The Siege of Corinth, line 752, Poetical Works, 1900, iii. 483. There is a note of tragic irony in the soldiers' vain-glorious prophecy.]

[di] With the Bourbon will count o'er.--[MS.]

[236] {504}[Brantôme (Memoires, etc., 1722, i. 215) quotes a "chanson" of "Les soldats Espagnols" as they marched Romewards. "Calla calla Julio Cesar, Hannibal, y Scipion! Viva la fama de Bourbon."]

[dj] The General with his men of confidence.--[MS.]

[dk] {505} And present phantom of that deathless world.--[MS.]

[237] {506}[When the Uticans decided not to stand a siege, but to send deputies to Cæsar, Cato determined to put an end to his life rather than fall into the hands of the conqueror. Accordingly, after he had retired to rest he stabbed himself under the breast, and when the physician sewed up the wound, he thrust him away, and plucked out his own bowels.--Plutarch's Lives, Langhorne's Translation, 1838, P. 553.]

[dl] {507} Of a mere starving----.--[MS.]

[dm] ----Work away with words.--[MS.]

[dn] {508} First City rests upon to-morrow's action.--[MS.]

[238] {510}["Dès l'aube du lundi 6 mai 1527, le connétable, à cheval, la cuirasse couverte d'un manteau blanc, marcha vers le Borgo, dont les murailles, à la hauteur de San-Spirito, étaient d'accès facile.... Bourbon mit pied à terre, et, prenant lui-même une échelle l'appliqua tout près de la porte Torrione."--De l'Italie, par Émile Gebhart, 1876, p. 255. Cæsar Grolierius (Historia expugnatæ ... Urbis, 1637), who claims to speak as an eye-witness (p. 2), describes "Borbonius" as "insignemque veste et armis" (p. 62).]

[do] 'Tis the morning--Hark! Hark! Hark!--[MS.]

[239] {512} Scipio, the second Africanus, is said to have repeated a verse of Homer [Iliad, vi. 448], and wept over the burning of Carthage [B.C. 146]. He had better have granted it a capitulation.

[dp] Than such victors should pollute.--[MS.]

[240] {514}[Byron retains or adopts the old-fashioned pronunciation of the word "Rome" metri gratiâ. Compare The Island, Canto II. line 199.]

[241] ["Le bouillant Bourbon, à la tête des plus intrepides assaillans tenoit, de la main gauche une échelle appuyée centre le mur, et de la droite faisoit signe à ses soldats de monter pour suivre leurs camarades; en ce moment il reçut dans le flanc une balle d'arquebuse qui le traversa de part en part; il tomba à terre, mortellement blessé. On rapporte qu'avant d'expirer il prononca ces mots: 'Officiers et soldats, cacher ma mort à l'ennemi et marchez toujours en avant; la victoire est à vous, mon trépas ne peut vous la ravir.'"--Sac de Rome en 1527, par Jacques Buonaparte, 1836, p. 201.]

[242] {515}["Quand il sentit le coup, se print à cryer: 'Jésus!' et puis il dist 'Hélas! mon Dieu, je suis mort!' Si prit son espée par la poignée en signe de croix en disant tout hault, 'Miserere mei, Deus, secundùm magnam misericordiam tuam.'"--Chronique de Bayart, 1836, cap. lxiv., p. 119. For his rebuke of Charles de Bourbon, "Ne me plaignez pas," etc., vide ante, p. 499.]

[243] ["'M. de Bourbon,' dit un contemporain, 'termina de vie par mort, mais avant fist le devoir de bon, Chrestien; car il se confessa et reçut son Créateur."'--De l'Italie, par Émile Gebhart, 1876, p. 256.]

[244] {516}["While I was at work upon that diabolical task of mine, there came, from time to time, to watch me, some of the Cardinals who were invested in the castle; and most frequently the Cardinal of Ravenna and the Cardinal de' Gaddi. I often told them not to show themselves, since their nasty red caps gave a fair mark for the enemy."--Life of Benvenuto Cellini, translated by J. A. Symonds, 1888, i. 112. See, too, for the flight of the Cardinals, Sac de Rome, par Jacques Buonaparte, Paris, 1836, p. 203.]

[dq] {517} Covered with gore and glory--those good times.--[MS.]

[245] ["Directing my arquebuse where I saw the thickest and most serried troop of fighting men, I aimed exactly at one whom I remarked to be higher than the rest; the fog prevented me from being certain whether he was on horseback or on foot. Then I turned to Alessandro and Cecchino, and bade them discharge their arquebuses, showing them how to avoid being hit by the besiegers. When we had fired two rounds apiece, I crept cautiously up to the walls, and observing a most extraordinary confusion, I discovered afterwards that one of our shots had killed the Constable of Bourbon; and from what I subsequently learned he was the man whom I had first noticed above the heads of the rest." It is a fact "that Bourbon was shot dead near the spot Cellini mentions. But the honour of flying the arquebuse ... cannot be assigned to any one in particular."--Life of Benvenuto Cellini, 1888, i. 114, and note.]

[246] {519}[Compare Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, stanza vi. line 2, Poetical Works, 1900, in. 307, note 3.]

[dr]

'Tis the moment When such I fain would show me.--[MS.]

[247] {520}[Among the Imperial troops which Charles de Bourbon led against Rome were at least six thousand Landsknechts, ardent converts to the Reformed religion, and eager to prove their zeal by the slaughter of Catholics and the destruction of altars and crucifixes. Their leader, George Frundsberg, had set out for Rome with the pious intention of hanging the Pope (see The Popes of Rome, by Leopold Ranke, translated by Sarah Austen, 1866, i. 72). Brantôme (Memoirs de Messire Pierre de Bourdeille.... Leyde, 1722, i. 230) gives a vivid picture of their fanatical savagery: "Leur cruauté ne s'estendit pas seulement sur les personnes, mais sur les marbres et les anciennes statuës. Les Lansquenets, qui nouvellement estoient imbus de la nouvelle Religion, et les Espagnols encore aussi bien que les autres, s'habilloient en Cardinaux et evesques en leur habits Pontificaux et se pourmenoient ainsi parray la Ville."

In the Schmalkald articles, 1530, the pious belief that the Pope was Antichrist became an article of the Lutheran creed. Compare the following extracts, quoted by Hans Schultz in Der Sacco di Roma, 1894, p. 63, from the Historia von der Romischen Bischoff, etc., 1527:

"Der Papst ist für den Verfasser der Antichrist, der durch Lug und Trug seine Herrschaft in der Welt behauptet."

"Quant à l'armée impériale, on n'en vit jamais de plus étonnante.... Allemands et Espagnols, luthériens iconoclastes qui brûlaient les églises, ou furieux mystiques qui brûlaient Juils et Maures, barbares plus raffinés que leur vieux ancêtres les Visigoths, les Vandales et les Huns, ils frappaient l'Italie d'une terreur sans exemple."--De I'italie, by E. Gebliart, chap. vii., "Le Sac de Rome en 1527," p. 245.]

[ds]

Hush! don't let him hear you Or he might take you off before your time.--[MS.]

[248] {521}["We got with the greatest difficulty to the gate of the castle.... I ascended to the keep, and, at the same instant, Pope Clement came in through the corridors into the castle; he had refused to leave the palace of St. Peter earlier, being unable to believe that his enemies would effect their entrance into Rome."--Life of Benvenuto Cellini, translated by J. A. Symonds, 1888, i. 114, 115.

So, too, Jacques Buonaparte (Le Sac de Rome, 1836, p. 202): "Le Pape Clement, avoit entendu les cris des soldats; il se sauvoit précipitamment par un long corridor pratiqué dans un mur double et se laissoit emporter de son palais an château Saint-Ange."]

[249] {526}[Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, was slain by Achilles, who wept over her as she lay a-dying, bewailing her beauty and her daring. For the picture, see Pausanias, Descriptio Græciæ, lib, v. cap. 11, 2.]

[250] {527}[See Gen. vi. 2, the motto of Heaven and Earth, ante, p, 277.]

[251] ["It came to pass the same day, that in Echatane a city of Media, Sara the daughter of Raguel was also reproached by her father's maids; because that she had been married to seven husbands, whom Asmodeus the evil spirit had killed before they had lain with her.... And as he went, he remembered the words of Raphael, and took the ashes of the perfumes, and put the heart and the liver of the fish thereupon, and made smoke therewith. The which smell when the evil spirit had smelled, he fled into the utmost parts of Egypt."--Tobit iii. 7, 8; viii. 2, 3.]

[dt] {528} The first born who burst the winter sun.--[MS.]

[du] ----through the brine.--[MS.]

[252] {533}[Lucifer or Mephistopheles, renamed Cæsar, wears the shape of the Deformed Arnold. It may be that Byron intended to make Olimpia bestow her affections, not on the glorious Achilles, but the witty and interesting Hunchback.]

THE AGE OF BRONZE;

OR,

CARMEN SECULARE ET ANNUS HAUD MIRABILIS.[dv]

"Impar Congressus Achilli."[253]

INTRODUCTION TO THE AGE OF BRONZE.

The Age of Bronze was begun in December, 1822, and finished on January 10, 1823. "I have sent," he writes (letter to Leigh Hunt, Letters, 1901, vi. 160), "to Mrs. S[helley], for the benefit of being copied, a poem of about seven hundred and fifty lines length--The Age of Bronze,--or Carmen Seculare et Annus haud Mirabilis, with this Epigraph--'Impar Congressus Achilli.' It is calculated for the reading part of the million, being all on politics, etc., etc., etc., and a review of the day in general,--in my early English Bards style, but a little more stilted, and somewhat too full of 'epithets of war' and classical and historical allusions. If notes are necessary, they can be added."

On March 5th he forwarded the "Proof in Slips" ("and certainly the Slips are the most conspicuous part of it") to his new publisher, John Hunt; and, on April 1, 1823, The Age of Bronze was published, but not with the author's name.

Ten years had gone by since he had published, only to disclaim, the latest of his boyish satires, The Waltz, and more than six years since he had written, "at the request of Douglas Kinnaird," the stilted and laboured Monody on the Death of ... Sheridan. In the interval (1816-1822) he had essayed any and every measure but the heroic, and, at length, as a tardy recognition of his allegiance to "the great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all feelings, and of all stages of existence" (Observations upon "Observations," Letters, 1901, v. 590), he reverts, as he believes, to his "early English Bards style," the style of Pope.

The brazen age, the "Annus Haud Mirabilis," which the satirist would hold up to scorn, was 1822, the year after Napoleon's death, which witnessed a revolution in Spain, and the Congress of Allied Sovereigns at Verona. Earlier in the year, the publication of Las Cases' Memorial de S^te^ Hélène, and of O'Meara's Napoleon in Exile, or a Voice from St. Helena, had created a sensation on both sides of the Channel. Public opinion had differed as to the system on which Napoleon should be treated--and, since his death, there had been a conflict of evidence as to the manner in which he had been treated, at St. Helena. Tories believed that an almost excessive lenience and indulgence had been wasted on a graceless and thankless intriguer, while the "Opposition," Liberals or Radicals, were moved to indignation at the hardships and restrictions which were ruthlessly and needlessly imposed on a fallen and powerless foe. It was, and is, a very pretty quarrel; and Byron, whose lifelong admiration for his "Héros de Roman" was tempered by reason, approached the Longwood controversy somewhat in the spirit of a partisan.

In The Age of Bronze (sects, iii.-v.) he touches on certain incidents of the "Last Phase" of Napoleon's career, and proceeds to recapitulate, in a sort of Memoria Technica, the chief events of his history, from the dawn at Marengo to the sunset at "bloody and most bootless Waterloo," and draws the unimpeachable moral that "Honesty is the best policy," even when the "game is Empire" and "the stakes are thrones"!

From the rise and fall, the tyranny and captivity of Napoleon, he passes on to the Congress of Allied Powers, which met at Verona in November, 1822.

The "Congress" is the object of his satire. It had assembled with a parade of power and magnificence, and had dispersed with little or nothing accomplished. It was "impar Achilli" (vide ante, p. 535, note 1), an empty menace, ill-matched with the revolutionary spirit, and in pitiful contrast to the Sic volo, sic jubeo of the dead Napoleon.

The immediate and efficient cause of the Congress of Verona was the success of the revolution in Spain. The point at issue between Spanish Liberals and Royalists, or serviles, was the adherence to, or the evasion of, the democratic Constitution of 1812. At the moment the Liberals were in the ascendant, and, as Chateaubriand puts it, had driven King Ferdinand into captivity, at Urgel, in Catalonia, to the tune of the Spanish Marseillaise, "Tragala, Tragala" "swallow it, swallow it," that is, "accept the Constitution." On July 7, 1822, a government was established under the name of the "Supreme Regency of Spain during the Captivity of the King," and, hence, the consternation of the partners of the Holy Alliance, especially France, who conceived, or feigned to conceive, that revolution next door was a source of danger to constitutional government at home. To meet the emergency, a Congress was summoned in the first instance at Vienna, and afterwards at Verona. Thither came the sovereigns of Europe, great and small, accompanied by their chancellors and ministers. The Czar Alexander was attended by Count Nesselrode and Count Pozzo di Borgo; the Emperor Francis of Austria, by Metternich and Prince Esterhazy; the King of Prussia (Frederic William III.), by Count Bernstorff and Baron Humboldt. George IV. of Great Britain, and Louis XVIII. of France, being elderly and gouty, sent as their plenipotentiaries the Duke of Wellington and the Vicomte de Montmorenci, accompanied, and, finally, superseded by, the French ambassador, M. de Chateaubriand. Thither, too, came the smaller fry, Kings of the Two Sicilies and of Sardinia; and last, but not least, Marie Louise of Austria, Archduchess of Parma, ci-devant widow of Napoleon, and wife sub rosâ of her one-eyed chamberlain, Count de Neipperg. They met, they debated, they went to the theatre in state, and finally decided to send monitory despatches to Spain, and to leave to France a free hand to look after her own interests, and to go to war or not, as she was pleased to determine. There was one dissentient, the Duke of Wellington, who refused to sign the procès verbaux. His Britannic Majesty had been advised to let the Spaniards alone, and not to meddle with their internal affairs. The final outcome of the Congress, the French invasion of Spain, could not be foreseen; and, apparently, all that the Congress had accomplished was to refuse to prohibit the exportation of negroes from Africa to America, and to decline to receive the Greek deputies.

As the Morning Chronicle (November 7, 1822) was pleased to put it, "the Royal vultures have been deprived of their anticipated meal."

From the Holy Alliance and its antagonist, "the revolutionary stork," Byron turns to the landed and agricultural "interest" of Great Britain. With the cessation of war and the resumption of cash payments in 1819, prices had fallen some 50 per cent., and rents were beginning to fall. Wheat, which in 1818 had fetched 80s. a quarter, in December, 1822, was quoted at 39s. 11d.; consols were at 80. Poor rates had risen from £2,000,000 in 1792 to £8,000,000 in 1822. How was the distress which these changes involved to be met? By retrenchment and reform, by the repeal of taxes, the reduction of salaries, by the landlords and farmers, who had profited by war prices, submitting to the inevitable reaction; or by sliding scales, by a return to an inflated currency, perhaps by a repudiation of a portion of the funded debt?

The point of Byron's diatribe is that Squire Dives had enjoyed good things during the war, and, now that the war was over, he had no intention to let Lazarus have his turn; that, whoever suffered, it should not be Dives; that patriotism had brought grist to his mill; and that he proposed to suck no small advantage out of peace.

"Year after year they voted cent. per cent., Blood, sweat, and tear-wrung millions--why? for rent? They roared, they dined, they drank, they swore they meant To die for England--why then live?--for rent!"

It is easier to divine the "Sources" and the inspiration of The Age of Bronze than to place the reader au courant with the literary and political causerie of the day. Byron wrote with O'Meara's book at his elbow, and with batches of Galignani's Messenger, the Morning Chronicle, and Cobbett's Weekly Register within his reach. He was under the impression that his lines would appear as an anonymous contribution to The Liberal, and, in any case, he felt that he could speak out, unchecked and uncriticized by friend or publisher. He was, so to speak, unmuzzled.

With regard to the style and quality of his new satire, Byron was under an amiable delusion. His couplets, he imagined, were in his "early English Bards style," but "more stilted." He did not realize that, whatever the intervening years had taken away, they had "left behind" experience and passion, and that he had learned to think and to feel. The fault of the poem is that too much matter is packed into too small a compass, and that, in parts, every line implies a minute acquaintance with contemporary events, and requires an explanatory note. But, even so, in The Age of Bronze Byron has wedded "a striking passage of history" to striking and imperishable verse.

The Age of Bronze was reviewed in the Scots Magazine, April, 1823, N.S., vol. xii. pp. 483-488; the Monthly Review, April, 1823, E.S., vol. 100, pp. 430-433; the Monthly Magazine, May, 1823, vol. 55, pp. 322-325; the Examiner, March 30, 1823; the Literary Chronicle, April 5, 1823; and the Literary Gazette, April 5, 1823.

THE AGE OF BRONZE.

I.

The "good old times"--all times when old are good-- Are gone; the present might be if they would; Great things have been, and are, and greater still Want little of mere mortals but their will:[dw] A wider space, a greener field, is given To those who play their "tricks before high heaven."[254] I know not if the angels weep, but men Have wept enough--for what?--to weep again!

II.

All is exploded--be it good or bad. Reader! remember when thou wert a lad, 10 Then Pitt was all; or, if not all, so much, His very rival almost deemed him such.[255] We--we have seen the intellectual race Of giants stand, like Titans, face to face-- Athos and Ida, with a dashing sea Of eloquence between, which flowed all free, As the deep billows of the Ægean roar Betwixt the Hellenic and the Phrygian shore. But where are they--the rivals! a few feet Of sullen earth divide each winding sheet.[256] 20 How peaceful and how powerful is the grave, Which hushes all! a calm, unstormy wave, Which oversweeps the World. The theme is old Of "Dust to Dust," but half its tale untold: Time tempers not its terrors--still the worm Winds its cold folds, the tomb preserves its form, Varied above, but still alike below; The urn may shine--the ashes will not glow-- Though Cleopatra's mummy cross the sea[257] O'er which from empire she lured Anthony; 30 Though Alexander's urn[258] a show be grown On shores he wept to conquer, though unknown--[259] How vain, how worse than vain, at length appear The madman's wish, the Macedonian's tear! He wept for worlds to conquer--half the earth Knows not his name, or but his death, and birth, And desolation; while his native Greece Hath all of desolation, save its peace. He "wept for worlds to conquer!" he who ne'er Conceived the Globe, he panted not to spare! 40 With even the busy Northern Isle unknown, Which holds his urn--and never knew his throne.

III.

But where is he, the modern, mightier far, Who, born no king, made monarchs draw his car; The new Sesostris, whose unharnessed kings,[260] Freed from the bit, believe themselves with wings, And spurn the dust o'er which they crawled of late, Chained to the chariot of the Chieftain's state? Yes! where is he, "the champion and the child"[261] Of all that's great or little--wise or wild; 50 Whose game was Empire, and whose stakes were thrones; Whose table Earth--whose dice were human bones? Behold the grand result in yon lone Isle, And, as thy nature urges--weep or smile. Sigh to behold the Eagle's lofty rage Reduced to nibble at his narrow cage; Smile to survey the queller of the nations Now daily squabbling o'er disputed rations;[dx][262] Weep to perceive him mourning, as he dines, O'er curtailed dishes and o'er stinted wines; 60 O'er petty quarrels upon petty things. Is this the Man who scourged or feasted kings? Behold the scales in which his fortune hangs, A surgeon's[263] statement, and an earl's[264] harangues! A bust delayed,[265]--a book[266] refused, can shake The sleep of Him who kept the world awake. Is this indeed the tamer of the Great,[dy] Now slave of all could tease or irritate-- The paltry gaoler[267] and the prying spy, The staring stranger with his note-book nigh?[268] 70 Plunged in a dungeon, he had still been great; How low, how little was this middle state, Between a prison and a palace, where How few could feel for what he had to bear! Vain his complaint,--My Lord presents his bill, His food and wine were doled out duly still; Vain was his sickness, never was a clime So free from homicide--to doubt's crime; And the stiff surgeon,[269] who maintained his cause, Hath lost his place, and gained the world's applause. 80 But smile--though all the pangs of brain and heart Disdain, defy, the tardy aid of art; Though, save the few fond friends and imaged face Of that fair boy his Sire shall ne'er embrace, None stand by his low bed--though even the mind Be wavering, which long awed and awes mankind: Smile--for the fettered Eagle breaks his chain, And higher Worlds than this are his again.[270]

IV.

How, if that soaring Spirit still retain A conscious twilight of his blazing reign, 90 How must he smile, on looking down, to see The little that he was and sought to be! What though his Name a wider empire found Than his Ambition, though with scarce a bound; Though first in glory, deepest in reverse, He tasted Empire's blessings and its curse; Though kings, rejoicing in their late escape From chains, would gladly be their Tyrant's ape; How must he smile, and turn to yon lone grave, The proudest Sea-mark that o'ertops the wave! 100 What though his gaoler, duteous to the last, Scarce deemed the coffin's lead could keep him fast, Refusing one poor line[271] along the lid, To date the birth and death of all it hid; That name shall hallow the ignoble shore, A talisman to all save him who bore: The fleets that sweep before the eastern blast Shall hear their sea-boys[272] hail it from the mast; When Victory's Gallic column[273] shall but rise, Like Pompey's pillar[274], in a desert's skies, 110 The rocky Isle that holds or held his dust, Shall crown the Atlantic like the Hero's bust, And mighty Nature o'er his obsequies Do more than niggard Envy still denies. But what are these to him? Can Glory's lust Touch the freed spirit or the fettered dust? Small care hath he of what his tomb consists; Nought if he sleeps--nor more if he exists: Alike the better-seeing Shade will smile On the rude cavern[275] of the rocky isle, 120 As if his ashes found their latest home In Rome's Pantheon or Gaul's mimic dome[276]. He wants not this; but France shall feel the want Of this last consolation, though so scant: Her Honour--Fame--and Faith demand his bones, To rear above a Pyramid of thrones; Or carried onward in the battle's van, To form, like Guesclin's dust, her Talisman[277]. But be it as it is--the time may come His name shall beat the alarm, like Ziska's drum[278]. 130

V.

Oh Heaven! of which he was in power a feature; Oh Earth! of which he was a noble creature; Thou Isle! to be remembered long and well, That saw'st the unfledged eaglet chip his shell! Ye Alps which viewed him in his dawning flights Hover, the Victor of a hundred fights! Thou Rome, who saw'st thy Cæsar's deeds outdone! Alas! why passed he too the Rubicon-- The Rubicon of Man's awakened rights, To herd with vulgar kings and parasites? 140 Egypt! from whose all dateless tombs arose Forgotten Pharaohs from their long repose, And shook within their pyramids to hear A new Cambyses thundering in their ear; While the dark shades of Forty Ages stood Like startled giants by Nile's famous flood[279]; Or from the Pyramid's tall pinnacle Beheld the desert peopled, as from hell, With clashing hosts, who strewed the barren sand, To re-manure the uncultivated land! 150 Spain! which, a moment mindless of the Cid, Beheld his banner flouting thy Madrid[280]! Austria! which saw thy twice-ta'en capital[281] Twice spared to be the traitress of his fall! Ye race of Frederic!--Frederics but in name And falsehood--heirs to all except his fame: Who, crushed at Jena, crouched at Berlin[282], fell First, and but rose to follow! Ye who dwell Where Kosciusko dwelt, remembering yet The unpaid amount of Catherine's bloody debt[283]! 160 Poland! o'er which the avenging Angel past, But left thee as he found thee,[284] still a waste, Forgetting all thy still enduring claim, Thy lotted people and extinguished name, Thy sigh for freedom, thy long-flowing tear, That sound that crashes in the tyrant's ear-- Kosciusko![285] On--on--on--the thirst of War Gasps for the gore of serfs and of their Czar. The half barbaric Moscow's minarets Gleam in the sun, but 'tis a sun that sets! 170 Moscow! thou limit of his long career, For which rude Charles had wept his frozen tear[286] To see in vain--he saw thee--how? with spire And palace fuel to one common fire. To this the soldier lent his kindling match, To this the peasant gave his cottage thatch, To this the merchant flung his hoarded store, The prince his hall--and Moscow was no more! Sublimest of volcanoes! Etna's flame Pales before thine, and quenchless Hecla's tame; 180 Vesuvius shows his blaze,[287] an usual sight For gaping tourists, from his hackneyed height:[dz] Thou stand'st alone unrivalled, till the Fire To come, in which all empires shall expire!

Thou other Element! as strong and stern, To teach a lesson conquerors will not learn!-- Whose icy wing flapped o'er the faltering foe, Till fell a hero with each flake of snow; How did thy numbing beak and silent fang, Pierce, till hosts perished with a single pang! 190 In vain shall Seine look up along his banks For the gay thousands of his dashing ranks! In vain shall France recall beneath her vines Her Youth--their blood flows faster than her wines; Or stagnant in their human ice remains In frozen mummies on the Polar plains. In vain will Italy's broad sun awaken Her offspring chilled; its beams are now forsaken. Of all the trophies gathered from the war, What shall return? the Conqueror's broken car![288] 200 The Conqueror's yet unbroken heart! Again The horn of Roland[289] sounds, and not in vain. Lutzen, where fell the Swede of victory,[290] Beholds him conquer, but, alas! not die: Dresden[291] surveys three despots fly once more Before their sovereign,--sovereign as before;[ea] But there exhausted Fortune quits the field, And Leipsic's[292] treason bids the unvanquished yield; The Saxon jackal leaves the lion's side To turn the bear's, and wolf's, and fox's guide; 210 And backward to the den of his despair The forest monarch shrinks, but finds no lair!

Oh ye! and each, and all! Oh France! who found Thy long fair fields ploughed up as hostile ground, Disputed foot by foot, till Treason, still His only victor, from Montmartre's hill[293] Looked down o'er trampled Paris! and thou Isle, Which seest Etruria from thy ramparts smile, Thou momentary shelter of his pride, Till wooed by danger, his yet weeping bride! 220 Oh, France! retaken by a single march, Whose path was through one long triumphal arch! Oh bloody and most bootless Waterloo! Which proves how fools may have their fortune too, Won half by blunder, half by treachery: Oh dull Saint Helen! with thy gaoler nigh-- Hear! hear Prometheus[294] from his rock appeal To Earth,--Air,--Ocean,--all that felt or feel His power and glory, all who yet shall hear A name eternal as the rolling year; 230 He teaches them the lesson taught so long, So oft, so vainly--learn to do no wrong! A single step into the right had made This man the Washington of worlds betrayed: A single step into the wrong has given His name a doubt to all the winds of heaven; The reed of Fortune, and of thrones the rod, Of Fame the Moloch or the demigod; His country's Cæsar, Europe's Hannibal, Without their decent dignity of fall. 240 Yet Vanity herself had better taught A surer path even to the fame he sought, By pointing out on History's fruitless page Ten thousand conquerors for a single sage. While Franklin's quiet memory climbs to Heaven, Calming the lightning which he thence hath riven, Or drawing from the no less kindled earth Freedom and peace to that which boasts his birth;[295] While Washington's a watchword, such as ne'er Shall sink while there's an echo left to air:[296] 250 While even the Spaniard's thirst of gold and war Forgets Pizarro to shout Bolivar![297] Alas! why must the same Atlantic wave Which wafted freedom gird a tyrant's grave-- The king of kings, and yet of slaves the slave, Who burst the chains of millions to renew The very fetters which his arm broke through, And crushed the rights of Europe and his own, To flit between a dungeon and a throne?

VI.

But 'twill not be--the spark's awakened--lo! 260 The swarthy Spaniard feels his former glow; The same high spirit which beat back the Moor Through eight long ages of alternate gore Revives--and where? in that avenging clime Where Spain was once synonymous with crime, Where Cortes' and Pizarro's banner flew, The infant world redeems her name of "New." 'Tis the old aspiration breathed afresh, To kindle souls within degraded flesh, Such as repulsed the Persian from the shore 270 Where Greece was--No! she still is Greece once more. One common cause makes myriads of one breast, Slaves of the East, or helots of the West: On Andes'[298] and on Athos' peaks unfurled, The self-same standard streams o'er either world: The Athenian[299] wears again Harmodius' sword; The Chili chief[300] abjures his foreign lord; The Spartan knows himself once more a Greek,[301] Young Freedom plumes the crest of each cacique; Debating despots, hemmed on either shore, 280 Shrink vainly from the roused Atlantic's roar; Through Calpe's strait the rolling tides advance, Sweep slightly by the half-tamed land of France, Dash o'er the old Spaniard's cradle, and would fain Unite Ausonia to the mighty main: But driven from thence awhile, yet not for aye, Break o'er th' Ægean, mindful of the day Of Salamis!--there, there the waves arise, Not to be lulled by tyrant victories. Lone, lost, abandoned in their utmost need 290 By Christians, unto whom they gave their creed, The desolated lands, the ravaged isle, The fostered feud encouraged to beguile, The aid evaded, and the cold delay, Prolonged but in the hope to make a prey[302];-- These, these shall tell the tale, and Greece can show The false friend worse than the infuriate foe. But this is well: Greeks only should free Greece, Not the barbarian, with his masque of peace. How should the Autocrat of bondage be 300 The king of serfs, and set the nations free? Better still serve the haughty Mussulman, Than swell the Cossaque's prowling caravan; Better still toil for masters, than await, The slave of slaves, before a Russian gate,-- Numbered by hordes, a human capital, A live estate, existing but for thrall, Lotted by thousands, as a meet reward For the first courtier in the Czar's regard; While their immediate owner never tastes 310 His sleep, sans dreaming of Siberia's wastes: Better succumb even to their own despair, And drive the Camel--than purvey the Bear.

VII.

But not alone within the hoariest clime Where Freedom dates her birth with that of Time, And not alone where, plunged in night, a crowd Of Incas darken to a dubious cloud[eb], The dawn revives: renowned, romantic Spain Holds back the invader from her soil again. Not now the Roman tribe nor Punic horde[ec] 320 Demands her fields as lists to prove the sword; Not now the Vandal or the Visigoth Pollute the plains, alike abhorring both[ed]; Nor old Pelayo[303] on his mountain rears The warlike fathers of a thousand years. That seed is sown and reaped, as oft the Moor Sighs to remember on his dusky shore. Long in the peasant's song or poet's page Has dwelt the memory of Abencerrage; The Zegri[304], and the captive victors, flung 330 Back to the barbarous realm from whence they sprung. But these are gone--their faith, their swords, their sway, Yet left more anti-christian foes than they[ee]; The bigot monarch, and the butcher priest[305], The Inquisition, with her burning feast, The Faith's red "Auto," fed with human fuel, While sate the catholic Moloch, calmly cruel, Enjoying, with inexorable eye,[ef] That fiery festival of Agony! The stern or feeble sovereign, one or both 340 By turns; the haughtiness whose pride was sloth; The long degenerate noble; the debased Hidalgo, and the peasant less disgraced, But more degraded; the unpeopled realm; The once proud navy which forgot the helm; The once impervious phalanx disarrayed; The idle forge that formed Toledo's blade; The foreign wealth that flowed on every shore, Save hers who earned it with the native's gore; The very language which might vie with Rome's, 350 And once was known to nations like their homes, Neglected or forgotten:--such was Spain; But such she is not, nor shall be again. These worst, these home invaders, felt and feel The new Numantine soul of old Castile[eg], Up! up again! undaunted Tauridor! The bull of Phalaris renews his roar[eh]; Mount, chivalrous Hidalgo! not in vain Revive the cry--"Iago! and close Spain!"[306] Yes, close her with your arméd bosoms round, 360 And form the barrier which Napoleon found,-- The exterminating war, the desert plain, The streets without a tenant, save the slain; The wild Sierra, with its wilder troop[ei] Of vulture-plumed Guerrillas, on the stoop[ej] For their incessant prey; the desperate wall Of Saragossa, mightiest in her fall; The Man nerved to a spirit, and the Maid Waving her more than Amazonian blade[307]; The knife of Arragon, Toledo's steel; 370 The famous lance of chivalrous Castile[308]; The unerring rifle of the Catalan; The Andalusian courser in the van; The torch to make a Moscow of Madrid; And in each heart the spirit of the Cid:-- Such have been, such shall be, such are. Advance, And win--not Spain! but thine own freedom, France!

VIII.

But lo! a Congress[309]! What! that hallowed name Which freed the Atlantic! May we hope the same For outworn Europe? With the sound arise, 380 Like Samuel's shade to Saul's monarchic eyes, The prophets of young Freedom, summoned far From climes of Washington and Bolivar; Henry, the forest-born Demosthenes, Whose thunder shook the Philip of the seas[310]; And stoic Franklin's energetic shade, Robed in the lightnings which his hand allayed; And Washington, the tyrant-tamer, wake, To bid us blush for these old chains, or break. But who compose this Senate of the few 390 That should redeem the many? Who renew This consecrated name, till now assigned To councils held to benefit mankind? Who now assemble at the holy call? The blest Alliance, which says three are all! An earthly Trinity! which wears the shape Of Heaven's, as man is mimicked by the ape. A pious Unity! in purpose one-- To melt three fools to a Napoleon[ek]. Why, Egypt's Gods were rational to these; 400 Their dogs and oxen knew their own degrees, And, quiet in their kennel or their shed, Cared little, so that they were duly fed; But these, more hungry, must have something more-- The power to bark and bite, to toss and gore. Ah, how much happier were good Æsop's frogs Than we! for ours are animated logs, With ponderous malice swaying to and fro, And crushing nations with a stupid blow; All dully anxious to leave little work 410 Unto the revolutionary stork.

IX.

Thrice blest Verona! since the holy three With their imperial presence shine on thee! Honoured by them, thy treacherous site forgets[el] The vaunted tomb of "all the Capulets!"[311] Thy Scaligers--for what was "Dog the Great," "Can Grande,"[312] (which I venture to translate,) To these sublimer pugs? Thy poet too, Catullus, whose old laurels yield to new;[313] Thine amphitheatre, where Romans sate; 420 And Dante's exile sheltered by thy gate; Thy good old man, whose world was all within Thy wall, nor knew the country held him in;[314] Would that the royal guests it girds about Were so far like, as never to get out! Aye, shout! inscribe![315] rear monuments of shame, To tell Oppression that the world is tame! Crowd to the theatre with loyal rage, The comedy is not upon the stage; The show is rich in ribandry and stars, 430 Then gaze upon it through thy dungeon bars; Clap thy permitted palms, kind Italy, For thus much still thy fettered hands are free!

X.

Resplendent sight! Behold the coxcomb Czar,[316] The Autocrat of waltzes[317] and of war! As eager for a plaudit as a realm, And just as fit for flirting as the helm; A Calmuck beauty with a Cossack wit, And generous spirit, when 'tis not frost-bit; Now half dissolving to a liberal thaw,[em] 440 But hardened back whene'er the morning's raw; With no objection to true Liberty, Except that it would make the nations free. How well the imperial dandy prates of peace! How fain, if Greeks would be his slaves, free Greece! How nobly gave he back the Poles their Diet, Then told pugnacious Poland to be quiet! How kindly would he send the mild Ukraine, With all her pleasant Pulks,[318] to lecture Spain! How royally show off in proud Madrid 450 His goodly person, from the South long hid! A blessing cheaply purchased, the world knows, By having Muscovites for friends or foes. Proceed, thou namesake of great Philip's son! La Harpe, thine Aristotle, beckons on;[319] And that which Scythia was to him of yore Find with thy Scythians on Iberia's shore. Yet think upon, thou somewhat agéd youth, Thy predecessor on the banks of Pruth; Thou hast to aid thee, should his lot be thine, 460 Many an old woman,[320] but not Catherine.[321] Spain, too, hath rocks, and rivers, and defiles-- The Bear may rush into the Lion's toils. Fatal to Goths are Xeres' sunny fields;[322] Think'st thou to thee Napoleon's victor yields? Better reclaim thy deserts, turn thy swords To ploughshares, shave and wash thy Bashkir[323] hordes, Redeem thy realms from slavery and the knout, Than follow headlong in the fatal route, To infest the clime whose skies and laws are pure 470 With thy foul legions. Spain wants no manure: Her soil is fertile, but she feeds no foe: Her vultures, too, were gorged not long ago; And wouldst thou furnish them with fresher prey? Alas! thou wilt not conquer, but purvey. I am Diogenes, though Russ and Hun[324] Stand between mine and many a myriad's sun; But were I not Diogenes, I'd wander Rather a worm than such an Alexander! Be slaves who will, the cynic shall be free; 480 His tub hath tougher walls than Sinopè:[en] Still will he hold his lantern up to scan The face of monarchs for an "honest man."[325]

XI.

And what doth Gaul, the all-prolific land Of ne plus ultra ultras and their band Of mercenaries? and her noisy chambers And tribune, which each orator first clambers Before he finds a voice, and when 'tis found, Hears "the lie" echo for his answer round? Our British Commons sometimes deign to "hear!" 490 A Gallic senate hath more tongue than ear; Even Constant,[326] their sole master of debate, Must fight next day his speech to vindicate. But this costs little to true Franks, who'd rather Combat than listen, were it to their father. What is the simple standing of a shot, To listening long, and interrupting not? Though this was not the method of old Rome, When Tully fulmined o'er each vocal dome, Demosthenes has sanctioned the transaction, 500 In saying eloquence meant "Action, action!"

XII.

But where's the monarch?[327] hath he dined? or yet Groans beneath indigestion's heavy debt? Have revolutionary patés risen, And turned the royal entrails to a prison? Have discontented movements stirred the troops? Or have no movements followed traitorous soups? Have Carbonaro[328] cooks not carbonadoed Each course enough? or doctors dire dissuaded Repletion? Ah! in thy dejected looks 510 I read all France's treason in her cooks! Good classic Louis! is it, canst thou say, Desirable to be the "Desiré?" Why wouldst thou leave calm Hartwell's green abode, Apician table, and Horatian ode, To rule a people who will not be ruled, And love much rather to be scourged than schooled? Ah! thine was not the temper or the taste For thrones; the table sees thee better placed: A mild Epicurean, formed, at best, 520 To be a kind host and as good a guest, To talk of Letters, and to know by heart One half the Poet's, all the Gourmand's art; A scholar always, now and then a wit, And gentle when Digestion may permit;-- But not to govern lands enslaved or free; The gout was martyrdom enough for thee.

XIII.

Shall noble Albion pass without a phrase From a bold Briton in her wonted praise? "Arts--arms--and George--and glory--and the Isles, 530 And happy Britain, wealth, and Freedom's smiles, White cliffs, that held invasion far aloof, Contented subjects, all alike tax-proof, Proud Wellington, with eagle beak so curled,[eo] That nose, the hook where he suspends the world![329] And Waterloo, and trade, and----(hush! not yet A syllable of imposts or of debt)---- And ne'er (enough) lamented Castlereagh,[330] Whose penknife slit a goose-quill t'other day--[ep] And, 'pilots who have weathered every storm'--[331] 540 (But, no, not even for rhyme's sake, name Reform)." These are the themes thus sung so oft before, Methinks we need not sing them any more; Found in so many volumes far and near, There's no occasion you should find them here. Yet something may remain perchance to chime With reason, and, what's stranger still, with rhyme.[eq] Even this thy genius, Canning![332] may permit, Who, bred a statesman, still wast born a wit, And never, even in that dull House, couldst tame 550 To unleavened prose thine own poetic flame; Our last, our best, our only orator, Even I can praise thee--Tories do no more: Nay, not so much;--they hate thee, man, because Thy Spirit less upholds them than it awes. The hounds will gather to their huntsman's hollo, And where he leads the duteous pack will follow; But not for love mistake their yelling cry; Their yelp for game is not an eulogy; Less faithful far than the four-footed pack, 560 A dubious scent would lure the bipeds back. Thy saddle-girths are not yet quite secure, Nor royal stallion's feet extremely sure; The unwieldy old white horse is apt at last To stumble, kick--and now and then stick fast With his great Self and Rider in the mud; But what of that? the animal shows blood.

XIV.

Alas, the Country! how shall tongue or pen Bewail her now _un_country gentlemen? The last to bid the cry of warfare cease, 570 The first to make a malady of peace. For what were all these country patriots born? To hunt--and vote--and raise the price of corn? But corn, like every mortal thing, must fall, Kings--Conquerors--and markets most of all. And must ye fall with every ear of grain? Why would you trouble Buonaparté's reign? He was your great Triptolemus;[333] his vices Destroyed but realms, and still maintained your prices; He amplified to every lord's content 580 The grand agrarian alchymy, high rent.[er] Why did the tyrant stumble on the Tartars, And lower wheat to such desponding quarters? Why did you chain him on yon Isle so lone? The man was worth much more upon his throne. True, blood and treasure boundlessly were spilt, But what of that? the Gaul may bear the guilt; But bread was high, the farmer paid his way, And acres told upon the appointed day.[es] But where is now the goodly audit ale? 590 The purse-proud tenant, never known to fail? The farm which never yet was left on hand? The marsh reclaimed to most improving land? The impatient hope of the expiring lease? The doubling rental? What an evil's peace! In vain the prize excites the ploughman's skill, In vain the Commons pass their patriot bill;[334] The Landed Interest--(you may understand The phrase much better leaving out the land)-- The land self-interest groans from shore to shore, 600 For fear that plenty should attain the poor.[et] Up, up again, ye rents, exalt your notes, Or else the Ministry will lose their votes, And patriotism, so delicately nice, Her loaves will lower to the market price;[eu] For ah! "the loaves and fishes," once so high, Are gone--their oven closed, their ocean dry,[ev] And nought remains of all the millions spent, Excepting to grow moderate and content. They who are not so, had their turn--and turn 610 About still flows from Fortune's equal urn; Now let their virtue be its own reward, And share the blessings which themselves prepared. See these inglorious Cincinnati swarm, Farmers of war, dictators of the farm; Their ploughshare was the sword in hireling hands, Their fields manured by gore of other lands; Safe in their barns, these Sabine tillers sent Their brethren out to battle--why? for rent! Year after year they voted cent. per cent. 620 Blood, sweat, and tear-wrung millions--why?--for rent! They roared, they dined, they drank, they swore they meant To die for England--why then live?--for rent! The peace has made one general malcontent Of these high-market patriots; war was rent! Their love of country, millions all mis-spent, How reconcile? by reconciling rent! And will they not repay the treasures lent? No: down with everything, and up with rent! Their good, ill, health, wealth, joy, or discontent, 630 Being, end, aim, religion--rent--rent--rent! Thou sold'st thy birthright, Esau! for a mess; Thou shouldst have gotten more, or eaten less; Now thou hast swilled thy pottage, thy demands Are idle; Israel says the bargain stands. Such, landlords! was your appetite for war, And gorged with blood, you grumble at a scar! What! would they spread their earthquake even o'er cash? And when land crumbles, bid firm paper crash?[335] So rent may rise, bid Bank and Nation fall, 640 And found on 'Change a Fundling Hospital? Lo, Mother Church, while all religion writhes, Like Niobe, weeps o'er her offspring--Tithes;[336] The Prelates go to--where the Saints have gone, And proud pluralities subside to one; Church, state, and faction wrestle in the dark, Tossed by the deluge in their common ark. Shorn of her bishops, banks, and dividends, Another Babel soars--but Britain ends. And why? to pamper the self-seeking wants, 650 And prop the hill of these agrarian ants. "Go to these ants, thou sluggard, and be wise;" Admire their patience through each sacrifice, Till taught to feel the lesson of their pride, The price of taxes and of homicide; Admire their justice, which would fain deny The debt of nations:--pray who made it high?[337]

XV.

Or turn to sail between those shifting rocks, The new Symplegades[338]--the crushing Stocks, Where Midas might again his wish behold 660 In real paper or imagined gold. That magic palace of Alcina[339] shows More wealth than Britain ever had to lose, Were all her atoms of unleavened ore, And all her pebbles from Pactolus' shore. There Fortune plays, while Rumour holds the stake And the World trembles to bid brokers break. How rich is Britain! not indeed in mines, Or peace or plenty, corn or oil, or wines; No land of Canaan, full of milk and honey, 670 Nor (save in paper shekels) ready money: But let us not to own the truth refuse, Was ever Christian land so rich in Jews? Those parted with their teeth to good King John, And now, ye kings, they kindly draw your own; All states, all things, all sovereigns they control, And waft a loan "from Indus to the pole." The banker--broker--baron[340]--brethren, speed To aid these bankrupt tyrants in their need. Nor these alone; Columbia feels no less 680 Fresh speculations follow each success; And philanthropic Israel deigns to drain Her mild per-centage from exhausted Spain. Not without Abraham's seed can Russia march; Tis gold, not steel, that rears the conqueror's arch. Two Jews, a chosen people, can command In every realm their Scripture-promised land:-- Two Jews, keep down the Romans,[341] and uphold The accurséd Hun, more brutal than of old: Two Jews,--but not Samaritans--direct 690 The world, with all the spirit of their sect. What is the happiness of earth to them? A congress forms their "New Jerusalem," Where baronies and orders both invite-- Oh, holy Abraham! dost thou see the sight? Thy followers mingling with these royal swine, Who spit not "on their Jewish gaberdine," But honour them as portion of the show-- (Where now, oh Pope! is thy forsaken toe? Could it not favour Judah with some kicks? 700 Or has it ceased to "kick against the pricks?") On Shylock's shore behold them stand afresh, To cut from Nation's hearts their "pound of flesh."

XVI.

Strange sight this Congress! destined to unite All that's incongruous, all that's opposite. I speak not of the Sovereigns--they're alike, A common coin as ever mint could strike; But those who sway the puppets, pull the strings, Have more of motley than their heavy kings. Jews, authors, generals, charlatans, combine, 710 While Europe wonders at the vast design: There Metternich, power's foremost parasite, Cajoles; there Wellington forgets to fight; There Chateaubriand[342] forms new books of martyrs; And subtle Greeks[343] intrigue for stupid Tartars; There Montmorenci, the sworn foe to charters,[344] Turns a diplomatist of great éclat, To furnish articles for the "Débats;" Of war so certain--yet not quite so sure As his dismissal in the "Moniteur." 720 Alas! how could his cabinet thus err! Can Peace be worth an ultra-minister? He falls indeed, perhaps to rise again, "Almost as quickly as he conquered Spain.[345]"

XVII.

Enough of this--a sight more mournful woos The averted eye of the reluctant Muse. The Imperial daughter, the Imperial bride,[346] The imperial Victim--sacrifice to pride; The mother of the Hero's hope, the boy, The young Astyanax of Modern Troy;[347] 730 The still pale shadow of the loftiest Queen That Earth has yet to see, or e'er hath seen; She flits amidst the phantoms of the hour, The theme of pity, and the wreck of power. Oh, cruel mockery! Could not Austria spare A daughter? What did France's widow there? Her fitter place was by St. Helen's wave, Her only throne is in Napoleon's grave. But, no,--she still must hold a petty reign, Flanked by her formidable chamberlain; 740 The martial Argus, whose not hundred eyes[348] Must watch her through these paltry pageantries. What though she share no more, and shared in vain, A sway surpassing that of Charlemagne, Which swept from Moscow to the southern seas! Yet still she rules the pastoral realm of cheese, Where Parma views the traveller resort, To note the trappings of her mimic court. But she appears! Verona sees her shorn Of all her beams--while nations gaze and mourn-- 750 Ere yet her husband's ashes have had time To chill in their inhospitable clime; (If e'er those awful ashes can grow cold;-- But no,--their embers soon will burst the mould;) She comes!--the Andromache (but not Racine's, Nor Homer's,)--Lo! on Pyrrhus' arm[349] she leans![ew] Yes! the right arm, yet red from Waterloo, Which cut her lord's half-shattered sceptre through, Is offered and accepted? Could a slave Do more? or less?--and he in his new grave! 760 Her eye--her cheek--betray no inward strife, And the Ex-Empress grows as Ex a wife! So much for human ties in royal breasts! Why spare men's feelings, when their own are jests?

XVIII.

But, tired of foreign follies, I turn home, And sketch the group--the picture's yet to come. My Muse 'gan weep, but, ere a tear was spilt, She caught Sir William Curtis in a kilt![350] While thronged the chiefs of every Highland clan To hail their brother, Vich Ian Alderman! 770 Guildhall grows Gael, and echoes with Erse roar, While all the Common Council cry "Claymore!"[351] To see proud Albyn's tartans as a belt Gird the gross sirloin of a city Celt, She burst into a laughter so extreme, That I awoke--and lo! it was no dream!

Here, reader, will we pause:--if there's no harm in This first--you'll have, perhaps, a second "Carmen."

B. J^n 10^th^ 1823.

FOOTNOTES:

[dv] {535} Annus Mirabilis.--MS.

[253] [It has been suggested by Dr. Garnett (late keeper of the Printed Books in the British Museum) that the motto to The Age of Bronze may, possibly, contain a reference to the statue of Achilles, "inscribed by the women of England to Arthur, Duke of Wellington, and his brave companions in arms," which was erected in Hyde Park, June 18, 1822.]

[dw] {541} Want nothing of the little, but their will.--[MS.]

[254] [Measure for Measure, act ii. sc. 2, line 121.]

[255] [Fox used to say, "I never want a word, but Pitt never wants the word."]

[256] [The grave of Fox, in Westminster Abbey is within eighteen inches of that of Pitt. Compare--

"Nor yet suppress the generous sigh. Because his rival slumbers nigh; Nor be thy requiescat dumb, Lest it be said o'er Fox's tomb.

Where,--taming thought to human pride!-- The mighty chiefs sleep side by side. Drop upon Fox's grave the tear, 'Twill trickle to his rival's bier," etc.

Marmion, by Sir Walter Scott, Introduction to Canto I. lines 125-128, 184-188.

Compare, too, Macaulay on Warren Hastings: "In that temple of silence and reconciliation, where the enmities of twenty generations lie buried, in the Great Abbey ... the dust of the illustrious accused should have mingled with the dust of the illustrious accusers. This was not to be."--Critical and Historical Essays, 1843, iii. 465.]

[257] {542}[The Cleopatra whose mummy is preserved in the British Museum was a member of the Theban Archon family. Her date was circ. A.D. 100.]

[258] [According to Strabo (Rerum Geog., xvii. ed. 1807, ii. 1127), Ptolemæus Soter brought Alexander's body back from Babylon, and buried it in Alexandria, in the spot afterwards known as the Soma. There it lay, in Strabo's time, not in its original body-mask of golden chase-work, which Ptolemæus Cocces had stolen, but in a casket of glass. Great men "turned to pilgrims" to visit Alexander's grave. Augustus crowned the still life-like body with a golden laurel-wreath, and scattered flowers over the tomb: Caligula stole the breastplate, and wore it during his pantomimic triumphs; Septimius Severus buried in the sarcophagus the writings of the priests, and a clue to the hieroglyphics. Finally, the sarcophagus and its sacred remains disappear, and Alexander himself passes into the land of fable and romance. In 1801 a sarcophagus came into the possession of the English Army, and was presented by George III. to the British Museum. Hieroglyphics were as yet undeciphered, and, in 1805, the traveller Edward Daniel Clarke published a quarto monograph (The Tomb of Alexander, etc.), in which he proves, to his own satisfaction, that "this surprising sarcophagus in one entire block of green Egyptian breccia," had once contained the ashes of Alexander the Great. Byron knew Clarke, and, no doubt, respected his authority (see letter December 15, 1813, Letters, 1898, ii. 308); and, hence, the description of "Alexander's urn" as "a show." The sarcophagus which has, since 1844, been assigned to its rightful occupant, Nectanebus II. (Nekht-neb-f), is a conspicuous object in the Egyptian Gallery of the British Museum. It is a curious coincidence that in the Ethiopic version of the Pseudo-Callisthenes, Alexander is said to have been the son of Nectanebus II., who threw a spell over Olympias, the wife of Philip of Macedon, and won her love by the exercise of nefarious magic. (See the Life and Exploits of Alexander the Great, by E. A. Wallis Budge, Litt.D., F.S.A., Keeper of the Egyptian and Assyrian Antiquities in the British Museum, 1896, i, ix.)]

[259] {543}[Arrian (Alexand. Anabasis, vii. i, 4, ed. 1849, p. 165) says that Alexander would never have rested content with what he had acquired; "that if he had annexed Europe to Asia, and the British Isles to Europe, he would have sought out some no-man's-land to conquer." So insatiable was his ambition, that when the courtly philosopher Anaxarchus explained to him the theory of the plurality of worlds he bemoaned himself because as yet he was not master of one. "Heu me, inquit, miserum, quod ne uno quidem adhuc potitus sum."--Valerius Maximus, De Dictis, etc., lib. viii. cap. xiv. ex. 2. See, too, Juvenal, x. 168, 169. Burton (Anatomy of Melancholy, 1893, i. 64) denies that this was spoken like a prince, but, as wise Seneca censures him [on another occasion, however], 'twas vox iniquissima et stultissima, "'twas spoken like a bedlam fool."]

[260] [Compare Werner, act iii. sc. I, lines 288, 289, "When he [Sesostris] went into the temple or the city, his custom was to cause the horses to be unharnessed out of his chariot, and to yoke four kings and four princes to the chariot-pole."--Diodori Siculi Bibl. Hist., lib. i. p. 37, C, ed. 1604, p. 53.]

[261] {544}[In a speech delivered in the House of Commons, February 17, 1800, "On the continuance of the War with France," Pitt described Napoleon as the "child and champion of Jacobinism." Coleridge, who was reporting for the Morning Post, took down Pitt's words as "nursling and champion" (unpublished MS. note-book)--a finer and more original phrase, but substituted "child" for "nursling" in his "copy." (See Letters of S. T. Coleridge, 1895, i. 327, note i.) The phrase was much in vogue, e.g. "All that survives of Jacobinism in Europe looks up to him as its 'child and champion.'"-Quarterly Review, xvi. 48.]

[dx] Lines 55-58 not in MS.

[262] [O'Meara, under the dates August 19, September 5, September 7, 13, etc. (see Napoleon in Exile, 1888, i. 95, 96, 114, 121, etc.), reports complaints on the part of Napoleon with regard to the reduction of expenses suggested or enforced by Sir Hudson Lowe, and gives specimens of the nature and detail of these reductions. For a refutation of O'Meara's facts and figures (as given in Napoleon in Exile, 1822, ii. Appendix V.), see the History of the Captivity of Napoleon, by William Forsyth, Q.C., 1853, iii. 121, sq.; see, too, Sir Hudson Lowe and Napoleon, by R. C. Seaton, 1898. It is a fact that Sir Hudson Lowe, on his own responsibility, increased the allowance for the household expenses of Napoleon and his staff from £8000 to £12,000 a year, and it is also perfectly true that opportunities for complaint were welcomed by the ex-Emperor and his mimic court. It was la politique de Longwood to make the worst of everything, on the off-chance that England would get to hear, and that Radical indignation and Radical sympathy would gild, perhaps unbar, the eagle's cage. It is true, too, that a large sum of money was spent on behalf of a prisoner of war whom the stalwarts of the Tory party would have executed in cold blood. But it is also true that Napoleon had no need to manufacture complaints, that he was exposed to unnecessary discomforts, that useless and irritating precautions were taken to prevent his escape, that the bottles of champagne and madeira, the fowls and the bundles of wood were counted with an irritating preciseness, inconsistent with the general scale of expenditure, which saved a little waste, and covered both principals and agents with ridicule. It is said that O'Meara, in his published volumes, manipulated his evidence, and that his own letters give him the lie; but there is a mass of correspondence, published and unpublished, between him and Sir Thomas Reade, Sir Hudson Lowe, and Major Gorrequer (see Addit. MSS. Brit. Mus. 20,145), which remains as it was written, and which testifies to facts which might have been and were not refuted on the spot and at the moment. With regard to "disputed rations," the Governor should have been armed with a crushing answer to any and every complaint. As it was, he was able to show that champagne was allowed to "Napoleon Buonaparte," and that he did not exceed his allowance.]

[263] {545}[In his correspondence with Lord Bathurst, Sir Hudson Lowe more than once quotes "statements" made by Dr. O'Meara (vide post, p. 546). But the surgeon may be William Warden (1777-1849), whose Letters written on board His Majesty's Ship the Northumberland, and at St, Helena, were published in 1816.]

[264] [Henry, Earl of Bathurst (1762-1834), Secretary for War and the Colonies, replied to Lord Holland's motion "for papers connected with the personal treatment of Napoleon Buonaparte at St. Helena," March 18, 1817. Parl. Deb., vol. 35, pp. 1137-1166.]

[265] [A bust of Napoleon's son, the Duke of Reichstadt, had been forwarded to St. Helena. O'Meara (Napoleon in Exile, etc., 1822, i. p. 100) says "that it had been in the island fourteen days, during several of which it was at Plantation House," before it was transferred to Longwood. Forsyth (History of Napoleon in Captivity, 1853, ii. 146) denies this statement. It was, no doubt, detained on board ship for inspection, but not at Plantation House.]

[266] [The book in question was The Substance of some Letters written by an Englishman in Paris, 1816 (by J. C. Hobhouse). It was inscribed "To the Emperor Napoleon." Lowe's excuse was that Hobhouse had submitted the work to his inspection, and suggested that if the Governor did not think fit to give it to Napoleon, he might place it in his own library. (See Napoleon in Exile, 1822, i. 85-87; and Forsyth, 1853, i. 193.)]

[dy] Weep to survey the Tamer of the Great.--[MS.]

[267] [Lieutenant-General Sir Hudson Lowe, K.C.B. (1769-1844), was the son of an army surgeon, John Hudson Lowe. His mother was Irish. He was appointed Governor of St. Helena, August 23, 1815, and landed in the island April 14, 1816. Byron met him at Lord Holland's, before he sailed for St. Helena, and was not impressed by his remarks on Napoleon and Waterloo (Letters, 1901, v. 429). He was well-intentioned, honourable, and, in essentials, humane, but he was arrogant and tactless. The following sentence, from a letter written by Lowe to O'Meara, October 3, 1816 (Forsyth, i. 318, 319), is characteristic: "With respect to the instructions I have received, and my manner of making them known, never having regarded General Bonaparte's opinions in any point whatever as to matter or manner, as an oracle or criterion by which to regulate my own judgment, I am not disposed to think the less favourably of the instructions, or my mode of executing them." It must, however, be borne in mind that this was written some time after Lowe's fifth and last interview with his captive (Aug. 18, 1816); that Napoleon had abused him to his face and behind his back, and was not above resorting to paltry subterfuges in order to defy and exasperate his "paltry gaoler."]

[268] {546}[There is reason to think that "the staring stranger" was the traveller Captain Basil Hall (1788-1844), who called upon Byron at Venice (see Letters, 1900, iv. 252), but did not see him. His account of his interview with Napoleon is attached to his narrative of a Voyage to Java, 1840. It is not included in the earlier editions of Hall's Voyage to the Corea and the Loochoo Islands, but is quoted by Scott, in his Life of Napoleon, 1827.]

[269] [Barry Edward O'Meara (1786-1836) began life as assistant-surgeon to the 62nd Regiment, then stationed in Sicily and Calabria. In 1815 he was surgeon on board the Bellerophon, under Captain F. L. Maitland. Napoleon took a fancy to him because he could speak Italian, and, as his own surgeon Mengeaud would not follow him into exile, requested that O'Meara might accompany him, in the Northumberland, to St. Helena. His position was an ambiguous one. He was to act as Napoleon's medical and, quoad hoc, confidential attendant, but he was not to be subservient to him or dependent on him. At St. Helena Lowe expected him to be something between an intermediary and a spy, and, for a time, O'Meara discharged both functions to the Governor's satisfaction (statements by Dr. O'Meara are quoted by Lowe in his letter to Lord Bathurst [Life of Napoleon, etc., by Sir W. Scott, 1828, p. 763]). As time went on, the surgeon yielded to the glamour of Napoleon's influence, and more and more disliked and resented the necessity of communicating private conversations to Lowe. He "withheld his confidence," with the result that the Governor became suspicious, and treated O'Meara with reprobation and contempt. At length, on July 18, 1818, on a renewed accusation of "irregularities," Lord Bathurst dismissed him from his post, and ordered him to quit St. Helena. He returned to England, and, October 28, 1818, addressed a letter (see Forsyth's Napoleon, etc., iii. 432, 433) to J. W. Croker, the Secretary to the Admiralty, in which he argued against the justice of his dismissal. One sentence which asserted that Lowe had dwelt upon the "benefit which would result to Europe from the death of Napoleon," was seized upon by Croker as calumnious, and in answer to his remonstrance, O'Meara's name was struck off the list of naval surgeons. He published, in 1819, a work entitled Exposition of some of the Transactions that have taken place at St. Helena since the appointment of Sir Hudson Lowe as Governor, which was afterwards expanded into Napoleon in Exile, or a Voice from St. Helena (2 vols., 1822). The latter work made a great sensation, and passed through five editions. It was republished in 1888. O'Meara was able, and generously disposed, but he was not "stiff" (vide infra, 489). "He was," says Lord Rosebery (Napoleon, The Last Phase, 1900, p. 31), "the confidential servant of Napoleon: unknown to Napoleon, he was the confidential agent of Lowe; and behind both their backs he was the confidential informant of the British Government.... Testimony from such a source is ... tainted." Neither men nor angels will disentangle the wheat from the tares.]

[270] {547}[Buonaparte died the 5th of May, 1821.]

[271] [At the end of vol. ii. of O'Meara's Voice, etc. (ed. 5), there is a statement, signed by Count Montholon, to the effect that he wished the following inscription to be placed on Napoleon's coffin--

"Napoléon.

Né à Ajaccio le 15 Août, 1769, Mort à Ste. Hélène le 5 Mai, 1821;"

but that the Governor said, "that his instructions would not allow him to sanction any other name being placed on the coffin than that of 'General Bonaparte.'" Lowe would have sanctioned "Napoléon Bonaparte," but, on his own admission, did refuse the inscription of the one word "Napoléon."--Forsyth, iii. 295, 296, note 3.]

[272] {548}[Hall, in his interview with Napoleon at St. Helena, Narrative of a Voyage to Java, 1840, p. 77, testifies that, weeks before the vessel anchored at St. Helena, August 11, 1817, "the probability of seeing him [Napoleon] had engrossed the thoughts of every one on board.... Even those of our number who, from their situation, could have no chance of seeing him, caught the fever of the moment, and the most cold and indifferent person on board was roused on the occasion into unexpected excitement."]

[273] [The Colonne Vendôme, erected to commemorate the Battle of Austerlitz, was inaugurated in 1810.]

[274] [Pompey's, i.e. Diocletian's Pillar stands on a mound near the Arabian cemetery, about three quarters of a mile from Alexandria, between the city and Lake Mareotis.]

[275] [Napoleon was buried, May 9, 1821, in a garden in the middle of a deep ravine, under the shade of two willow trees.]

[276] [Byron took for granted that Napoleon's remains would one day rest under the dome of the Pantheon, where Mirabeau is buried, and where cenotaphs have been erected to Voltaire and Rousseau. As it is (since December 15, 1840) he sleeps under the Dôme des Invalides. Above the entrance are these words, which are taken from his will: "Je désire que mes cendres reposent sur les bords de la Seine, au milieu de ce peuple Français que j'ai tant aimé."]

[277] {549} Guesclin died during the siege of a city; it surrendered, and the keys were brought and laid upon his bier, so that the place might appear rendered to his ashes. [Bertrand du Guesclin, born 1320, first distinguished himself in the service of King John II. of France, in defending Rennes against Henry Duke of Lancaster, 1356-57. He was made Constable of France in 1370, and died before the walls of Châteauneuf-de-Randon (Lozère). July 13, 1380. He was buried by the order of Charles V. in Saint-Denis, hard by the tomb which the king had built for himself. In La Vie vaillant Bertran du Guesclin [Chronique, etc. (par E. Charrière), 1839, tom. ii. p. 321, lines 22716, sq.], the English do not place the keys of the castle on Du Guesclin's bier, but present them to him as he lies tossing on his death-bed ("à son lit agité"). So, too, Histoire de Messire Bertrand du Guesclin, par Claude Menard, 1618, 540: "Et Engloiz se accorderent à ce faire. Lors issirent dudit Chastel, et vindrent à Bertran, et lui presenterent les clefs. Et ne demora guères, qu'il getta le souppir de la mort."]

[278] [John of Trocnow, surnamed Zižka, or the "One-eyed," was born circ. 1360, and died while he was besieging a town on the Moravian border, October 11, 1424. He was the hero of the Hussite or Taborite crusade (1419-1422), the malleus Catholicorum. The story is that on his death-bed he was asked where he wished to be buried, and replied, "that it mattered not, that his flesh might be thrown to the vulture and eagles; but his skin was to be carefully preserved and made into a drum, to be carried in the front of the battle, that the very sound might disperse their enemies." Voltaire, in his Essai sur Les Mœurs et L'Esprit des Nations (cap. lxxiii. s.f. Œuvres Complètes, etc., 1836, iii. 256), mentions the legend as a fact, "Il ordonna qu' après sa mort on fit un tambour de sa peau." Compare Werner, act i. sc. I, lines 693, 694.]

[279] {550}["Au moment de la bataille Napoléon avait dit à ses troupes, en leur montrant les Pyramides: 'Soldats, quarante siècles vous regardent.'"--Campagnes d'Égypte et de Syrie, 1798-9, par le Général Bertrand, 1847, i. 160.]

[280] [Madrid was taken by the French, first in March, 1808, and again December 2, 1808.]

[281] [Vienna was taken by the French under Murat, November 14, 1805, evacuated January 12, 1806, captured by Napoleon, May, 1809, and restored at the conclusion of peace, October 14, 1809. Her treachery consisted in her hospitality to the sovereigns at the Congress of Vienna, November, 1814, and her share in the Treaty of Vienna, March 25, 1815, which ratified the Treaties of Chaumont, March 1, and of Paris, April 11, 1814.]

[282] [At Jena Napoleon defeated Prince Hohenlohe, and at Auerstadt General Davoust defeated the King of Prussia, October 14, 1806. Napoleon then advanced to Berlin, October 27, from which he issued his famous decree against British commerce, November 20, 1806.]

[283] [The partition of Poland. "Henry [of Prussia] arrived at St. Petersburg, December 9, 1770; and it seems now to be certain that the first open proposal of a dismemberment of Poland arose in his conversations with the Empress.... Catherine said to the Prince, 'I will frighten Turkey and flatter England. It is your business to gain Austria, that she may lull France to sleep;' and she became at length so eager, that ... she dipt her finger into ink, and drew with it the lines of partition on a map of Poland which lay before them."--Edinburgh Review, November, 1822 (art. x. on Histoire des Trois Démembremens de la Pologne, par M. Ferrand, 1820, etc., vol. 37, pp. 479, 480.)]

[284] {551} [Napoleon promised much, but did little for the Poles. "In speaking of the business of Poland he ... said it was a whim (c'était un caprice)."--Narrative of an Embassy to Warsaw, by M. Dufour de Pradt, 1816, p. 51. "The Polish question," says Lord Wolseley (Decline and Fall of Napoleon, 1893, p. 19), "thrust itself most inconveniently before him. In early life all his sympathies ... were with the Poles, and he had regarded the partition of their country as a crime.... As a very young man liberty was his only religion; but he had now learned to hate and to fear that term.... He had no desire ... to be the Don Quixote of Poland by reconstituting it as a kingdom. To fight Russia by the re-establishment of Polish independence was not, therefore, to be thought of."]

[285] [The final partition of Poland took place after the Battle of Maciejowice, October 12, 1794, when "Freedom shrieked when Kosciusko fell." Tyrants, e.g. Napoleon in 1806, and Alexander in 1814 and again in 1815, approached Kosciusko with respect, and loaded him with flattery and promises, and then "passed by on the other side."]

[286] [The reference is to Charles's chagrin when the Grand Vizier allowed the Russians to retire in safety from the banks of the Pruth, and assented to the Treaty of Jassy, July 21, 1711. Charles, "impatient for the fight, and to behold the enemy in his power," had ridden above fifty leagues from Bender to Jassy, swam the Pruth at the risk of his life, and found that the Czar had marched off in triumph. He contrived to rip up the Vizier's robe with his spur, "remonta à cheval, et retourna a Bender le desespoir dans le cœur" (Histoire de Charles XII., Livre v. s.f.).]

[287] {552}["Naples, October 29, 1822. Le Vésuve continue à lancer des pierres et des cendres."--From Le Moniteur Universel, November 21, 1822.]

[dz] For staring tourists----.--[MS.]

[288] [The material for this description of Napoleon on his return from Moscow is drawn from De Pradt's Narrative of an Embassy to Warsaw and Wilna, published in 1816, pp. 133-141. "I hurried out, and arrived at the Hôtel d'Angleterre.... [Warsaw, December 10, 1812]. I saw a small carriage body placed on a sledge made of four pieces of fir: it had stood some crashes, and was much damaged.... The ministers joined me in addressing to him ... wishes for the preservation of his health and the prosperity of his journey. He replied, 'I never was better; if I carried the devil with me, I should be all the better for that (Quand j'aurai le diable je ne m'en porterai que mieux).' These were his last words. He then mounted the humble sledge, which bore Cæsar and his fortune, and disappeared." The passage is quoted in the Quarterly Review, October, 1815, vol. xiv. pp. 64-68.]

[289] {553}

["Soldats Français! Serrez vos rangs! Intendez Roland qui vous crie! Armez vous contre vos tyrans! Brisez les fers de la patrie."

"L'Ombre de Roland," Morning Chronicle, October 10, 1822.]

[290] [Gustavus Adolphus fell at the great battle of Lutzen, in November, 1632. Napoleon defeated the allied Russian and Prussian armies at Lutzen, May 2, 1813.]

[291] [On June 26, 1813, Napoleon re-entered Dresden, and on the 27th repulsed the allied sovereigns, the Emperors of Russia and Prussia, with tremendous loss. Thousands of prisoners and a great quantity of cannon were taken.]

[ea]

Dresden beholds three nations fly once more Before the lash they oft had felt before.--[MS. erased.]

[292] [At the battle of Leipzig, October 18, 1813, on the appearance of Bernadotte, the Saxon soldiers under Regnier deserted and went over to the Allies. Napoleon, whose army was already weakened, lost 30,000 men at Leipzig.]

[293] [Joseph Buonaparte, who had been stationed on the heights of Montmartre, March 30, 1814, to witness if not direct the defence of Paris against the Allies under Blücher, authorized Marmont to capitulate. His action was, unjustly, regarded as a betrayal of his brother's capital.]

[294] {554} I refer the reader to the first address of Prometheus in Æschylus, when he is left alone by his attendants, and before the arrival of the chorus of Sea-nymphs.--Prometheus Vinctus, line 88, sq.

[295] [Franklin published his Opinions and Conjectures concerning the Properties and Effects of the Electrical Matter and the Means of preserving Buildings, Ships, etc., from Lightning, in 1751, and in June, 1752, "the immortal kite was flown." It was in 1781, when he was minister plenipotentiary at the Court of France, that the Latin hexameter, "Eripuit cœlo fulmen sceptrumque tyrannis," first applied to him by Turgot, was affixed to his portrait by Fragonard. The line, said to be an adaptation of a line in the Astronomicon of Manilius (lib. i. 104), descriptive of the Reason, "Eripuitque Jovi fulmen viresque tonandi," was turned into French by Nogaret, d'Alembert, and other wits and scholars. It appears on the reverse of a medal by F. Dupré, dated 1786. (See Works of Benjamin Franklin, edited by Jared Sparks, 1840, viii. 537-539; Life and Times, etc., by James Parton, 1864, i. 285-291.)]

[296] {555}["To be the first man--not the Dictator, not the Sylla, but the Washington, or the Aristides, the leader in talent and truth--is next to the Divinity."--Journal, November 24, 1813, Letters, 1898, ii. 340.]

[297] [Simon Bolivar (El Libertador), 1783-1830, was at the height of his power and fame at the beginning of 1823. In 1821 he had united New Grenada to Venezuela under the name of the Republic of Columbia, and on the 1st of September he made a solemn entry into Lima. He was greeted with acclaim, but in accepting the honours which his fellow-citizens showered upon him, he warned them against the dangers of tyranny. "Beware," he said, "of a Napoleon or an Iturbide." Byron, at one time, had a mind to settle in "Bolivar's country" (letter to Ellice, June 12, 1821, Letters, 1901, vi. 89); and he christened his yacht The Bolivar.]

[298] [A proclamation of Bolivar's, dated June 8, 1822, runs thus: "Columbians, now all your delightful country is free.... From the banks of the Orinoco to the Andes of Peru, the ... army marching in triumph has covered with its protecting arms the entire extent of Columbia."--"Jamaica Papers," Morning Chronicle, September 28, 1822.]

[299] {556}[The capitulation of Athens was signed June 21, 1822. "Three days after the Greeks had sworn to observe the capitulation, they commenced murdering their helpless prisoners.... The streets of Athens were stained with the blood of four hundred men, women, and children."--History of Greece, by George Finlay, 1877, vi. 283. The sword was hid in the myrtle bough. Hence the allusion. (Compare Childe Harold, Canto III. stanza xx. line 9, Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 228, and 291, note 2.)]

[300] [The independence of Chili dated from April 5, 1818, when General José de San Martin routed the Spanish army on the plains of Maypo. On the 28th of July, 1821, the Independence of Peru was proclaimed. General San Martin assumed the title of Protector, and, August 3, 4, 1821, issued proclamations, in which he announced the independence of Peru, and bade the Spaniards tremble if they "abused his indulgence." Extracts from a Journal written on the Coast of Chili, etc., by Captain Basil Hall, 1824, i. 266-272.]

[301] [On the 8th of August, 1822, Niketas and Hypsilantes defeated the Turks under Dramali, near Lerna. The Moreotes attributed their good fortune to the generalship of Kolokotrones, a Messenian. Compare with the whole of section vi. the following quotations from an article on the "Numbers of the Greeks," which appeared in the Morning Chronicle, September 13, 1822--

"'Trust not for freedom to the Franks, They have a king who buys and sells; In native swords and native ranks The only hope of courage dwells.'

Byron.

"As Russia has now removed her warlike projects, and the Greeks are engaged single-handed with the whole force of the Ottoman Empire, etc.... Byron's Grecian bard can no longer exclaim--

'My country! on thy voiceless shore The heroic lay is tuneless now-- The heroic bosom beats no more.'

"Greece is no longer a 'nation's sepulchre,' the foul abode of slaves, but the living theatre of the patriot's toils and the hero's achievements. Her banners once more float on the mountains, and the battles she has already won show that in every glen and valley, as well as on

'Suli's rock and Parga's shore Exists the remnant of a line Such as the Doric mothers bore.'"]

[302] {557}[An account of these Russian intrigues in Greece is contained in Thomas Gordon's History of the Greek Revolution, 1832, i. 194-204.]

[eb] {558} Of Incas known but as a cloud.--[MS. erased.]

[ec] Not now the Roman or the Punic horde.--[MS.]

[ed] ----abhorrent of them both.--[MS.]

[303] [Pelayo, said to be the son of Favila, Duke of Cantabria, was elected king by the Christians of the Asturias in 718, and defeated the Arab generals Suleyman and Manurza. He died A.D. 737.]

[304] [For the "fabulous sketches" of the Zegri and Abencerrages, rival Moorish tribes, whose quarrels, at the close of the fifteenth century, deluged Granada with blood, see the Civil Wars of Granada, a prose fiction, interspersed with ballads, by Ginés Perez de Hita, published in 1595. An opera, Les Abencerages, by Cherubini, was performed in Paris in 1813. Chateaubriand's Les Aventures du dernier Abencerrage was not published till 1826.]

[ee] And yet have left worse enemies than they.--[MS. erased.]

[305] [Ferdinand VII. returned to Madrid in March, 1814. "No sooner was he established on his throne ... than he set himself to restore the old absolutism with its worst abuses. The nobles recovered their privileges ... the Inquisition resumed its activity; and the Jesuits returned to Spain.... A camarilla of worthless courtiers and priests conducted the government, and urged the king to fresh acts of revolutionary violence. For six years Spain groaned under a royalist 'reign of terror.'"--Encycl. Brit., art. "Spain," vol. 22, p. 345.]

[ef] As rose on his remorseless ear the cry.--[MS. erased.]

[eg] {559} The re-awakened virtue----.--[MS. erased.]

[eh] ----is on the shore.--[MS. erased.]

[306] "'St. Jago and close Spain!' the old Spanish war-cry." ["Santiago y serra España."]

[ei] The wild Guerilla on Morena----.--[MS. erased]

[ej] Of eagle-eyed----.--[MS. erased.]

[307] [Compare Childe Harold, Canto I. stanzas liv.-lvi., Poetical Works, i. 57, 58, 91, 92 (note II). The "man" was Tio Jorge (Jorge Ibort), vide ibid., p. 94.]

[308] {560} The Arragonians are peculiarly dexterous in the use of this weapon, and displayed it particularly in former French wars.

[309] [Vide ante, the Introduction to the Age of Bronze, pp, 537-540.]

[310] [Patrick Henry, born May 29, 1736, died June 6, 1799, was one of the leading spirits of the American Revolution. His father, John Henry, a Scotchman, a cousin of the historian, William Robertson, had acquired a small property in Virginia. Patrick was not exactly "forest born," but, as a child, loved to play truant "in the forest with his gun or over his angle-rod." He first came into notice as an orator in the "Parson's Cause," a suit brought by a minister of the Established Church to recover his salary, which had been fixed at 16,000 lbs. of tobacco. In his speech he is said to have struck the key-note of the Revolution by arguing that "a king, by disallowing acts of a salutary nature, from being the father of his people, degenerates into a tyrant, and forfeits all right to his subjects' obedience." His famous speech against the "Stamps Act" was delivered in the House of Burgesses of Virginia, May 29, 1765. One passage, with which, no doubt, Byron was familiar, has passed into history. "Cæsar had his Brutus--Charles the First had his Cromwell--and George the Third--" Henry was interrupted with a shout of "Treason! treason!!" but finished the sentence with, and "George the Third may profit by their example. If this be treason, make the most of it."

Henry was delegate to the first Continental Congress, five times Governor of Virginia, and was appointed U.S. Senator in 1794.

His contemporaries said that he was "the greatest orator that ever lived." He seems to have exercised a kind of magical influence over his hearers, which they could not explain, which charmed and overwhelmed them, and "has left behind a tradition of bewitching persuasiveness and almost prophetic sublimity."--See Life of Patrick Henry, by William Wirt, 1845, passim.]

[ek] {561} ----to one Napoleon.--[MS. erased.]

[el] ----thy poor old wall forgets.--[MS. erased.]

[311] ["I have been over Verona. The amphitheatre is wonderful--beats even Greece. Of the truth of Juliet's story they seem tenacious to a degree, insisting on the fact, giving a date (1303), and showing a tomb. It is a plain, open, and partly decayed sarcophagus, with withered leaves in it, in a wild and desolate conventual garden, once a cemetery, now ruined to the very graves. The situation struck me as very appropriate to the legend, being blighted as their love.... The Gothic monuments of the Scaliger princes pleased me, but 'a poor virtuoso am I.'"--Letter to Moore, November 7, 1816, Letters, 1899, iii. 386, 387. The tombs of the Scaligers are close to the Church of Santa Maria l'Antica. Juliet's tomb, "of red Verona marble," is in the garden of the Orfanotrofio, between the Via Cappucini and the Adige. It is not "that ancient vault where all the kindred of the Capulets lie," which has long since been destroyed. Since 1814 Verona had been under Austria's sway, and had "treacherously" forgotten her republican traditions.]

[312] {562}[Francesco Can Grande della Scala died in 1329. It was under his roof that Dante learned

"... how salt his food who fares Upon another's bread--how steep his path Who treadeth up and down another's stairs."

For anecdotes of Can Grande, see Commedia, etc., by E. H. Plumptre, D.D., 1886, I. cxx., cxxi.; and compare Dante at Verona, by D. G. Rossetti, Works, 1886, i. 1-17.]

[313] [Ippolito Pindemonte, the modern Tibullus (1753-1828). (See Letters, 1900, iv. 127, note 4.)]

[314] [Claudian's famous old man of Verona, "qui suburbium numquam egressus est."

"Indocilis rerum, vicinæ nescius urbis, Adspectu fruitur liberiore poli."

C. Claudiani Opera, lii., Epigrammata, ii. lines 9, 10 (ed. 1821, iii. 427).]

[315] ["In the amphitheatre ... crowds collected after the sittings of the Congress, to witness dramatic representations.... But for the costumes, a spectator might have imagined he was witnessing a resurrection of the ancient Romans."--Congress, etc., by M. de Chateaubriand, 1838, i. 76. This was on the 24th of November. Catalani sang. Rossini's cantata was performed with tremendous applause. On the next day the august visitors witnessed an illumination of the city. "Leur attention s'est principalement arrête sur le superbe portail de l'église Sainte-Agnés, qui brillait de mille feux, au milieu desquels se lisait l'inscription suivante en lettres de grandeur colossale:

'A Cesare Augusta Verona esultante.'"

--Le Moniteur, December 14, 1822.]

[316] {563}[Alexander I. (Paulowitsch), 1777-1825, succeeded his father in 1801. He began his reign well. Taxation was diminished, judicial penalties were remitted, universities were founded and reorganized, personal servitude was abolished or restricted throughout the empire. At the height of his power and influence, when he was regarded as the Liberator of Europe, he granted a Constitution to Poland, based on liberal if not democratic principles (June 21, 1815). But after a time he reverted to absolutism. Autocracy at home, a mystical and sentimental alliance with autocrats abroad, were incompatible with the indulgence of liberal proclivities. "After the Congresses of Aix-la-Chapelle and Troppau," writes M. Rambaud (History of Russia, 1888, ii. 384), "he was no longer the same man.... From that time he considered himself the dupe of his generous ideas ... at Carlsbad, at Laybach, and at Verona, Alexander was already the leader of the European reaction." But even to the last he believed that he could run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. "They may say of me," he exclaimed, "what they will; but I have lived and shall die republican" (ibid., p. 398).

Alexander was a man of ideas, a sentimentalist, and a poseur, but he had an eye to the main chance. Whatever cause or dynasty suffered, the Emperor Alexander was still triumphant. Byron's special grudge against him at this time was due to his vacillation with regard to the cause of Greek Independence. But he is too contemptuous. There were points in common between the "Coxcomb Czar" and his satirist; and it is far from certain that if the twain had changed places Byron might not have proved just "such an Alexander." In one respect their destiny was alike. The greatest sorrow of their lives was the death of a natural daughter.]

[317] [For Alexander's waltzing, see Personal Reminiscences, by Cornelia Knight and Thomas Raikes, 1875, p. 286. See, too, Moore's Fables for the Holy Alliance, Fable I., "A Dream."]

[em] Now half inclining----.--[MS.]

[318] {564} ["Pulk" is Polish for "regiment." The allusion must be to the military colonies planted by "the corporal of Gatchina," Araktchèef, in the governments of Novgorod, Kharkof, and elsewhere.]

[319] [Frédéric César La Harpe (1754-1838) was appointed by Catherine II. Governor to the Grand-Dukes Alexander and Constantine. It was from La Harpe's teaching that Alexander imbibed his liberal ideas. In 1816, when Byron passed the summer in Switzerland, La Harpe was domiciled at Lausanne, and it is possible that a meeting took place.]

[320] [Alexander's platonic attachment to the Baronne de Krüdener (Barbe Julie de Wietenhoff), beauty, novelist, illuminée, was the source of amusement rather than scandal. The Baronne, then in her fiftieth year, was the channel through which Franz Bader's theory or doctrine of the "Holy Alliance" was conveyed to the enthusiastic and receptive Czar. It was only a passing whim. Alexander's mysticism was for ornament, not for use, and, before very long, Egeria and her Muscovite Numa parted company.]

[321] The dexterity of Catherine extricated Peter (called the Great by courtesy), when surrounded by the Mussulmans on the banks of the river Pruth. [Catherine, who had long been Peter's mistress, had at length been acknowledged as his wife. Her "dexterity" took the form of a bribe of money and jewels, conveyed to the Turkish grand-vizier Baltazhi-Mahomet, who was induced to accede to the Treaty of Pruth, July 20, 1711.]

[322] {565}

["Eight thousand men had to Asturias march'd Beneath Count Julian's banner.... To revenge His quarrel, twice that number left their bones, Slain in unnatural battle, on the field Of Xeres, where the sceptre from the Goths By righteous Heaven was reft."

Southey's Roderick, Canto XXV. lines 1, 2, 7-11.]

[323] [The Bashkirs are a Turco-Mongolian tribe inhabiting the slopes of the Ural Mountains. They supply a body of irregular cavalry to the Russian army.]

[324] [The Austrian and Russian armies stood between the Greeks and other peoples, and their independence, as Alexander the Great stood between Diogenes and the sunshine.]

[en]

Still will I roll my tub at Sinope Be slaves who may----.--[MS.]

[325] [Lines 482, 483, are not in the MS.]

[326] {566} [Constant (Henri Benjamin de Rebecque, 1767-1830) was the "stormy petrel" of debate in the French Chamber. For instance, in a discussion on secret service money for the police (July 27, 1822), he exclaimed, "Vous les répresentez-vous payant d'une main le salaire du vol, et tenant peut-être un crucifix de l'autre?" No wonder that there were "violens murmures, cris d'indignation à droite." The duel, however, did not arise out of a speech in the Chamber, but from a letter of June 5, 1822, in La Quotidienne, in which the Marquis de Forbin des Issarts replied to some letters of Constant, which had appeared in the Courrier and Constitutionnel. Constant was lame, and accordingly both combatants "out été places à dix petits pas sur des chaises." Both fired twice, but neither "was a penny the worse." (See La Grande Encyclopédie, art. "Constant;" and, for details, La Quotidienne, June 8, 1822. See, too, for "session de 1822," Opinions el Discours de M. Casimir Perrier, 1838, ii. 5-47.)]

[327] [Louis XVIII. (Louis Stanislas Xavier, 1755-1824) passed several years of exile in England, at Goswell, Wanstead, and latterly at Hartwell, near Aylesbury, in Buckinghamshire. When he entered Paris as king, in May, 1814, he was in his fifty-ninth year, inordinately bulky and unwieldy--a king pour rire. "C'est ce gros goutteux," explained an ouvrier to a bystander, who had asked, "Which is the king?" Fifteen mutton cutlets, "sautées au jus," for breakfast; fifteen mutton cutlets served with a "sauce à la champagne," for dinner; to say nothing of strawberries, and sweet apple-puffs between meals, made digestion and locomotion difficult. It was no wonder that he was a martyr to the gout. But he cared for nature and for books as well as for eating. His Lettres d'Artwell (Paris, 1830), which profess to be selections from his correspondence with a friend, give a pleasant picture of the roi en exil. His wife, Louise de Savoie, died November, 1810, and in the following April he writes (Lettres, pp. 70, 71), "Mars a maintenu le bien d'un hiver fort doux; point encore de goutte; à brebis tondue, Dieu measure le vent. Hélas! je l'éprouve bien qu'elle est tondue cette pauvre brebis!... je me promène dans le jardin, je vois mes rosiers qui poussent bien; a qui offrirai-je les roses?... Eh bien! je ne voudrais pas que cette goutte d'absinthe cessât, car pour cela il faudrait l'oublier. L'oublier! Ah Dieu! Je suis comme les enfans d'Israël qui disaient: Super flumina Babylonis ... Sion. Mais ajoutons tout de suite: Si oblitus fuero hit, Jerusalem, oblivioni detur dextera mea." In another letter, June 8, 1811, he criticizes some translations of Horace, and laments that the good Père Sanadon has confined himself to the Opera Expurgata. Not, he adds, that he would not have excluded one or two odes, "mais on a impitoyablement sabré des choses délicieuses" (Lettres, p. 98).

To his wit, Chateaubriand testifies (The Congress, etc., 1838, i. 262). At the council, when affairs of state were being discussed, the king "would say in his clear shrill voice, 'I am going to make you laugh, M. de Chateaubriand.' The other ministers fumed with impatience, but Chateaubriand laughed, not as a courtier, but as a human being."]

[328] {567}[Louvel, who assassinated the Due de Berri, and who was executed June 7, 1820, was supposed to have been an agent of the carbonari. La Fayette, Constant, Lafitte, and others were also suspected of being connected with secret societies.--The Court of the Tuileries, 1815-1848, by Lady Jackson, 1883, ii. 19.]

[eo] {568}

Immortal Wellington with beak so curled. That foremost Corporal of all the World-- Immortal Wellington--and flags unfurled.--[MS. erased.]

[329] "Naso suspendis adunco."--HORACE [Sat. i. 6, 5]. The Roman applies it to one who merely was imperious to his acquaintance.

[330] [Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, afterwards Marquis of Londonderry (1769-1822), who had been labouring under a "mental delirium" (Letter of Duke of Wellington, August 9, 1822), committed suicide by cutting his throat with a penknife (August 12, 1822). He was the uncompromising and successful opponent of popular causes in Ireland, Italy, and elsewhere, and, as such, Byron assailed him, alive and dead, with the bitterest invective. (See, for instance, the "Dedication" to Don Juan, stanzas xi.-xvi., sundry epigrams, and an "Epitaph.") In the Preface to Cantos VI., VII., VIII., of Don Juan, he justifies the inclusion of a stanza or two on Castlereagh, which had been written "before his decease," and, again, alludes to his suicide. (For an estimate of his career and character, see Letters, 1900, iv. 108, 109, note 1; and for a full report of the inquest, The Annual Biography, 1823, pp. 56-62.)]

[ep]

Whose penknife saved some nations t'other day. Who shaved his throat by chance the other day.--[MS. erased.]

[331] ["The Pilot that weathered the Storm" was written by Canning, to be recited at a dinner given on Pitt's birthday, May 28, 1802.]

[eq] {569} With reason--whate'er it may with rhyme.--[MS. erased.]

[332] [George Canning (1770-1827) succeeded Lord Londonderry as Foreign Secretary, September 8, 1822. He was not a persona grata to George IV., who had been offended by Canning's neutral attitude, as a minister, on the question of the Queen's message (June 7, 1820), and by his avowal "of an unaltered regard and affection" for that "illustrious personage" herself. There was, too, the prospect of Catholic Emancipation. In 1821 he had spoken in favour of Plunket's bills, and, the next year (April 30, 1822), he had brought in a bill to remove the disabilities of Roman Catholic peers from sitting in the House of Lords. If Canning persisted in his advocacy of Catholic claims, the king's conscience might turn restive, and urge him to effectual resistance. Hence the warning in lines 563-567.]

[333] {570} [Demeter gave Triptolemus a chariot drawn by serpents, and bade him scatter wheat throughout the world. (See Ovid, Met., lib. v. lines 642-661.)]

[er] The mighty monosyllable high Rent!--[MS.]

[es] ----upon the audit day.--[MS. M.]

[334] ["Lord Londonderry proposed (April 29, 1822) that whenever wheat should be under 60 shillings a quarter, Government should be authorized to issue £1,000,000 in Exchequer bills to landed proprietors on the security of their crops; that importation of foreign corn should be permitted whenever the price of wheat should be at or above 70 shillings a quarter ... that a sliding-scale should be fixed, that for wheat being under 80s. a quarter at 12 shillings; above 80s. and below 85s., at 5 shillings; and above 85s., only one shilling."--Allison's History of Europe, 1815-1852, and 1854, ii. 506. The first clause was thrown out, but the rest of the bill passed May 13, 1822.]

[et] {571} For fear that riches----.--[MS. M.]

[eu] Will sell the harvest at a market price.--[MS. M.]

[ev] Are gone--their fields untilled.--[MS. M.]

[335] {572}[Peel's bill for the resumption of cash payments (Act 59 Geo. III. cap. 49) was passed June 14, 1819. The "landed interest" attributed the fall of prices and the consequent fall of rent to this measure, and hinted more or less plainly that the fund-holders should share the loss. They had lent their money when the currency was inflated, and should not now be paid off in gold.

"But you," exclaims Cobbett [Letter to Mr. Western (Weekly Register, November 23, 1822)], "what can induce you to stickle for the Pitt system [i.e. paper-money]? I will tell you what it is: you loved the high prices, and the domination that they gave you.... Besides this, you think that the boroughs can be preserved by a return to paper-money, and along with them the hare-and-pheasant law and justice. You loved the glorious times of paper-money, and you want them back again. You think that they could go on for ever.... The bill of 1819 was really a great relaxation of the Pitt system, and when you are crying out spoliation and confiscation, when you are bawling out so lustily about the robbery committed on you by the fund-holders and the placemen, and are praising the infernal Pitt system at the same time, ... you say they are receiving, the fund-vagabonds in particular, more than they ought." It is evident that Byron's verse is a reverberation of Cobbett's prose.]

[336] [Petitions were presented by the inhabitants of St. Andrew, Holborn; St. Botolf, Bishopsgate; and St. Gregory by St. Paul, to the Court of Common Council, against a tithe-charge of 2s, 9d. in the pound on their annual rents.--Morning Chronicle, November 1, 1822.]

[337] Lines 614-657 are not in the MS.

[338] {573}[The Symplegades, or "justling rocks," Ovid's instabiles Cyaneæ, were supposed to crush the ships which sailed between them.]

[339] [Alcina, the personification of carnal pleasure in the Orlando Furioso, is the counterpart of Homer's Circe. "She enjoyed her lovers for a time, and then changed them into trees, stones, fountains, or beasts, as her fancy dictated." (See Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, vi. 35, seq.)]

[340] [There were five brothers Rothschild: Anselm, of Frankfort, 1773-1855; Salomon, of Vienna, 1774-1855; Nathan Mayer, of London, 1777-1836; Charles, of Naples, 1788-1855; and James, of Paris, 1792-1868. In 1821 Austria raised 37-1/2 million guldens through the firm, and, as an acknowledgment of their services, the Emperor raised the brothers to the rank of baron, and appointed Baron Nathan Mayer Consul-General in London, and Baron James to the same post in Paris. In 1822 both Russia (see line 684) and England raised 3-1/2 millions sterling through the Rothschilds. The "two Jews" (line 686, etc.) are, probably, the two Consuls-General. In 1822 their honours were new, and some mocked. There is the story that Talleyrand once presented the Parisian brother to Montmorenci as M. le premier Juif to M. le premier Baron Chrétien; while another tale, parent or offspring of the preceding, which appeared in La Quotidienne, December 21, 1822, testifies to the fact, not recorded, that a Rothschild was at Verona during the Congress: "M. de Rotschild, baron et banquier général des gouvernemens absolus, s'est, dit-on, rendu an congres, il a été présenté a l'empereur d'Autriche, et S.M., en lui remettant une decoration, a daigné lui dire: 'Vous pouvez être assuré, Monsieur, que la maison d'Autriche sera toujours disposée à reconnaître vos services et à vous accorder ce qui pourra vous être agréable,'--'Votre Majesté,' a répondu le baron financier, 'pourra toujours également compter sur la maison Rotschild.'"--See The Rothschilds, by John Reeves, 1886.]

[341] {574}[In 1822 the Neapolitan Government raised 22,000,000 ducats through the Rothschilds.]

[342] {575} Monsieur Chateaubriand, who has not forgotten the author in the minister, received a handsome compliment at Verona from a literary sovereign: "Ah! Monsieur C., are you related to that Chateaubriand who--who--who has written something?" (écrit quelque chose!) It is said that the author of Atala repented him for a moment of his legitimacy. [François René Vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768-1848) published Les Martyrs ou le Triomphe de la religion chrétienne in 1809.]

[343] [Count Capo d'Istria (b. 1776)--afterwards President of Greece. The count was murdered, in September, 1831, by the brother and son of a Mainote chief whom he had imprisoned (note to ed. 1832). Byron may have believed that Capo d'Istria was still in the service of the Czar, but, according to Allison, his advocacy of his compatriots the Greeks had led to his withdrawal from the Russian Foreign Office, and prevented his taking part in the Congress. It was, however, stated in the papers that he had been summoned, and was on his way to Verona.]

[344] [Jean Mathieu Félicité, Duc de Montmorenci (1766-1826), was, in his youth, a Jacobin. He proposed, August 4, 1789, to abrogate feudal rights, and June 15, 1790, to abolish the nobility. He was superseded as plenipotentiary by Chateaubriand, and on his return to Paris created a duke. Before the end of the year he was called upon to resign his portfolio as Minister of Foreign Affairs. The king disliked him, and there were personal disagreements between him and the Prime Minister, M. de Villêle.

The following "gazette" appeared in the Moniteur:--

"Ordonnance du Roi. Signé Louis. Art 1^er^ Le Vicomte de Chateaubriand, pair de France, est nomme ministre secrétaire d'état au département des affaires étrangères. Louis par la grace de Dieu Roi de France et de Navarre.

"Art. 1^er^ Le Duc Mathieu de Montmorenci, pair de France, est nommé ministre d'Etat, et membre de notre Conseil privé.

"Dimanche, 29 Décembre, 1822."

"On Tuesday, January 1, 1823," writes Chateaubriand, Congress, 1838, i. 258, "we crossed the bridges, and went to sleep in that minister's bed, which was not made for us,--a bed in which one sleeps but little, and in which one remains only for a short time."]

[345] {576}[From Pope's line on Lord Peterborough, _Imitations of Horace_, Sat. i. 132.]

[346] [Marie Louise, daughter of Francis I. of Austria, was born December 12, 1791, and died December 18, 1849. She was married to Napoleon, April 2, 1810, and gave birth to a son, March 29, 1811. In accordance with the Treaty of Paris, she left France April 26, 1814, renounced the title of Empress, and was created Duchess of Parma, Placentia, and Guastalla. After Napoleon's death (May 5, 1821). "Proud Austria's mournful flower" did not long remain a widow, but speedily and secretly married her chamberlain and gentleman of honour, Count Adam de Neipperg (ce polisson Neipperg, as Napoleon called him), to whom she had long been attached. It was supposed that she attended the Congress of Verona in the interest of her son, the ex-King of Rome, to whom Napoleon had bequeathed money and heirlooms. She was a solemn stately personage, tant soit peu declassée, and the other potentates whispered and joked at her expense. Chateaubriand says that when the Duke of Wellington was bored with the meetings of the Congress, he would while away the time in the company of the Orsini, who scribbled on the margin of intercepted French despatches, "Pas pour Mariée." Not for Madame de Neipperg.]

[347] [Napoleon François Charles Joseph, Duke of Reichstadt, died at the palace of Schönbrunn, July 22, 1832, having just attained his twenty-first year.]

[348] [Count Adam Albrecht de Neipperg had lost an eye from a wound in battle.]

[349] {577}[La Quotidienne of December 4, 1822, has a satirical reference to a passage in the Courrier, which attached a diplomatic importance to the "galanterie respectueuse que le duc de Wellington aurait faite à cette jeune Princesse." We read, too, of another victorious foe, the King of Prussia, giving "la main à l'archduchesse Marie-Louise jusqu'à son carrosse" (Le Constitutionnel, November 19, 1822). "All the world wondered" what Andromache did, and how she would fare--dans ce galère. It is difficult to explain the allusion to Pyrrhus. Andromache was the unwilling bride of Pyrrhus or Neoptolemus, whose father had slain her husband, Hector; Marie Louise the willing bride of Neipperg, who had certainly fought at Leipsic, but who could not be said to have given the final blow to Napoleon at Waterloo. Pyrrhus must stand for the victorious foe, and the right arm on which the too-forgiving Andromache leant, must have been offered by "the respectful gallantry" of the Duke of Wellington.]

[ew]

She comes the Andromache of Europe's Queens, And led by Pyrrhus arm on which she leans.--[MS. M.]

[350] {578}[Sir William Curtis (1752-1805), maker of sea-biscuits at Wapping, was M.P. for the City of London 1790-1818, Lord Mayor 1795-6. George IV. affected his society, visited him at Ramsgate, and sailed with him in his gorgeously appointed yacht. When the king visited Scotland in August, 1822, Curtis followed in his train. On first landing at Leith, "Sir William Curtis, who had celtified himself on the occasion, marched joyously in his scanty longitude of kilt." At the Levee, August 17, "Sir William Curtis again appeared in the Royal tartan, but he had forsaken the philabeg and addicted himself to the trews" (Morning Chronicle, August 19, 20, 1822). "The Fat Knight" was seventy years of age, and there was much joking at his expense. See, for instance, some lines in "Hudibrastic measure," Gentleman's Magazine, vol. 92, Part II. p. 606--

"And who is he, that sleek and smart one Pot-bellied pyramid of Tartan?

So mountainous in pinguitude, Ponderibus librata SUIS, He stands like pig of lead, so true is, That his abdomen throws alone A Body-guard around the Throne!"]

[351] [Lines 771, 772 are not in the MS.]

THE ISLAND

OR,

CHRISTIAN AND HIS COMRADES.

INTRODUCTION TO THE ISLAND

The first canto of The Island was finished January 10, 1823. We know that Byron was still at work on "the poeshie," January 25 (Letters, 1901, vi. 164), and may reasonably conjecture that a somewhat illegible date affixed to the fourth canto, stands for February 14, 1823. The MS. had been received in London before April 9 (ibid., p. 192); and on June 26, 1823, The Island; or, The Adventures of Christian and his Comrades, was published by John Hunt.

Byron's "Advertisement," or note, prefixed to The Island contains all that need be said with regard to the "sources" of the poem.

Two separate works were consulted: (1) A Narrative of the Mutiny on board His Majesty's Ship Bounty, and the subsequent Voyage of ... the Ship's Boat from Tafoa, one of the Friendly Islands, to Timor, a Dutch Settlement in the East Indies, written by Lieutenant William Bligh, 1790; and (2) An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands, Compiled and Arranged from the Extensive Communications of Mr. William Mariner, by John Martin, M.D., 1817.

According to George Clinton (Life and Writings of Lord Byron, 1824, p. 656), Byron was profoundly impressed by Mariner's report of the scenery and folklore of the Friendly Islands, was "never tired of talking of it to his friends," and, in order to turn this poetic material to account, finally bethought him that Bligh's Narrative of the mutiny of the Bounty would serve as a framework or structure "for an embroidery of rare device"--the figures and foliage of a tropical pattern. That, at least, is the substance of Clinton's analysis of the "sources" of The Island, and whether he spoke, or only feigned to speak, with authority, his criticism is sound and to the point. The story of the mutiny of the Bounty, which is faithfully related in the first canto, is not, as the second title implies, a prelude to the "Adventures of Christian and his Comrades," but to a description of "The Island," an Ogygia of the South Seas.

It must be borne in mind that Byron's acquaintance with the details of the mutiny of the Bounty was derived exclusively from Bligh's Narrative; that he does not seem to have studied the minutes of the court-martial on Peter Heywood and the other prisoners (September, 1792), or to have possessed the information that in 1809, and, again, in 1815, the Admiralty received authentic information with regard to the final settlement of Christian and his comrades on Pitcairn Island. Articles, however, had appeared in the Quarterly Review, February, 1810, vol. iii. pp. 23, 24, and July, 1815, vol. xiii. pp. 376-378, which contained an extract from the log-book of Captain Mayhew Folger, of the American ship Topaz, dated September 29, 1808, and letters from Folger (March 1, 1813), and Sir Thomas Staines, October 18, 1814, which solved the mystery. Moreover, the article of February, 1810, is quoted in the notes (pp. 313-318) affixed to Miss Mitford's Christina, the Maid of the South Seas, 1811, a poem founded on Bligh's Narrative, of which neither Byron or his reviewers seem to have heard.

But whatever may have been his opportunities of ascertaining the facts of the case, it is certain (see his note to Canto IV. section vi. line 122) that he did not know what became of Christian, and that whereas in the first canto he follows the text of Bligh's Narrative, in the three last cantos he draws upon his imagination, turning Tahiti into Toobonai (Tubuai), and transporting Toobonai from one archipelago to another--from the Society to the Friendly Islands.

Another and still more surprising feature of The Island is that Byron accepts, without qualification or reserve, the guilt of the mutineers and the innocence and worth of Lieutenant Bligh. It is true that by inheritance he was imbued with the traditions of the service, and from personal experience understood the necessity of discipline on board ship; but it may be taken for granted that if he had known that the sympathy, if not the esteem, of the public had been transferred from Bligh to Christian, that in the opinion of grave and competent writers, the guilt of mutiny on the high seas had been almost condoned by the violence and brutality of the commanding officer, he would have sided with the oppressed rather than the oppressor. As it is, he takes Bligh at his own valuation, and carefully abstains from "eulogizing mutiny." (Letter to L. Hunt, January 25, 1823.)

The story of the "mutiny of the Bounty" happened in this wise. In 1787 it occurred to certain West India planters and merchants, resident in London, that it would benefit the natives, and perhaps themselves, if the bread-fruit tree, which flourished in Tahiti (the Otaheite of Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks, see Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 7, note 2) and other islands of the South Seas, could be acclimatized in the West Indies. A petition was addressed to the king, with the result that a vessel, with a burden of 215 tons, which Banks christened the Bounty, sailed from Spithead December 23, 1787. Lieutenant William Bligh, who had sailed with Cook in the Resolution, acted as commanding officer, and under him were five midshipmen, a master, two master's mates, etc.--forty-four persons all told. The Bounty arrived at Tahiti October 26, 1788, and there for six delightful months the ship's company tarried, "fleeting the time carelessly, as in the elder world." But "Scripture saith an ending to all fine things must be," and on April 4, 1789, the Bounty, with a cargo of over a thousand bread-fruit trees, planted in pots, tubs, and boxes (see for plate of the pots, etc., A Voyage, etc., 1792, p. 1), sailed away westward for the Cape of Good Hope, and the West Indies. All went well at first, but "just before sun-rising" on Tuesday, April 28, 1789, "the north-westernmost of the Friendly Islands, called Tofoa, bearing north-east," Fletcher Christian, who was mate of the watch, assisted by Charles Churchill, master-at-arms, Alexander Smith (the John Adams of Pitcairn Island), and Thomas Burkitt, able seamen, seized the captain, tied his hands behind his back, hauled him out of his berth, and forced him on deck. The boatswain, William Cole, was ordered to hoist out the ship's launch, which measured twenty-three feet from stem to stern, and into this open boat Bligh, together with eighteen of the crew, who were or were supposed to be on his side, were thrust, on pain of instant death. When they were in the boat they were "veered round with a rope, and finally cast adrift." Bligh and his eighteen innocent companions sailed westward, and, after a voyage of "twelve hundred leagues," during which they were preserved from death and destruction by the wise ordering and patient heroism of the commander, safely anchored in Kœpang Bay, on the north-west coast of the Isle of Timor, June 14, 1789. (See Bligh's Narrative, etc., 1790, pp. 11-88; and The Island, Canto I. section ix. lines 169-201.)

The Bounty, with the remainder of the crew, twenty-five in number, "the most able of the ship's company," sailed eastward, first to Toobooai, or Tubuai, an island to the south of the Society Islands, thence to Tahiti (June 6), back to Tubuai (June 26), and yet again, to Tahiti (September 20), where sixteen of the mutineers, including the midshipman George Stewart (the "Torquil" of The Island), were put on shore. Finally, September 21, 1789, Fletcher Christian, with the Bounty and eight of her crew, six Tahitian men, and twelve women, sailed away still further east to unknown shores, and, so it was believed, disappeared for good and all. Long afterwards it was known that they had landed on Pitcairn Island, broken up the Bounty, and founded a permanent settlement.

When Bligh returned to England (March 14, 1790), and acquainted the Government "with the atrocious act of piracy and mutiny" which had been committed on the high seas, the Pandora frigate, with Captain Edwards, was despatched to apprehend the mutineers, and bring them back to England for trial and punishment. The Pandora reached Tahiti March 23, 1791, set sail, with fourteen prisoners, May 8, and was wrecked on the "Great Barrier Reef" north-east of Queensland, August 29, 1791. Four of the prisoners, including George Stewart, who had been manacled, and were confined in "Pandora's box," perished in the wreck, and the remaining ten were brought back to England, and tried by court-martial. (See The Eventful History of the Mutiny, etc. (by Sir John Barrow), 1831, pp. 205-244.)

The story, which runs through the second, third, and fourth cantos, may possibly owe some of its details to a vague recollection of incidents which happened, or were supposed to happen, at Tahiti, in the interval between the final departure of the Bounty, September 21, 1789, and the arrival of the Pandora, March 23, 1791; but, as a whole, it is a work of fiction.

With the exception of the fifteenth and sixteenth cantos of Don Juan, The Island was the last poem of any importance which Byron lived to write, and the question naturally suggests itself--Is the new song as good as the old? Byron answers the question himself. He tells Leigh Hunt (January 25, 1823) that he hopes the "poem will be a little above the ordinary run of periodical poesy," and that, though portions of the Toobonai (sic) islanders are "pamby," he intends "to scatter some _un_common places here and there nevertheless." On the whole, in point of conception and execution, The Island is weaker and less coherent than the Corsair; but it contains lines and passages (e.g. Canto I. lines 107-124, 133-140; Canto II. lines 272-297; Canto IV. lines 94-188) which display a finer feeling and a more "exalted wit" than the "purple patches" of The Turkish Tales.

The poetic faculty is somewhat exhausted, but the poetic vision has been purged and heightened by suffering and self-knowledge.

The Island was reviewed in the Monthly Review, July, 1823, E.S., vol. 101, pp. 316-319; the New Monthly Magazine, N.S., 1823, vol. 8, pp. 136-141; the Atlantic Magazine, April, 1826, vol. 2, pp. 333-337; in the Literary Chronicle, June 21, 1823; and the Literary Gazette, June 21, 1823.

ADVERTISEMENT.

The foundation of the following story will be found partly in Lieutenant Bligh's "Narrative of the Mutiny and Seizure of the Bounty, in the South Seas (in 1789);" and partly in "Mariner's Account of the Tonga Islands."

GENOA, 1823.

THE ISLAND

CANTO THE FIRST.

I.

The morning watch was come; the vessel lay Her course, and gently made her liquid way;[ex] The cloven billow flashed from off her prow In furrows formed by that majestic plough; The waters with their world were all before; Behind, the South Sea's many an islet shore. The quiet night, now dappling, 'gan to wane, Dividing darkness from the dawning main; The dolphins, not unconscious of the day, Swam high, as eager of the coming ray; The stars from broader beams began to creep, And lift their shining eyelids from the deep;[ey] The sail resumed its lately shadowed white, And the wind fluttered with a freshening flight; The purpling Ocean owns the coming Sun, But ere he break--a deed is to be done.

II.

The gallant Chief[352] within his cabin slept, Secure in those by whom the watch was kept: His dreams were of Old England's welcome shore, Of toils rewarded, and of dangers o'er; 20 His name was added to the glorious roll Of those who search the storm-surrounded Pole. The worst was over, and the rest seemed sure,[353] And why should not his slumber be secure? Alas! his deck was trod by unwilling feet, And wilder hands would hold the vessel's sheet; Young hearts, which languished for some sunny isle, Where summer years and summer women smile; Men without country, who, too long estranged, Had found no native home, or found it changed, 30 And, half uncivilised, preferred the cave Of some soft savage to the uncertain wave-- The gushing fruits that nature gave unfilled; The wood without a path--but where they willed; The field o'er which promiscuous Plenty poured Her horn; the equal land without a lord; The wish--which ages have not yet subdued In man--to have no master save his mood;[354] The earth, whose mine was on its face, unsold, The glowing sun and produce all its gold; 40 The Freedom which can call each grot a home; The general garden, where all steps may roam, Where Nature owns a nation as her child, Exulting in the enjoyment of the wild;[ez] Their shells, their fruits, the only wealth they know, Their unexploring navy, the canoe;[fa] Their sport, the dashing breakers and the chase; Their strangest sight, an European face:-- Such was the country which these strangers yearned To see again--a sight they dearly earned. 50

III.

Awake, bold Bligh! the foe is at the gate! Awake! awake!----Alas! it is too late! Fiercely beside thy cot the mutineer Stands, and proclaims the reign of rage and fear. Thy limbs are bound, the bayonet at thy breast; The hands, which trembled at thy voice, arrest; Dragged o'er the deck, no more at thy command The obedient helm shall veer, the sail expand; That savage Spirit, which would lull by wrath Its desperate escape from Duty's path, 60 Glares round thee, in the scarce believing eyes Of those who fear the Chief they sacrifice: For ne'er can Man his conscience all assuage, Unless he drain the wine of Passion--Rage.

IV.

In vain, not silenced by the eye of Death, Thou call'st the loyal with thy menaced breath:-- They come not; they are few, and, overawed, Must acquiesce, while sterner hearts applaud. In vain thou dost demand the cause: a curse Is all the answer, with the threat of worse. 70 Full in thine eyes is waved the glittering blade, Close to thy throat the pointed bayonet laid. The levelled muskets circle round thy breast In hands as steeled to do the deadly rest. Thou dar'st them to their worst, exclaiming--"Fire!" But they who pitied not could yet admire; Some lurking remnant of their former awe Restrained them longer than their broken law; They would not dip their souls at once in blood, But left thee to the mercies of the flood.[355] 80

V.

"Hoist out the boat!" was now the leader's cry; And who dare answer "No!" to Mutiny, In the first dawning of the drunken hour, The Saturnalia of unhoped-for power? The boat is lowered with all the haste of hate, With its slight plank between thee and thy fate; Her only cargo such a scant supply As promises the death their hands deny; And just enough of water and of bread To keep, some days, the dying from the dead: 90 Some cordage, canvass, sails, and lines, and twine, But treasures all to hermits of the brine, Were added after, to the earnest prayer Of those who saw no hope, save sea and air; And last, that trembling vassal of the Pole-- The feeling compass--Navigation's soul.[356]

VI.

And now the self-elected Chief finds time To stun the first sensation of his crime, And raise it in his followers--"Ho! the bowl!"[357] Lest passion should return to reason's shoal.[fb] 100 "Brandy for heroes!"[358] Burke could once exclaim-- No doubt a liquid path to Epic fame; And such the new-born heroes found it here, And drained the draught with an applauding cheer. "Huzza! for Otaheite!"[359] was the cry. How strange such shouts from sons of Mutiny! The gentle island, and the genial soil, The friendly hearts, the feasts without a toil, The courteous manners but from nature caught, The wealth unhoarded, and the love unbought; 110 Could these have charms for rudest sea-boys, driven Before the mast by every wind of heaven? And now, even now prepared with others' woes To earn mild Virtue's vain desire, repose? Alas! such is our nature! all but aim At the same end by pathways not the same; Our means--our birth--our nation, and our name, Our fortune--temper--even our outward frame, Are far more potent o'er our yielding clay Than aught we know beyond our little day. 120 Yet still there whispers the small voice within, Heard through Gain's silence, and o'er Glory's din: Whatever creed be taught, or land be trod, Man's conscience is the Oracle of God.[360]

VII.

The launch is crowded with the faithful few Who wait their Chief, a melancholy crew: But some remained reluctant on the deck Of that proud vessel--now a moral wreck-- And viewed their Captain's fate with piteous eyes; While others scoffed his augured miseries, 130 Sneered at the prospect of his pigmy sail, And the slight bark so laden and so frail. The tender nautilus, who steers his prow, The sea-born sailor of his shell canoe, The ocean Mab, the fairy of the sea, Seems far less fragile, and, alas! more free. He, when the lightning-winged Tornados sweep The surge, is safe--his port is in the deep-- And triumphs o'er the armadas of Mankind, Which shake the World, yet crumble in the wind. 140

VIII.

When all was now prepared, the vessel clear Which hailed her master in the mutineer, A seaman, less obdurate than his mates, Showed the vain pity which but irritates; Watched his late Chieftain with exploring eye, And told, in signs, repentant sympathy; Held the moist shaddock to his parched mouth, Which felt Exhaustion's deep and bitter drouth. But soon observed, this guardian was withdrawn, Nor further Mercy clouds Rebellion's dawn.[361] 150 Then forward stepped the bold and froward boy His Chief had cherished only to destroy, And, pointing to the helpless prow beneath, Exclaimed, "Depart at once! delay is death!" Yet then, even then, his feelings ceased not all: In that last moment could a word recall Remorse for the black deed as yet half done, And what he hid from many showed to one: When Bligh in stern reproach demanded where Was now his grateful sense of former care? 160 Where all his hopes to see his name aspire, And blazon Britain's thousand glories higher? His feverish lips thus broke their gloomy spell, "Tis that! 'tis that! I am in hell! in hell!"[362] No more he said; but urging to the bark His Chief, commits him to his fragile ark; These the sole accents from his tongue that fell, But volumes lurked below his fierce farewell.

IX.

The arctic[363] Sun rose broad above the wave; The breeze now sank, now whispered from his cave; 170 As on the Æolian harp, his fitful wings Now swelled, now fluttered o'er his Ocean strings.[fc] With slow, despairing oar, the abandoned skiff Ploughs its drear progress to the scarce seen cliff, Which lifts its peak a cloud above the main: That boat and ship shall never meet again!

But 'tis not mine to tell their tale of grief, Their constant peril, and their scant relief; Their days of danger, and their nights of pain; Their manly courage even when deemed in vain; 180 The sapping famine, rendering scarce a son Known to his mother in the skeleton;[364] The ills that lessened still their little store, And starved even Hunger till he wrung no more; The varying frowns and favours of the deep, That now almost ingulfs, then leaves to creep With crazy oar and shattered strength along The tide that yields reluctant to the strong; The incessant fever of that arid thirst[365] Which welcomes, as a well, the clouds that burst 190 Above their naked bones, and feels delight In the cold drenching of the stormy night, And from the outspread canvass gladly wrings A drop to moisten Life's all-gasping springs; The savage foe escaped, to seek again More hospitable shelter from the main; The ghastly Spectres which were doomed at last To tell as true a tale of dangers past, As ever the dark annals of the deep Disclosed for man to dread or woman weep. 200

X.

We leave them to their fate, but not unknown Nor unredressed. Revenge may have her own:[fd] Roused Discipline aloud proclaims their cause, And injured Navies urge their broken laws. Pursue we on his track the mutineer, Whom distant vengeance had not taught to fear. Wide o'er the wave--away! away! away! Once more his eyes shall hail the welcome bay; Once more the happy shores without a law Receive the outlaws whom they lately saw; 210 Nature, and Nature's goddess--Woman--woos To lands where, save their conscience, none accuse; Where all partake the earth without dispute,[fe] And bread itself is gathered as a fruit;[366] Where none contest the fields, the woods, the streams:-- The goldless Age, where Gold disturbs no dreams, Inhabits or inhabited the shore, Till Europe taught them better than before; Bestowed her customs, and amended theirs, But left her vices also to their heirs.[367] 220 Away with this! behold them as they were, Do good with Nature, or with Nature err. "Huzza! for Otaheite!" was the cry, As stately swept the gallant vessel by. The breeze springs up; the lately flapping sail Extends its arch before the growing gale; In swifter ripples stream aside the seas, Which her bold bow flings off with dashing ease. Thus Argo ploughed the Euxine's virgin foam,[ff] But those she wafted still looked back to home; 230 These spurn their country with their rebel bark, And fly her as the raven fled the Ark; And yet they seek to nestle with the dove, And tame their fiery spirits down to Love.

End of Canto 1^st^, J^n 14.

CANTO THE SECOND.

I.

How pleasant were the songs of Toobonai,[368] When Summer's Sun went down the coral bay! Come, let us to the islet's softest shade, And hear the warbling birds! the damsels said: The wood-dove from the forest depth shall coo, Like voices of the Gods from Bolotoo;[369] We'll cull the flowers that grow above the dead, For these most bloom where rests the warrior's head; And we will sit in Twilight's face, and see The sweet Moon glancing through the Tooa[370] tree, 10 The lofty accents of whose sighing bough Shall sadly please us as we lean below; Or climb the steep, and view the surf in vain Wrestle with rocky giants o'er the main, Which spurn in columns back the baffled spray. How beautiful are these! how happy they, Who, from the toil and tumult of their lives, Steal to look down where nought but Ocean strives! Even He too loves at times the blue lagoon, And smooths his ruffled mane beneath the Moon. 20

II.

Yes--from the sepulchre we'll gather flowers, Then feast like spirits in their promised bowers, Then plunge and revel in the rolling surf, Then lay our limbs along the tender turf, And, wet and shining from the sportive toil, Anoint our bodies with the fragrant oil, And plait our garlands gathered from the grave, And wear the wreaths that sprung from out the brave. But lo! night comes, the Mooa[371] woos us back, The sound of mats[372] are heard along our track; 30 Anon the torchlight dance shall fling its sheen In flashing mazes o'er the Marly's[373] green; And we too will be there; we too recall The memory bright with many a festival, Ere Fiji blew the shell of war, when foes For the first time were wafted in canoes.[fg] Alas! for them the flower of manhood bleeds; Alas! for them our fields are rank with weeds: Forgotten is the rapture, or unknown,[fh] Of wandering with the Moon and Love alone. 40 But be it so:--they taught us how to wield The club, and rain our arrows o'er the field: Now let them reap the harvest of their art! But feast to-night! to-morrow we depart. Strike up the dance! the Cava bowl[374] fill high! Drain every drop!--to-morrow we may die. In summer garments be our limbs arrayed; Around our waists the Tappa's white displayed; Thick wreaths shall form our coronal,[375] like Spring's, And round our necks shall glance the Hooni strings; 50 So shall their brighter hues contrast the glow Of the dusk bosoms that beat high below.

III.

But now the dance is o'er--yet stay awhile; Ah, pause! nor yet put out the social smile. To-morrow for the Mooa we depart, But not to-night--to-night is for the heart. Again bestow the wreaths we gently woo, Ye young Enchantresses of gay Licoo![376] How lovely are your forms! how every sense Bows to your beauties, softened, but intense,[fi] 60 Like to the flowers on Mataloco's steep, Which fling their fragrance far athwart the deep!-- We too will see Licoo; but--oh! my heart!-- What do I say?--to-morrow we depart!

IV.

Thus rose a song--the harmony of times Before the winds blew Europe o'er these climes. True, they had vices--such are Nature's growth-- But only the barbarian's--we have both; The sordor of civilisation, mixed With all the savage which Man's fall hath fixed. 70 Who hath not seen Dissimulation's reign, The prayers of Abel linked to deeds of Cain? Who such would see may from his lattice view The Old World more degraded than the New,-- Now new no more, save where Columbia rears Twin giants, born by Freedom to her spheres, Where Chimborazo, over air,--earth,--wave,-- Glares with his Titan eye, and sees no slave.[fj][377]

V.

Such was this ditty of Tradition's days, Which to the dead a lingering fame conveys 80 In song, where Fame as yet hath left no sign Beyond the sound whose charm is half divine; Which leaves no record to the sceptic eye, But yields young History all to Harmony; A boy Achilles, with the Centaur's lyre In hand, to teach him to surpass his sire. For one long-cherished ballad's[378] simple stave, Rung from the rock, or mingled with the wave, Or from the bubbling streamlet's grassy side, Or gathering mountain echoes as they glide, 90 Hath greater power o'er each true heart and ear, Than all the columns Conquest's minions rear;[fk] Invites, when Hieroglyphics[379] are a theme For sages' labours, or the student's dream; Attracts, when History's volumes are a toil,-- The first, the freshest bud of Feeling's soil. Such was this rude rhyme--rhyme is of the rude-- But such inspired the Norseman's solitude, Who came and conquered; such, wherever rise Lands which no foes destroy or civilise, 100 Exist: and what can our accomplished art Of verse do more than reach the awakened heart?[380]

VI.

And sweetly now those untaught melodies Broke the luxurious silence of the skies, The sweet siesta of a summer day, The tropic afternoon of Toobonai, When every flower was bloom, and air was balm, And the first breath began to stir the palm, The first yet voiceless wind to urge the wave All gently to refresh the thirsty cave, 110 Where sat the Songstress with the stranger boy, Who taught her Passion's desolating joy, Too powerful over every heart, but most O'er those who know not how it may be lost; O'er those who, burning in the new-born fire, Like martyrs revel in their funeral pyre, With such devotion to their ecstacy, That Life knows no such rapture as to die: And die they do; for earthly life has nought Matched with that burst of Nature, even in thought; 120 And all our dreams of better life above But close in one eternal gush of Love.

VII.

There sat the gentle savage of the wild, In growth a woman, though in years a child, As childhood dates within our colder clime, Where nought is ripened rapidly save crime; The infant of an infant world, as pure From Nature--lovely, warm, and premature; Dusky like night, but night with all her stars; Or cavern sparkling with its native spars; 130 With eyes that were a language and a spell, A form like Aphrodite's in her shell, With all her loves around her on the deep, Voluptuous as the first approach of sleep; Yet full of life--for through her tropic cheek The blush would make its way, and all but speak; The sun-born blood suffused her neck, and threw O'er her clear nut-brown skin a lucid hue, Like coral reddening through the darkened wave, Which draws the diver to the crimson cave. 140 Such was this daughter of the southern seas, Herself a billow in her energies,[fl] To bear the bark of others' happiness, Nor feel a sorrow till their joy grew less: Her wild and warm yet faithful bosom knew No joy like what it gave; her hopes ne'er drew Aught from Experience, that chill touchstone, whose Sad proof reduces all things from their hues: She feared no ill, because she knew it not, Or what she knew was soon--too soon--forgot: 150 Her smiles and tears had passed, as light winds pass O'er lakes to ruffle, not destroy, their glass, Whose depths unsearched, and fountains from the hill, Restore their surface, in itself so still, Until the Earthquake tear the Naiad's cave, Root up the spring, and trample on the wave, And crush the living waters to a mass, The amphibious desert of the dank morass! And must their fate be hers? The eternal change But grasps Humanity with quicker range; 160 And they who fall but fall as worlds will fall, To rise, if just, a Spirit o'er them all.

VIII.

And who is he? the blue-eyed northern child[381] Of isles more known to man, but scarce less wild; The fair-haired offspring of the Hebrides, Where roars the Pentland with its whirling seas; Rocked in his cradle by the roaring wind, The tempest-born in body and in mind, His young eyes opening on the ocean-foam, Had from that moment deemed the deep his home, 170 The giant comrade of his pensive moods, The sharer of his craggy solitudes, The only Mentor of his youth, where'er His bark was borne; the sport of wave and air; A careless thing, who placed his choice in chance, Nursed by the legends of his land's romance; Eager to hope, but not less firm to bear, Acquainted with all feelings save despair. Placed in the Arab's clime he would have been As bold a rover as the sands have seen, 180 And braved their thirst with as enduring lip As Ishmael, wafted on his Desert-Ship;[382] Fixed upon Chili's shore, a proud cacique: On Hellas' mountains, a rebellious Greek;[383] Born in a tent, perhaps a Tamerlane; Bred to a throne, perhaps unfit to reign. For the same soul that rends its path to sway, If reared to such, can find no further prey Beyond itself, and must retrace its way,[384] Plunging for pleasure into pain: the same 190 Spirit which made a Nero, Rome's worst shame, A humbler state and discipline of heart, Had formed his glorious namesake's counterpart;[385] But grant his vices, grant them all his own, How small their theatre without a throne!

IX.

Thou smilest:--these comparisons seem high To those who scan all things with dazzled eye; Linked with the unknown name of one whose doom Has nought to do with glory or with Rome, With Chili, Hellas, or with Araby;-- 200 Thou smilest?--Smile; 'tis better thus than sigh; Yet such he might have been; he was a man, A soaring spirit, ever in the van, A patriot hero or despotic chief,[fm] To form a nation's glory or its grief, Born under auspices which make us more Or less than we delight to ponder o'er. But these are visions; say, what was he here? A blooming boy, a truant mutineer. The fair-haired Torquil, free as Ocean's spray, 210 The husband of the bride of Toobonai.

X.

By Neuha's side he sate, and watched the waters,-- Neuha, the sun-flower of the island daughters, Highborn, (a birth at which the herald smiles, Without a scutcheon for these secret isles,) Of a long race, the valiant and the free, The naked knights of savage chivalry, Whose grassy cairns ascend along the shore; And thine--I've seen--Achilles! do no more.[386] She, when the thunder-bearing strangers came, 220 In vast canoes, begirt with bolts of flame, Topped with tall trees, which, loftier than the palm, Seemed rooted in the deep amidst its calm: But when the winds awakened, shot forth wings Broad as the cloud along the horizon flings, And swayed the waves, like cities of the sea, Making the very billows look less free;-- She, with her paddling oar and dancing prow, Shot through the surf, like reindeer through the snow, Swift-gliding o'er the breaker's whitening edge, 230 Light as a Nereid in her ocean sledge, And gazed and wondered at the giant hulk, Which heaved from wave to wave its trampling bulk. The anchor dropped; it lay along the deep, Like a huge lion in the sun asleep, While round it swarmed the Proas' flitting chain, Like summer bees that hum around his mane.

XI.

The white man landed!--need the rest be told? The New World stretched its dusk hand to the Old; Each was to each a marvel, and the tie 240 Of wonder warmed to better sympathy. Kind was the welcome of the sun-born sires, And kinder still their daughters' gentler fires. Their union grew: the children of the storm Found beauty linked with many a dusky form; While these in turn admired the paler glow, Which seemed so white in climes that knew no snow. The chace, the race, the liberty to roam, The soil where every cottage showed a home; The sea-spread net, the lightly launched canoe, 250 Which stemmed the studded archipelago, O'er whose blue bosom rose the starry isles; The healthy slumber, earned by sportive toils; The palm, the loftiest Dryad of the woods, Within whose bosom infant Bacchus broods, While eagles scarce build higher than the crest Which shadows o'er the vineyard in her breast; The Cava feast, the Yam, the Cocoa's root, Which bears at once the cup, and milk, and fruit; The Bread-tree, which, without the ploughshare, yields 260 The unreaped harvest of unfurrowed fields, And bakes its unadulterated loaves Without a furnace in unpurchased groves, And flings off famine from its fertile breast, A priceless market for the gathering guest;-- These, with the luxuries of seas and woods, The airy joys of social solitudes, Tamed each rude wanderer to the sympathies Of those who were more happy, if less wise, Did more than Europe's discipline had done, 270 And civilised Civilisation's son!

XII.

Of these, and there was many a willing pair, Neuha[387] and Torquil were not the least fair: Both children of the isles, though distant far; Both born beneath a sea-presiding star; Both nourished amidst Nature's native scenes, Loved to the last, whatever intervenes Between us and our Childhood's sympathy, Which still reverts to what first caught the eye. He who first met the Highlands' swelling blue 280 Will love each peak that shows a kindred hue, Hail in each crag a friend's familiar face, And clasp the mountain in his Mind's embrace. Long have I roamed through lands which are not mine, Adored the Alp, and loved the Apennine, Revered Parnassus, and beheld the steep Jove's Ida and Olympus crown the deep: But 'twas not all long ages' lore, nor all Their nature held me in their thrilling thrall; The infant rapture still survived the boy, 290 And Loch-na-gar with Ida looked o'er Troy,[388] Mixed Celtic memories with the Phrygian mount, And Highland linns with Castalie's clear fount. Forgive me, Homer's universal shade! Forgive me, Phœbus! that my fancy strayed; The North and Nature taught me to adore Your scenes sublime, from those beloved before.

XIII.

The love which maketh all things fond and fair, The youth which makes one rainbow of the air, The dangers past, that make even Man enjoy 300 The pause in which he ceases to destroy, The mutual beauty, which the sternest feel Strike to their hearts like lightning to the steel, United the half savage and the whole, The maid and boy, in one absorbing soul. No more the thundering memory of the fight Wrapped his weaned bosom in its dark delight; No more the irksome restlessness of Rest Disturbed him like the eagle in her nest, Whose whetted beak[389] and far-pervading eye 310 Darts for a victim over all the sky: His heart was tamed to that voluptuous state, At once Elysian and effeminate, Which leaves no laurels o'er the Hero's urn;-- These wither when for aught save blood they burn; Yet when their ashes in their nook are laid, Doth not the myrtle leave as sweet a shade? Had Cæsar known but Cleopatra's kiss, Rome had been free, the world had not been his. And what have Cæsar's deeds and Cæsar's fame 320 Done for the earth? We feel them in our shame. The gory sanction of his Glory stains The rust which tyrants cherish on our chains. Though Glory--Nature--Reason--Freedom, bid Roused millions do what single Brutus did-- Sweep these mere mock-birds of the Despot's song From the tall bough where they have perched so long,-- Still are we hawked at by such mousing owls,[390] And take for falcons those ignoble fowls, When but a word of freedom would dispel 330 These bugbears, as their terrors show too well.

XIV.

Rapt in the fond forgetfulness of life, Neuha, the South Sea girl, was all a wife, With no distracting world to call her off From Love; with no Society to scoff At the new transient flame; no babbling crowd Of coxcombry in admiration loud, Or with adulterous whisper to alloy Her duty, and her glory, and her joy: With faith and feelings naked as her form, 340 She stood as stands a rainbow in a storm, Changing its hues with bright variety, But still expanding lovelier o'er the sky, Howe'er its arch may swell, its colours move, The cloud-compelling harbinger of Love.

XV.

Here, in this grotto of the wave-worn shore, They passed the Tropic's red meridian o'er; Nor long the hours--they never paused o'er time, Unbroken by the clock's funereal chime,[391] Which deals the daily pittance of our span, 350 And points and mocks with iron laugh at man.[fn] What deemed they of the future or the past? The present, like a tyrant, held them fast: Their hour-glass was the sea-sand, and the tide, Like her smooth billow, saw their moments glide Their clock the Sun, in his unbounded tower They reckoned not, whose day was but an hour; The nightingale, their only vesper-bell, Sung sweetly to the rose the day's farewell;[392] The broad Sun set, but not with lingering sweep, 360 As in the North he mellows o'er the deep; But fiery, full, and fierce, as if he left The World for ever, earth of light bereft, Plunged with red forehead down along the wave, As dives a hero headlong to his grave. Then rose they, looking first along the skies, And then for light into each other's eyes, Wondering that Summer showed so brief a sun, And asking if indeed the day were done.

XVI.

And let not this seem strange: the devotee 370 Lives not in earth, but in his ecstasy; Around him days and worlds are heedless driven, His Soul is gone before his dust to Heaven. Is Love less potent? No--his path is trod, Alike uplifted gloriously to God; Or linked to all we know of Heaven below, The other better self, whose joy or woe Is more than ours; the all-absorbing flame Which, kindled by another, grows the same,[fo] Wrapt in one blaze; the pure, yet funeral pile, 380 Where gentle hearts, like Bramins, sit and smile. How often we forget all time, when lone, Admiring Nature's universal throne, Her woods--her wilds--her waters--the intense Reply of hers to our intelligence! Live not the Stars and Mountains? Are the Waves Without a spirit? Are the dropping caves Without a feeling in their silent tears?[393] No, no;--they woo and clasp us to their spheres, Dissolve this clog and clod of clay before 390 Its hour, and merge our soul in the great shore. Strip off this fond and false identity!-- Who thinks of self when gazing on the sky? And who, though gazing lower, ever thought, In the young moments ere the heart is taught Time's lesson, of Man's baseness or his own? All Nature is his realm, and Love his throne.

XVII.

Neuha arose, and Torquil: Twilight's hour Came sad and softly to their rocky bower, Which, kindling by degrees its dewy spars, 400 Echoed their dim light to the mustering stars. Slowly the pair, partaking Nature's calm, Sought out their cottage, built beneath the palm; Now smiling and now silent, as the scene; Lovely as Love--the Spirit!--when serene. The Ocean scarce spoke louder with his swell, Than breathes his mimic murmurer in the shell,[394] As, far divided from his parent deep, The sea-born infant cries, and will not sleep, Raising his little plaint in vain, to rave 410 For the broad bosom of his nursing wave: The woods drooped darkly, as inclined to rest, The tropic bird wheeled rockward to his nest, And the blue sky spread round them like a lake Of peace, where Piety her thirst might slake.

XVIII.

But through the palm and plantain, hark, a Voice! Not such as would have been a lover's choice, In such an hour, to break the air so still; No dying night-breeze, harping o'er the hill, Striking the strings of nature, rock and tree, 420 Those best and earliest lyres of Harmony, With Echo for their chorus; nor the alarm Of the loud war-whoop to dispel the charm; Nor the soliloquy of the hermit owl, Exhaling all his solitary soul, The dim though large-eyed wingéd anchorite, Who peals his dreary Pæan o'er the night; But a loud, long, and naval whistle, shrill As ever started through a sea-bird's bill; And then a pause, and then a hoarse "Hillo! 430 Torquil, my boy! what cheer? Ho! brother, ho!" "Who hails?" cried Torquil, following with his eye The sound. "Here's one," was all the brief reply.

XIX.

But here the herald of the self-same mouth[395] Came breathing o'er the aromatic south, Not like a "bed of violets" on the gale, But such as wafts its cloud o'er grog or ale, Borne from a short frail pipe, which yet had blown Its gentle odours over either zone, And, puffed where'er winds rise or waters roll, 440 Had wafted smoke from Portsmouth to the Pole, Opposed its vapour as the lightning flashed, And reeked, 'midst mountain-billows, unabashed, To Æolus a constant sacrifice, Through every change of all the varying skies. And what was he who bore it?--I may err, But deem him sailor or philosopher.[396] Sublime Tobacco! which from East to West Cheers the tar's labour or the Turkman's rest; Which on the Moslem's ottoman divides 450 His hours, and rivals opium and his brides; Magnificent in Stamboul, but less grand, Though not less loved, in Wapping or the Strand; Divine in hookas, glorious in a pipe, When tipped with amber, mellow, rich, and ripe: Like other charmers, wooing the caress, More dazzlingly when daring in full dress; Yet thy true lovers more admire by far[fp] Thy naked beauties--Give me a cigar![397]

XX.

Through the approaching darkness of the wood 460 A human figure broke the solitude, Fantastically, it may be, arrayed, A seaman in a savage masquerade; Such as appears to rise out from the deep, When o'er the line the merry vessels sweep, And the rough Saturnalia of the tar Flock o'er the deck, in Neptune's borrowed car;[398] And, pleased, the God of Ocean sees his name Revive once more, though but in mimic game Of his true sons, who riot in the breeze 470 Undreamt of in his native Cyclades. Still the old God delights, from out the main, To snatch some glimpses of his ancient reign. Our sailor's jacket, though in ragged trim, His constant pipe, which never yet burned dim, His foremast air, and somewhat rolling gait, Like his dear vessel, spoke his former state; But then a sort of kerchief round his head, Not over tightly bound, nor nicely spread; And, 'stead of trowsers (ah! too early torn! 480 For even the mildest woods will have their thorn) A curious sort of somewhat scanty mat Now served for inexpressibles and hat; His naked feet and neck, and sunburnt face, Perchance might suit alike with either race. His arms were all his own, our Europe's growth, Which two worlds bless for civilising both; The musket swung behind his shoulders broad, And somewhat stooped by his marine abode, But brawny as the boar's; and hung beneath, 490 His cutlass drooped, unconscious of a sheath, Or lost or worn away; his pistols were Linked to his belt, a matrimonial pair-- (Let not this metaphor appear a scoff, Though one missed fire, the other would go off); These, with a bayonet, not so free from rust As when the arm-chest held its brighter trust, Completed his accoutrements, as Night Surveyed him in his garb heteroclite.

XXI.

"What cheer, Ben Bunting?" cried (when in full view 500 Our new acquaintance) Torquil. "Aught of new?" "Ey, ey!" quoth Ben, "not new, but news enow; A strange sail in the offing."--"Sail! and how? What! could you make her out? It cannot be; I've seen no rag of canvass on the sea." "Belike," said Ben, "you might not from the bay, But from the bluff-head, where I watched to-day, I saw her in the doldrums; for the wind Was light and baffling."--"When the Sun declined Where lay she? had she anchored?"--"No, but still 510 She bore down on us, till the wind grew still." "Her flag?"--"I had no glass: but fore and aft, Egad! she seemed a wicked-looking craft." "Armed?"--"I expect so;--sent on the look-out: 'Tis time, belike, to put our helm about." "About?--Whate'er may have us now in chase, We'll make no running fight, for that were base; We will die at our quarters, like true men." "Ey, ey! for that 'tis all the same to Ben." "Does Christian know this?"--"Aye; he has piped all hands 520 To quarters. They are furbishing the stands Of arms; and we have got some guns to bear, And scaled them. You are wanted."--"That's but fair; And if it were not, mine is not the soul To leave my comrades helpless on the shoal. My Neuha! ah! and must my fate pursue Not me alone, but one so sweet and true? But whatsoe'er betide, ah, Neuha! now Unman me not: the hour will not allow A tear; I am thine whatever intervenes!" 530 "Right," quoth Ben; "that will do for the marines."[399]

CANTO THE THIRD.

I.

The fight was o'er; the flashing through the gloom, Which robes the cannon as he wings a tomb, Had ceased; and sulphury vapours upward driven Had left the Earth, and but polluted Heaven: The rattling roar which rung in every volley Had left the echoes to their melancholy; No more they shrieked their horror, boom for boom; The strife was done, the vanquished had their doom; The mutineers were crushed, dispersed, or ta'en, Or lived to deem the happiest were the slain. 10 Few, few escaped, and these were hunted o'er The isle they loved beyond their native shore. No further home was theirs, it seemed, on earth, Once renegades to that which gave them birth; Tracked like wild beasts, like them they sought the wild, As to a Mother's bosom flies the child; But vainly wolves and lions seek their den, And still more vainly men escape from men.

II.

Beneath a rock whose jutting base protrudes Far over Ocean in its fiercest moods, 20 When scaling his enormous crag the wave Is hurled down headlong, like the foremost brave, And falls back on the foaming crowd behind, Which fight beneath the banners of the wind, But now at rest, a little remnant drew Together, bleeding, thirsty, faint, and few; But still their weapons in their hands, and still With something of the pride of former will, As men not all unused to meditate, And strive much more than wonder at their fate. 30 Their present lot was what they had foreseen, And dared as what was likely to have been; Yet still the lingering hope, which deemed their lot Not pardoned, but unsought for or forgot, Or trusted that, if sought, their distant caves Might still be missed amidst the world of waves, Had weaned their thoughts in part from what they saw And felt, the vengeance of their country's law. Their sea-green isle, their guilt-won Paradise, No more could shield their Virtue or their Vice: 40 Their better feelings, if such were, were thrown Back on themselves,--their sins remained alone. Proscribed even in their second country, they Were lost; in vain the World before them lay; All outlets seemed secured. Their new allies Had fought and bled in mutual sacrifice; But what availed the club and spear, and arm Of Hercules, against the sulphury charm, The magic of the thunder, which destroyed The warrior ere his strength could be employed? 50 Dug, like a spreading pestilence, the grave No less of human bravery than the brave![400] Their own scant numbers acted all the few Against the many oft will dare and do; But though the choice seems native to die free, Even Greece can boast but one Thermopylæ, Till now, when she has forged her broken chain Back to a sword, and dies and lives again!

III.

Beside the jutting rock the few appeared, Like the last remnant of the red-deer's herd; 60 Their eyes were feverish, and their aspect worn, But still the hunter's blood was on their horn. A little stream came tumbling from the height, And straggling into ocean as it might, Its bounding crystal frolicked in the ray, And gushed from cliff to crag with saltless spray; Close on the wild, wide ocean, yet as pure And fresh as Innocence, and more secure, Its silver torrent glittered o'er the deep, As the shy chamois' eye o'erlooks the steep, 70 While far below the vast and sullen swell Of Ocean's alpine azure rose and fell. To this young spring they rushed,--all feelings first Absorbed in Passion's and in Nature's thirst,-- Drank as they do who drink their last, and threw Their arms aside to revel in its dew; Cooled their scorched throats, and washed the gory stains From wounds whose only bandage might be chains; Then, when their drought was quenched, looked sadly round, As wondering how so many still were found 80 Alive and fetterless:--but silent all, Each sought his fellow's eyes, as if to call On him for language which his lips denied, As though their voices with their cause had died.

IV.

Stern, and aloof a little from the rest, Stood Christian, with his arms across his chest. The ruddy, reckless, dauntless hue once spread Along his cheek was livid now as lead; His light-brown locks, so graceful in their flow, Now rose like startled vipers o'er his brow. 90 Still as a statue, with his lips comprest To stifle even the breath within his breast, Fast by the rock, all menacing, but mute, He stood; and, save a slight beat of his foot, Which deepened now and then the sandy dint Beneath his heel, his form seemed turned to flint. Some paces further Torquil leaned his head Against a bank, and spoke not, but he bled,-- Not mortally:--his worst wound was within; His brow was pale, his blue eyes sunken in, 100 And blood-drops, sprinkled o'er his yellow hair, Showed that his faintness came not from despair, But Nature's ebb. Beside him was another, Rough as a bear, but willing as a brother,-- Ben Bunting, who essayed to wash, and wipe, And bind his wound--then calmly lit his pipe, A trophy which survived a hundred fights, A beacon which had cheered ten thousand nights. The fourth and last of this deserted group Walked up and down--at times would stand, then stoop 110 To pick a pebble up--then let it drop-- Then hurry as in haste--then quickly stop-- Then cast his eyes on his companions--then Half whistle half a tune, and pause again-- And then his former movements would redouble, With something between carelessness and trouble. This is a long description, but applies To scarce five minutes passed before the eyes; But yet what minutes! Moments like to these Rend men's lives into immortalities. 120

V.

At length Jack Skyscrape, a mercurial man, Who fluttered over all things like a fan, More brave than firm, and more disposed to dare And die at once than wrestle with despair, Exclaimed, "G--d damn!"--those syllables intense,-- Nucleus of England's native eloquence, As the Turk's "Allah!" or the Roman's more Pagan "Proh Jupiter!" was wont of yore To give their first impressions such a vent, By way of echo to embarrassment.[fq] 130 Jack was embarrassed,--never hero more, And as he knew not what to say, he swore: Nor swore in vain; the long congenial sound Revived Ben Bunting from his pipe profound; He drew it from his mouth, and looked full wise, But merely added to the oath his eyes; Thus rendering the imperfect phrase complete, A peroration I need not repeat.

VI.

But Christian,[401] of a higher order, stood Like an extinct volcano in his mood; 140 Silent, and sad, and savage,--with the trace Of passion reeking from his clouded face; Till lifting up again his sombre eye, It glanced on Torquil, who leaned faintly by. "And is it thus?" he cried, "unhappy boy! And thee, too, thee--my madness must destroy!" He said, and strode to where young Torquil stood, Yet dabbled with his lately flowing blood; Seized his hand wistfully, but did not press, And shrunk as fearful of his own caress; 150 Enquired into his state: and when he heard The wound was slighter than he deemed or feared, A moment's brightness passed along his brow, As much as such a moment would allow. "Yes," he exclaimed, "we are taken in the toil, But not a coward or a common spoil; Dearly they have bought us--dearly still may buy,-- And I must fall; but have you strength to fly? 'Twould be some comfort still, could you survive; Our dwindled band is now too few to strive. 160 Oh! for a sole canoe! though but a shell, To bear you hence to where a hope may dwell! For me, my lot is what I sought; to be, In life or death, the fearless and the free."

VII.

Even as he spoke, around the promontory, Which nodded o'er the billows high and hoary, A dark speck dotted Ocean: on it flew Like to the shadow of a roused sea-mew; Onward it came--and, lo! a second followed-- Now seen--now hid--where Ocean's vale was hollowed; 170 And near, and nearer, till the dusky crew Presented well-known aspects to the view, Till on the surf their skimming paddles play, Buoyant as wings, and flitting through the spray;-- Now perching on the wave's high curl, and now Dashed downward in the thundering foam below, Which flings it broad and boiling sheet on sheet, And slings its high flakes, shivered into sleet: But floating still through surf and swell, drew nigh The barks, like small birds through a lowering sky. 180 Their art seemed nature--such the skill to sweep The wave of these born playmates of the deep.

VIII.

And who the first that, springing on the strand, Leaped like a Nereid from her shell to land, With dark but brilliant skin, and dewy eye Shining with love, and hope, and constancy? Neuha--the fond, the faithful, the adored-- Her heart on Torquil's like a torrent poured; And smiled, and wept, and near, and nearer clasped, As if to be assured 'twas him she grasped; 190 Shuddered to see his yet warm wound, and then, To find it trivial, smiled and wept again. She was a warrior's daughter, and could bear Such sights, and feel, and mourn, but not despair. Her lover lived,--nor foes nor fears could blight That full-blown moment in its all delight: Joy trickled in her tears, joy filled the sob That rocked her heart till almost heard to throb; And Paradise was breathing in the sigh Of Nature's child in Nature's ecstasy. 200

IX.

The sterner spirits who beheld that meeting Were not unmoved; who are, when hearts are greeting? Even Christian gazed upon the maid and boy With tearless eye, but yet a gloomy joy Mixed with those bitter thoughts the soul arrays In hopeless visions of our better days, When all's gone--to the rainbow's latest ray. "And but for me!" he said, and turned away; Then gazed upon the pair, as in his den A lion looks upon his cubs again; 210 And then relapsed into his sullen guise, As heedless of his further destinies.

X.

But brief their time for good or evil thought; The billows round the promontory brought The plash of hostile oars.--Alas! who made That sound a dread? All around them seemed arrayed Against them, save the bride of Toobonai: She, as she caught the first glimpse o'er the bay Of the armed boats, which hurried to complete The remnant's ruin with their flying feet,[fr] 220 Beckoned the natives round her to their prows, Embarked their guests and launched their light canoes; In one placed Christian and his comrades twain-- But she and Torquil must not part again. She fixed him in her own.--Away! away! They cleared the breakers, dart along the bay, And towards a group of islets, such as bear The sea-bird's nest and seal's surf-hollowed lair, They skim the blue tops of the billows; fast They flew, and fast their fierce pursuers chased. 230 They gain upon them--now they lose again,-- Again make way and menace o'er the main; And now the two canoes in chase divide, And follow different courses o'er the tide, To baffle the pursuit.--Away! away! As Life is on each paddle's flight to-day, And more than Life or lives to Neuha: Love Freights the frail bark and urges to the cove; And now the refuge and the foe are nigh-- Yet, yet a moment! Fly, thou light ark, fly! 240

CANTO THE FOURTH.

I.

White as a white sail on a dusky sea, When half the horizon's clouded and half free, Fluttering between the dun wave and the sky, Is Hope's last gleam in Man's extremity. Her anchor parts; but still her snowy sail Attracts our eye amidst the rudest gale: Though every wave she climbs divides us more, The heart still follows from the loneliest shore.

II.

Not distant from the isle of Toobonai, A black rock rears its bosom o'er the spray, 10 The haunt of birds, a desert to mankind, Where the rough seal reposes from the wind, And sleeps unwieldy in his cavern dun, Or gambols with huge frolic in the sun: There shrilly to the passing oar is heard The startled echo of the Ocean bird, Who rears on its bare breast her callow brood, The feathered fishers of the solitude. A narrow segment of the yellow sand On one side forms the outline of a strand;[402] 20 Here the young turtle, crawling from his shell, Steals to the deep wherein his parents dwell; Chipped by the beam, a nursling of the day, But hatched for ocean by the fostering ray; The rest was one bleak precipice, as e'er Gave mariners a shelter and despair; A spot to make the saved regret the deck Which late went down, and envy the lost wreck. Such was the stern asylum Neuha chose To shield her lover from his following foes; 30 But all its secret was not told; she knew In this a treasure hidden from the view.

III.

Ere the canoes divided, near the spot, The men that manned what held her Torquil's lot, By her command removed, to strengthen more The skiff which wafted Christian from the shore. This he would have opposed; but with a smile She pointed calmly to the craggy isle, And bade him "speed and prosper." She would take The rest upon herself for Torquil's sake. 40 They parted with this added aid; afar, The Proa darted like a shooting star, And gained on the pursuers, who now steered Right on the rock which she and Torquil neared. They pulled; her arm, though delicate, was free And firm as ever grappled with the sea, And yielded scarce to Torquil's manlier strength. The prow now almost lay within its length Of the crag's steep inexorable face, With nought but soundless waters for its base; 50 Within a hundred boats' length was the foe, And now what refuge but their frail canoe? This Torquil asked with half upbraiding eye, Which said--"Has Neuha brought me here to die? Is this a place of safety, or a grave, And yon huge rock the tombstone of the wave?"

IV.

They rested on their paddles, and uprose Neuha, and pointing to the approaching foes, Cried, "Torquil, follow me, and fearless follow!" Then plunged at once into the Ocean's hollow. 60 There was no time to pause--the foes were near-- Chains in his eye, and menace in his ear; With vigour they pulled on, and as they came, Hailed him to yield, and by his forfeit name. Headlong he leapt--to him the swimmer's skill Was native, and now all his hope from ill: But how, or where? He dived, and rose no more; The boat's crew looked amazed o'er sea and shore. There was no landing on that precipice, Steep, harsh, and slippery as a berg of ice. 70 They watched awhile to see him float again, But not a trace rebubbled from the main: The wave rolled on, no ripple on its face, Since their first plunge recalled a single trace; The little whirl which eddied, and slight foam, That whitened o'er what seemed their latest home, White as a sepulchre above the pair Who left no marble (mournful as an heir) The quiet Proa wavering o'er the tide Was all that told of Torquil and his bride; 80 And but for this alone the whole might seem The vanished phantom of a seaman's dream. They paused and searched in vain, then pulled away; Even Superstition now forbade their stay. Some said he had not plunged into the wave, But vanished like a corpse-light from a grave; Others, that something supernatural Glared in his figure, more than mortal tall; While all agreed that in his cheek and eye There was a dead hue of Eternity. 90 Still as their oars receded from the crag, Round every weed a moment would they lag, Expectant of some token of their prey; But no--he had melted from them like the spray.

V.

And where was he the Pilgrim of the Deep, Following the Nereid? Had they ceased to weep For ever? or, received in coral caves, Wrung life and pity from the softening waves? Did they with Ocean's hidden sovereigns dwell, And sound with Mermen the fantastic shell? 100 Did Neuha with the mermaids comb her hair Flowing o'er ocean as it streamed in air? Or had they perished, and in silence slept Beneath the gulf wherein they boldly leapt?

VI.

Young Neuha plunged into the deep, and he Followed: her track beneath her native sea Was as a native's of the element, So smoothly--bravely--brilliantly she went, Leaving a streak of light behind her heel, Which struck and flashed like an amphibious steel, 110 Closely, and scarcely less expert to trace The depths where divers hold the pearl in chase, Torquil, the nursling of the northern seas, Pursued her liquid steps with heart and ease. Deep--deeper for an instant Neuha led The way--then upward soared--and as she spread Her arms, and flung the foam from off her locks, Laughed, and the sound was answered by the rocks. They had gained a central realm of earth again, But looked for tree, and field, and sky, in vain. 120 Around she pointed to a spacious cave, Whose only portal was the keyless wave,[403] (A hollow archway by the sun unseen, Save through the billows' glassy veil of green, In some transparent ocean holiday, When all the finny people are at play,) Wiped with her hair the brine from Torquil's eyes, And clapped her hands with joy at his surprise; Led him to where the rock appeared to jut, And form a something like a Triton's hut; 130 For all was darkness for a space, till day, Through clefts above let in a sobered ray; As in some old cathedral's glimmering aisle The dusty monuments from light recoil, Thus sadly in their refuge submarine The vault drew half her shadow from the scene.

VII.

Forth from her bosom the young savage drew A pine torch, strongly girded with gnatoo; A plantain-leaf o'er all, the more to keep Its latent sparkle from the sapping deep. 140 This mantle kept it dry; then from a nook Of the same plantain-leaf a flint she took, A few shrunk withered twigs, and from the blade Of Torquil's knife struck fire, and thus arrayed The grot with torchlight. Wide it was and high, And showed a self-born Gothic canopy; The arch upreared by Nature's architect, The architrave some Earthquake might erect; The buttress from some mountain's bosom hurled, When the Poles crashed, and water was the world; 150 Or hardened from some earth-absorbing fire, While yet the globe reeked from its funeral pyre; The fretted pinnacle, the aisle, the nave,[404] Were there, all scooped by Darkness from her cave. There, with a little tinge of phantasy, Fantastic faces moped and mowed on high, And then a mitre or a shrine would fix The eye upon its seeming crucifix. Thus Nature played with the stalactites,[405] And built herself a Chapel of the Seas. 160

VIII.

And Neuha took her Torquil by the hand, And waved along the vault her kindled brand, And led him into each recess, and showed The secret places of their new abode. Nor these alone, for all had been prepared Before, to soothe the lover's lot she shared: The mat for rest; for dress the fresh gnatoo, And sandal oil to fence against the dew; For food the cocoa-nut, the yam, the bread Born of the fruit; for board the plantain spread 170 With its broad leaf, or turtle-shell which bore A banquet in the flesh it covered o'er; The gourd with water recent from the rill, The ripe banana from the mellow hill; A pine-torch pile to keep undying light, And she herself, as beautiful as night, To fling her shadowy spirit o'er the scene, And make their subterranean world serene. She had foreseen, since first the stranger's sail Drew to their isle, that force or flight might fail, 180 And formed a refuge of the rocky den For Torquil's safety from his countrymen.[fs] Each dawn had wafted there her light canoe, Laden with all the golden fruits that grew; Each eve had seen her gliding through the hour With all could cheer or deck their sparry bower; And now she spread her little store with smiles, The happiest daughter of the loving isles.

IX.

She, as he gazed with grateful wonder, pressed Her sheltered love to her impassioned breast; 190 And suited to her soft caresses, told An olden tale of Love,--for Love is old, Old as eternity, but not outworn With each new being born or to be born:[406] How a young Chief, a thousand moons ago, Diving for turtle in the depths below, Had risen, in tracking fast his ocean prey, Into the cave which round and o'er them lay; How, in some desperate feud of after-time, He sheltered there a daughter of the clime, 200 A foe beloved, and offspring of a foe, Saved by his tribe but for a captive's woe; How, when the storm of war was stilled, he led His island clan to where the waters spread Their deep-green shadow o'er the rocky door, Then dived--it seemed as if to rise no more: His wondering mates, amazed within their bark, Or deemed him mad, or prey to the blue shark; Rowed round in sorrow the sea-girded rock, Then paused upon their paddles from the shock; 210 When, fresh and springing from the deep, they saw A Goddess rise--so deemed they in their awe; And their companion, glorious by her side, Proud and exulting in his Mermaid bride; And how, when undeceived, the pair they bore With sounding conchs and joyous shouts to shore; How they had gladly lived and calmly died,-- And why not also Torquil and his bride? Not mine to tell the rapturous caress Which followed wildly in that wild recess 220 This tale; enough that all within that cave Was love, though buried strong as in the grave, Where Abelard, through twenty years of death, When Eloïsa's form was lowered beneath Their nuptial vault, his arms outstretched, and pressed The kindling ashes to his kindled breast.[407] The waves without sang round their couch, their roar As much unheeded as if life were o'er; Within, their hearts made all their harmony, Love's broken murmur and more broken sigh. 230

X.

And they, the cause and sharers of the shock Which left them exiles of the hollow rock, Where were they? O'er the sea for life they plied, To seek from Heaven the shelter men denied. Another course had been their choice--but where? The wave which bore them still their foes would bear, Who, disappointed of their former chase, In search of Christian now renewed their race. Eager with anger, their strong arms made way, Like vultures baffled of their previous prey. 240 They gained upon them, all whose safety lay In some bleak crag or deeply-hidden bay: No further chance or choice remained; and right For the first further rock which met their sight They steered, to take their latest view of land, And yield as victims, or die sword in hand; Dismissed the natives and their shallop, who Would still have battled for that scanty crew; But Christian bade them seek their shore again, Nor add a sacrifice which were in vain; 250 For what were simple bow and savage spear Against the arms which must be wielded here?

XI.

They landed on a wild but narrow scene, Where few but Nature's footsteps yet had been; Prepared their arms, and with that gloomy eye, Stern and sustained, of man's extremity, When Hope is gone, nor Glory's self remains To cheer resistance against death or chains.-- They stood, the three, as the three hundred stood Who dyed Thermopylæ with holy blood. 260 But, ah! how different! 'tis the cause makes all, Degrades or hallows courage in its fall. O'er them no fame, eternal and intense, Blazed through the clouds of Death and beckoned hence; No grateful country, smiling through her tears, Begun the praises of a thousand years; No nation's eyes would on their tomb be bent, No heroes envy them their monument; However boldly their warm blood was spilt, Their Life was shame, their Epitaph was guilt. 270 And this they knew and felt, at least the one, The leader of the band he had undone; Who, born perchance for better things, had set His life upon a cast which lingered yet: But now the die was to be thrown, and all The chances were in favour of his fall: And such a fall! But still he faced the shock, Obdurate as a portion of the rock Whereon he stood, and fixed his levelled gun, Dark as a sullen cloud before the sun. 280

XII.

The boat drew nigh, well armed, and firm the crew To act whatever Duty bade them do; Careless of danger, as the onward wind Is of the leaves it strews, nor looks behind. And, yet, perhaps, they rather wished to go Against a nation's than a native foe, And felt that this poor victim of self-will, Briton no more, had once been Britain's still. They hailed him to surrender--no reply; Their arms were poised, and glittered in the sky. 290 They hailed again--no answer; yet once more They offered quarter louder than before. The echoes only, from the rock's rebound, Took their last farewell of the dying sound. Then flashed the flint, and blazed the volleying flame, And the smoke rose between them and their aim, While the rock rattled with the bullets' knell, Which pealed in vain, and flattened as they fell; Then flew the only answer to be given By those who had lost all hope in earth or heaven. 300 After the first fierce peal as they pulled nigher, They heard the voice of Christian shout, "Now, fire!" And ere the word upon the echo died, Two fell; the rest assailed the rock's rough side, And, furious at the madness of their foes, Disdained all further efforts, save to close. But steep the crag, and all without a path, Each step opposed a bastion to their wrath, While, placed 'midst clefts the least accessible, Which Christian's eye was trained to mark full well, 310 The three maintained a strife which must not yield, In spots where eagles might have chosen to build. Their every shot told; while the assailant fell, Dashed on the shingles like the limpet shell; But still enough survived, and mounted still, Scattering their numbers here and there, until Surrounded and commanded, though not nigh Enough for seizure, near enough to die, The desperate trio held aloof their fate But by a thread, like sharks who have gorged the bait; 320 Yet to the very last they battled well, And not a groan informed their foes who fell. Christian died last--twice wounded; and once more Mercy was offered when they saw his gore; Too late for life, but not too late to die,[ft] With, though a hostile hand, to close his eye. A limb was broken, and he drooped along The crag, as doth a falcon reft of young.[fu] The sound revived him, or appeared to wake Some passion which a weakly gesture spake: 330 He beckoned to the foremost, who drew nigh, But, as they neared, he reared his weapon high-- His last ball had been aimed, but from his breast He tore the topmost button from his vest,[408][fv] Down the tube dashed it--levelled--fired, and smiled As his foe fell; then, like a serpent, coiled His wounded, weary form, to where the steep Looked desperate as himself along the deep; Cast one glance back, and clenched his hand, and shook His last rage 'gainst the earth which he forsook; 340 Then plunged: the rock below received like glass His body crushed into one gory mass, With scarce a shred to tell of human form, Or fragment for the sea-bird or the worm; A fair-haired scalp, besmeared with blood and weeds, Yet reeked, the remnant of himself and deeds; Some splinters of his weapons (to the last, As long as hand could hold, he held them fast) Yet glittered, but at distance--hurled away To rust beneath the dew and dashing spray. 350 The rest was nothing--save a life mis-spent, And soul--but who shall answer where it went? 'Tis ours to bear, not judge the dead; and they Who doom to Hell, themselves are on the way, Unless these bullies of eternal pains Are pardoned their bad hearts for their worse brains.

XIII.

The deed was over! All were gone or ta'en, The fugitive, the captive, or the slain. Chained on the deck, where once, a gallant crew, They stood with honour, were the wretched few 360 Survivors of the skirmish on the isle; But the last rock left no surviving spoil. Cold lay they where they fell, and weltering, While o'er them flapped the sea-birds' dewy wing, Now wheeling nearer from the neighbouring surge, And screaming high their harsh and hungry dirge: But calm and careless heaved the wave below, Eternal with unsympathetic flow; Far o'er its face the Dolphins sported on, And sprung the flying fish against the sun, 370 Till its dried wing relapsed from its brief height, To gather moisture for another flight.

XIV.

'Twas morn; and Neuha, who by dawn of day Swam smoothly forth to catch the rising ray, And watch if aught approached the amphibious lair Where lay her lover, saw a sail in air: It flapped, it filled, and to the growing gale Bent its broad arch: her breath began to fail With fluttering fear, her heart beat thick and high, While yet a doubt sprung where its course might lie. 380 But no! it came not; fast and far away The shadow lessened as it cleared the bay. She gazed, and flung the sea-foam from her eyes, To watch as for a rainbow in the skies. On the horizon verged the distant deck, Diminished, dwindled to a very speck-- Then vanished. All was Ocean, all was Joy! Down plunged she through the cave to rouse her boy; Told all she had seen, and all she hoped, and all That happy love could augur or recall; 390 Sprung forth again, with Torquil following free His bounding Nereid over the broad sea; Swam round the rock, to where a shallow cleft Hid the canoe that Neuha there had left Drifting along the tide, without an oar, That eve the strangers chased them from the shore; But when these vanished, she pursued her prow, Regained, and urged to where they found it now: Nor ever did more love and joy embark, Than now were wafted in that slender ark. 400

XV.

Again their own shore rises on the view, No more polluted with a hostile hue; No sullen ship lay bristling o'er the foam, A floating dungeon:--all was Hope and Home! A thousand Proas darted o'er the bay, With sounding shells, and heralded their way; The chiefs came down, around the people poured, And welcomed Torquil as a son restored; The women thronged, embracing and embraced By Neuha, asking where they had been chased, 410 And how escaped? The tale was told; and then One acclamation rent the sky again; And from that hour a new tradition gave Their sanctuary the name of "Neuha's Cave." A hundred fires, far flickering from the height,[fw] Blazed o'er the general revel of the night, The feast in honour of the guest, returned To Peace and Pleasure, perilously earned; A night succeeded by such happy days As only the yet infant world displays.[fx] 420

J. 10^th^ 1823.

FOOTNOTES:

[ex] {587} ----and made before the breeze her way.--[MS. D. erased.]

[ey] ----their doubtful shimmer from the deep.--[MS. D. erased]

[352] [William Bligh, the son of Cornish parents, was born September 9 1754 (? 1753). He served under Cook in his second voyage in the Resolution, 1772-75, as sailing-master; and, in 1782, fought under Lord Howe at Gibraltar. He married a daughter of William Betham, first collector of customs in the Isle of Man, and hence his connection with Fletcher Christian, who belonged to a Manx family, and the midshipman Peter Hayward, who was the son of a Deemster. He was appointed to the Bounty in December, 1787, and in 1791 to the Providence, which was despatched to the Society Islands to obtain a fresh cargo of bread-fruit trees in place of those which were thrown overboard by the mutineers. He commanded the Glatton at Copenhagen, May 21, 1801, and on that and other occasions served with distinction. He was made Governor of New South Wales in 1805, but was forcibly deposed in an insurrection headed by Major Johnston, January, 1808. He was kept in prison till 1810, but on his return to England his administration of his office was approved, and Johnston was cashiered. He was advanced to the rank of Vice-Admiral of the Blue in 1814, and died, December 7, 1817.

In his Narrative Bligh describes the mutiny as "a close-planned act of villainy," and attributes the conspiracy not to his own harshness, or to disloyalty provoked by "real or imaginary grievances," but to the contrast of life on board ship, "in ever climbing up the climbing wave," with the unearned luxuries of Tahiti, "the allurements of dissipation ... the female connections," which the sailors had left behind. Besides his own apology, there are the sworn statements of the two midshipmen, Hayward and Hallet, and others, which Bligh published in answer to a pamphlet which Edward Christian, afterwards Chief Justice of Ely, wrote in defence of his brother Fletcher. The evidence against Bligh is contained in the MS. journal of the boatswain's mate, James Morrison, which was saved, as by a miracle, from the wreck of the Pandora, and is quoted by Sir John Barrow, Lady Belcher, and other authorities. There is, too, the testimony of John Adams (Alexander Smith), as recorded by Captain Beachey, and, as additional proof of indifference and tyrannical behaviour, there are Bligh's own letters to Peter Hayward's mother and uncle (March 26, April 2, 1790), and W. C. Wentworth's account of his administration as Governor of New South Wales (see A Statistical Description, etc., 1819, p. 166). It cannot be gainsaid that Bligh was a man of integrity and worth, and that he was upheld and esteemed by the Admiralty. Morrison's Journal, though in parts corroborated by Bligh's MS. Journal, is not altogether convincing, and the testimony of John Adams in his old age counts for little. But according to his own supporters he "damned" his men though not the officers, and his own Narrative, as well as Morrison's Journal, proves that he was suspicious, and that he underrated and misunderstood the character and worth of his subordinates. He was responsible for the prolonged sojourn at Tahiti, and he should have remembered that time and distance are powerful solvents, and that between Portsmouth Hard and the untracked waters of the Pacific, "all Arcadia" had intervened. He was a man of imperfect sympathies, wanting in tact and fineness, but in the hour of need he behaved like a hero, and saved himself and others by submission to duty and strenuous self-control. Moreover, he "helped England" not once or twice, "in the brave days of old." (See A Narrative, etc., 1790; The Naval History of Great Britain, by E. P. Brenton, 1823, i. 96, sq.; Royal Naval Biography, by John Marshall, 1823-35, ii. pp. 747, sq.; Mutineers of the Bounty, by Lady Belcher, 1870, p. 8; Dictionary of National Biography, art. "Bligh.")]

[353] {589}["A few hours before, my situation had been peculiarly flattering. I had a ship in the most perfect order, and well stored with every necessary, both for service and health; ... the voyage was two thirds completed, and the remaining part in a very promising way."--A Narrative of the Mutiny, etc., by Lieut. W. Bligh, 1790, p. 9.]

[354] ["The women at Otaheite are handsome, mild, and cheerful in their manners and conversation, possessed of great sensibility, and have sufficient delicacy to make them admired and beloved. The chiefs were so much attached to our people, that they rather encouraged their stay among them than otherwise, and even made them promises of large possessions. Under these and many other attendant circumstances equally desirable, it is now, perhaps, not so much to be wondered at ... that a set of sailors, most of them void of connections, should be led away, especially when they imagined it in their power to fix themselves, in the midst of plenty, ... on the finest island in the world, where they need not labour, and where the allurements of dissipation are beyond anything that can be conceived,"--Ibid., p. 10.]

[ez] And all enjoy the exuberance of the wild.--[MS. D. erased.]

[fa] {590} Their formidable fleet the quick canoe.--[MS. D. erased.]

[355] {591}["Just before sunrising Mr. Christian, with the master-at-arms, gunner's mate, and Thomas Burkitt, seaman, came into my cabin while I was asleep, and, seizing me, tied my hands with a cord behind my back, and threatened me with instant death if I spoke or made the least noise. I, however, called out so loud as to alarm every one; but they had already secured the officers who were not of their party, by placing sentinels at their doors. There were three men at my cabin door, besides the four within; Christian had only a cutlass in his hand, the others had muskets and bayonets. I was hauled out of bed, and forced on deck in my shirt, suffering great pain from the tightness with which they had tied my hands.... The boatswain was now ordered to hoist the launch out. The boat being hoisted out, Mr. Hayward and Mr. Hallet, midshipmen, were ordered into it; upon which I demanded the cause of such an order, and endeavoured to persuade some one to a sense of duty; but it was to no effect: 'Hold your tongue, sir, or you are dead this instant,' was constantly repeated to me."--A Narrative of the Mutiny, etc., by Lieut. W. Bligh, 1790, pp. 1, 2.]

[356] ["The boatswain, and seamen who were to go in the boat, were allowed to collect twine, canvass, lines, sails, cordage, an eight-and-twenty-gallon cask of water, and the carpenter to take his tool-chest. Mr. Samuel got one hundred and fifty pounds of bread with a small quantity of rum and wine ... also a quadrant and compass."--Ibid., p. 3.]

[357] {592}["The mutineers now hurried those they meant to get rid of into the boat, ... Christian directed a dram to be served to each of his own crew."--A Narrative, etc., 1790, p. 3.]

[fb]

And lull it in his followers--"Ho! the dram" Rebellions sacrament, and paschal lamb. (A broken metaphor of flesh for wine But Catholics know the exchange is none of mine.--[MS. D. erased.]

And raise it in his followers--Ho! the bowl That sure Nepenthe for the wavering [soul].--[MS. D. erased.]

[358] [It was Johnson, not Burke, who upheld the claims of brandy.--"He was persuaded," says Boswell, "to drink one glass of it [claret]. He shook his head, and said, 'Poor stuff!--No, Sir, claret is the liquor for boys; port for men; but he who aspires to be a hero (smiling) must drink brandy.'"--Boswell's Life of Johnson, 1848, p. 627.]

[359] ["While the ship ... was in sight she steered to the W.N.W., but I considered this only a feint; for when we were sent away, 'Huzza for Otaheite!' was frequently heard among the mutineers."--A Narrative, etc., 1790, pp. 4-8. This statement is questioned by Sir John Barrow (The Eventful History, etc., 1831, p. 91), on the grounds that the mutiny was the result of a sudden determination on the part of Christian, and that liberty, and not the delights of Tahiti, was the object which the mutineers had in view.]

[360] {593}[A variant of Pope's lines--

"For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight, His can't be wrong, whose life is in the right."

Essay on Man, iii. 305, 306.]

[361] ["Isaac Martin, one of the guard over me, I saw, had an inclination to assist me; and as he fed me with shaddock (my lips being quite parched with my endeavours to bring about a change), we explained our wishes to each other by our looks; but this being observed, Martin was instantly removed from me."--A Narrative, etc., 1790, p. 4.]

[362] {594}["Christian ... then ... said, 'Come, Captain Bligh, your officers and men are now in the boat; and you must go with them; if you attempt to make the least resistance you will instantly be put to death;' and without any farther ceremony, holding me by the cord that tied my hands, with a tribe of armed ruffians about me, I was forced over the side, where they untied my hands. Being in the boat, we were veered astern by a rope. A few pieces of pork were thrown to me and some clothes.... After having undergone a great deal of ridicule, and being kept for some time to make sport for these unfeeling wretches, we were at length cast adrift in the open ocean.... When they were forcing me out of the ship, I asked him [Christian] if this treatment was a proper return for the many instances he had received of my friendship? He appeared disturbed at the question, and answered, with much emotion, 'That,--Captain Bligh,--that is the thing;--I am in hell--I am in hell.'"--A Narrative, etc., 1790, pp. 4-8.

Bligh's testimony on this point does not correspond with Morrison's journal, or with the evidence of the master, John Fryer, given at the court-martial, September 12, 1792. According to Morrison, when the boatswain tried to pacify Christian, he replied, "It is too late, I have been in hell for this fortnight past, and am determined to bear it no longer." The master's version is that he appealed to Christian, and that Christian exclaimed, "Hold your tongue, sir, I have been in hell for weeks past; Captain Bligh has brought all this on himself." Bligh seems to have flattered himself that in the act of mutiny Christian was seized with remorse, but it is clear that the wish was father to the thought. Moreover, on being questioned, Fryer, who was a supporter of the captain, explained that Christian referred to quarrels, to abuse in general, and more particularly to a recent accusation of stealing cocoa-nuts. (See The Eventful History, etc., 1831, pp. 84, 208, 209.)]

[363] {595}[Byron must mean "antarctic." "Arctic" is used figuratively for "cold," but not as a synonym for "polar."]

[fc] Now swelled now sighed along----.--[MS. D. erased.]

[364] ["At dawn of day some of my people seemed half dead; our appearances were horrible; and I could look no way, but I caught the eye of some one in distress."--A Narrative, etc., p. 37. Later on, p. 80, when the launch reached Timor, he speaks of the crew as "so many spectres, whose ghastly countenances, if the cause had been unknown, would have excited terror rather than pity."]

[365] [Bligh dwells on the misery caused to the luckless crew by drenching rains and by hunger, but says that no one suffered from thirst.]

[fd] {596} Nor yet unpitied. Vengeance had her own.--[MS. D. erased.]

[fe] ----the undisputed root.--[MS. D. erased.]

[366] The now celebrated bread fruit, to transplant which Captain Bligh's expedition was undertaken.

[The bread-fruit (Autocarpus incisa) was discovered by Dampier, in 1688. "Cook says that its taste is insipid, with a slight sweetness, somewhat resembling that of the crumb of wheaten bread mixed with a Jerusalem artichoke."--The Eventful History, etc., 1831, p. 43.]

[367] [See Letters from Mr. Fletcher Christian (pseud.), 1796, pp. 48, 49.]

[ff] Thus Argo plunged into the Euxine's foam.--[MS. D, erased.]

[368] {598} The first three sections are taken from an actual song of the Tonga Islanders, of which a prose translation is given in "Mariner's Account of the Tonga Islands." Toobonai is not however one of them; but was one of those where Christian and the mutineers took refuge. I have altered and added, but have retained as much as possible of the original.

["Whilst we were talking of Vaváoo tóoa Lico, the women said to us, 'Let us repair to the back of the island to contemplate the setting sun: there let us listen to the warbling of the birds, and the cooing of the wood-pigeon. We will gather flowers from the burying-place at Matáwto, and partake of refreshments prepared for us at Lico O'nĕ: we will then bathe in the sea, and rinse ourselves in the Váoo A'ca; we will anoint our skins in the sun with sweet-scented oil, and will plait in wreaths the flowers gathered at Matáwto.' And now as we stand motionless on the eminence over Anoo Mánoo, the whistling of the wind among the branches of the lofty toa shall fill us with a pleasing melancholy; or our minds shall be seized with astonishment as we behold the roaring surf below, endeavouring but in vain to tear away the firm rocks. Oh! how much happier shall we be thus employed, than when engaged in the troublesome and insipid cares of life!

"Now as night comes on, we must return to the Moóa. But hark!--hear you not the sound of the mats?--they are practising a bo-oóla ['a kind of dance performed by torch-light'], to be performed to-night on the malái, at Tanéa. Let us also go there. How will that scene of rejoicing call to our minds the many festivals held there, before Vavdoo was torn to pieces by war! Alas! how destructive is war! Behold! how it has rendered the land productive of weeds, and opened untimely graves for departed heroes! Our chiefs can now no longer enjoy the sweet pleasure of wandering alone by moonlight in search of their mistresses. But let us banish sorrow from our hearts: since we are at war, we must think and act like the natives of Fiji, who first taught us this destructive art. Let us therefore enjoy the present time, for to-morrow perhaps, or the next day, we may die. We will dress ourselves with chi coola, and put bands of white táppa round our waists. We will plait thick wreaths of jiale for our heads, and prepare strings of hooni for our necks, that their whiteness may show off the colour of our skins. Mark how the uncultivated spectators are profuse of their applause! But now the dance is over: let us remain here to-night and feast and be cheerful, and to-morrow we will depart for the Mooa. How troublesome are the young men, begging for our wreaths of flowers! while they say in their flattery, 'See how charming these young girls look coming from Licoo!--how beautiful are their skins, diffusing around a fragrance like the flowering precipice of Mataloco:--Let us also visit Licoo. We will depart to-morrow.'"--An Account of the Natives of the Tonga Islands, etc., 1817, i. 307, 308. See, too, for another version, ed. 1827, vol. ii. Appendix, p. xl.]

[369] {599}[Bolotoo is a visionary island to the north westward, the home of the Gods. The souls of chieftains, priests, and, possibly, the gentry, ascend to Bolotoo after death; but the souls of the lower classes "come to dust" with their bodies.--An Account, etc., 1817, ii. 104, 105.]

[370] [The toa, or drooping casuarina (C. equisetifolia). "Formerly the toa was regarded as sacred, and planted in groves round the 'Morais' of Tahiti."--Polynesia, by G. F. Angas, 1866, p. 44.]

[371] {600}[The capital town of an island.]

[372] ["The preparation of gnatoo, or tappa-cloth, from the inner bark of the paper mulberry tree, occupies much of the time of the Tongan women. The bark, after being soaked in water, is beaten out by means of wooden mallets, which are grooved longitudinally.... Early in the morning," says Mariner, "when the air is calm and still, the beating of the gnatoo at all the plantations about has a very pleasing effect; some sounds being near at hand, and others almost lost by the distance, some a little more acute, others more grave, and all with remarkable regularity, produce a musical variety that is ... heightened by the singing of the birds, and the cheerful influence of the scene."--Polynesia, 1846, pp. 249, 250.]

[373] [Marly, or Malái, is an open grass plat set apart for public ceremonies.]

[fg]

Ere Fiji's children blew the shell of war And armed Canoes brought Fury from afar.--[MS. D. erased.]

[fh] Too long forgotten in the pleasure ground.--[MS. D. erased.]

[374] [Cava, "kava," or "ava," is an intoxicating drink, prepared from the roots and stems of a kind of pepper (Piper methysticum). Mariner (An Account, etc., 1817, ii. 183-206) gives a highly interesting and suggestive account of the process of brewing the kava, and of the solemn "kava-drinking," which was attended with ceremonial rites. Briefly, a large wooden bowl, about three feet in diameter, and one foot in depth in the centre (see, for a typical specimen, King Thakombau's kava-bowl, in the British Museum), is placed in front of the king or chief, who sits in the midst, surrounded by his guests and courtiers. A portion of kava root is handed to each person present, who chews it to a pulp, and then deposits his quid in the kava bowl. Water being gradually added, the roots are well squeezed and twisted by various "curvilinear turns" of the hands and arms through the "fow," i.e. shavings of fibrous bark. When the "kava is in the cup," quaighs made of the "unexpanded leaf of the banana" are handed round to the guests, and the symposium begins. Mariner (ibid., p. 205, note) records a striking feature of the preliminary rites, a consecration or symbolic "grace before" drinking. "When a god has no priest, as Tali-y-Toobó [the Supreme Deity of the Tongans], no person ... presides at the head of his cava circle, the place being left ... vacant, but which it is supposed the god invisibly occupies.... And they go through the usual form of words, as if the first cup was actually filled and presented to the god: thus, before any cup is filled, the man by the side of the bowl says ... 'The cava is in the cup:' the mataboole answers ... 'Give it to our god:' but this is mere form, for there is no cup filled for the god." (See, too, The Making of Religion, by A. Lang, 1900, p. 279.)]

[375] {601}[The gnatoo, which is a piece of tappa cloth, is worn in different ways. "Twenty yards of fine cloth are required by a Tahitian woman to make one dress, which is worn from the waist downwards."--Polynesia, 1866, p. 45.]

[376] [Licoo is the name given to the back of or unfrequented part of any island.]

[fi]

How beauteous are their skins, how softly all The forms of Beauty wrap them like a pall.--[MS. D. erased.]

[fj] {602} Glares with his mountain eye--.--[MS. D. erased.]

[377] [The Morning Chronicle, November 6, 1822, prints the following proclamation of José Maria Carreno, Commandant-General of Panama: "Inhabitants of the Isthmus! The Genius of History, which has everywhere crowned our arms, announces peace to Colombia.... From the banks of Orinoco to the towering summits of Chimborazo not a single enemy exists, and those who proudly marched towards the abode of the ancient children of the Sun have either perished or remain prisoners expecting our clemency."]

[378] [Compare "a wise man's sentiment," as quoted by Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun: "He believed if a man were permitted to make all the Ballads, he need not care who should make the Laws."--An Account of a Conversation, etc., 1704, p. 10.]

[fk] {603} Than all the records History's annals rear.--[MS. D. erased.]

[379] [Jean François Champollion (1790-1832), at a meeting of the Académie des inscriptions, at Paris, September 17, 1822, announced the discovery of the alphabet of hieroglyphics.]

[380] [So, too, Shelley, in his Preface to the Revolt of Islam, speaks of "that more essential attribute of Poetry, the power of awakening in others sensations like those which animate my own bosom."]

[fl] {604}

And she herself the daughter of the Seas As full of gems and energy as these.--[MS. D. erased.]

[381] {605}[George Stewart was born at Ronaldshay (circ. 1764), but was living at Stromness in 1780 (where his father's house, "The White House," is still shown), when, on the homeward voyage of the Resolution, Cook and Bligh were hospitably entertained by his parents. He was of honourable descent. His mother's ancestors were sprung from a half-brother of Mary Stuart's, and his father's family dated back to 1400. When he was at Timor, Bligh gave a "description of the pirates" for purposes of identification by the authorities at Calcutta and elsewhere. "George Stewart, midshipman, aged 23 years, is five feet seven inches high, good complexion, dark hair, slender made ... small face, and black eyes; tatowed on the left breast with a star," etc. Lieutenant Bligh took Stewart with him, partly in return for the "civilities" at Stromness, but also because "he was a seaman, and had always borne a good character." Alexander Smith told Captain Beachey (Narrative of a Voyage to the Pacific, 1831, Part I. p. 53) that it was Stewart who advised Christian "to take possession of the ship," but Peter Hayward, who survived to old age, strenuously maintained that this was a calumny, that Stewart was forcibly detained in his cabin, and that he would not, in any case, have taken part in the mutiny. He had, perhaps, already wooed and won a daughter of the isles, and when the Bounty revisited Tahiti, September 20, 1789, he was put ashore, and took up his quarters in her father's house. There he remained till March, 1791, when he "voluntarily surrendered himself" to the captain of the Pandora, and was immediately put in irons. The story of his parting from his bride is told in A Missionary Voyage to the Southern Pacific Ocean in the Ship Duff (by W. Wilson), 1799, p. 360: "The history of Peggy Stewart marks a tenderness of heart that never will be heard without emotion.... They had lived with the old chief in the most tender state of endearment; a beautiful little girl had been the fruit of their union, and was at the breast when the Pandora arrived.... Frantic with grief, the unhappy Peggy ... flew with her infant in a canoe to the arms of her husband. She was separated from him by violence, and conveyed on shore in a state of despair and grief too big for utterance ... she sank into the deepest dejection, pined under a rapid decay ... and fell a victim to her feelings, dying literally of a broken heart." Stewart was drowned or killed by an accident during the wreck of the Pandora, August 29, 1791. Sunt lacrymæ rerum! It is a mournful tale.]

[382] {606} The "ship of the desert" is the Oriental figure for the camel or dromedary; and they deserve the metaphor well,--the former for his endurance, the latter for his swiftness. [Compare The Deformed Transformed, Part I. sc. i, line 117.]

[383] [Compare The Age of Bronze, lines 271-279.]

[384]

"Lucullus, when frugality could charm. Had roasted turnips in the Sabine farm."

POPE [Moral Essays, i. 218, 219.]

[385] The consul Nero, who made the unequalled march which deceived Hannibal, and defeated Asdrubal; thereby accomplishing an achievement almost unrivalled in military annals. The first intelligence of his return, to Hannibal, was the sight of Asdrubal's head thrown into his camp. When Hannibal saw this, he exclaimed with a sigh, that "Rome would now be the mistress of the world." And yet to this victory of Nero's it might be owing that his imperial namesake reigned at all. But the infamy of one has eclipsed the glory of the other. When the name of "Nero" is heard, who thinks of the consul?--But such are human things! [For Hannibal's cry of despair, "Agnoscere se fortunam Carthaginis!" see Livy, lib. xxvii. cap. li. s.f.]

[fm] Tyrant or hero--patriot or a chief.--[MS. erased.]

[386] [Compare Childe Harold, Canto II. stanza v. line i, see Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 102, and 99, note 1.]

[387] {609}[Toobo Neuha is the name of a Tongan chieftain. See Mariner's Account, etc., 1817, 141, sq.]

[388] When very young, about eight years of age, after an attack of the scarlet fever at Aberdeen, I was removed by medical advice into the Highlands. Here I passed occasionally some summers, and from this period I date my love of mountainous countries. I can never forget the effect, a few years afterwards, in England, of the only thing I had long seen, even in miniature, of a mountain, in the Malvern Hills. After I returned to Cheltenham, I used to watch them every afternoon, at sunset, with a sensation which I cannot describe. This was boyish enough: but I was then only thirteen years of age, and it was in the holidays. [Byron spent his summer holidays, 1796-98, at the farm-house of Ballatrich, on Deeside. (See Poetical Works, 1898, i. 192, note 2. For his visit to Cheltenham, in the summer of 1801, see Life, pp. 8, 19.)

[389] {610}[For the eagle's beak, see Childe Harold, Canto III. stanza xviii. line 6, Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 226, note 1.]

[390] {611}[Compare Macbeth, act ii. sc. 4, line 13.]

[391] [Compare--"The never-merry clock," Werner, act iii. sc. 3, line 3.]

[fn] Which knolls the knell of moments out of man.--[MS. D. erased.]

[392] {612} The now well-known story of the loves of the nightingale and rose need not be more than alluded to, being sufficiently familiar to the Western as to the Eastern reader. [Compare Werner, act iv. sc. 1, lines 380-382; and The Giaour, lines 21, 33.]

[fo] Which kindled by another's--.--[MS. D.]

[393] [Compare Childe Harold, Canto III. stanzas lxxii., lxxv. Once again the language and the sentiment recall Wordsworth's Tintern Abbey. (See Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 261, note 2.)]

[394] {613} If the reader will apply to his ear the sea-shell on his chimney-piece, he will be aware of what is alluded to. If the text should appear obscure, he will find in Gebir the same idea better expressed in two lines. The poem I never read, but have heard the lines quoted, by a more recondite reader--who seems to be of a different opinion from the editor of the Quarterly Review, who qualified it in his answer to the Critical Reviewer of his Juvenal, as trash of the worst and most insane description. It is to Mr. Landor, the author of Gebir, so qualified, and of some Latin poems, which vie with Martial or Catullus in obscenity, that the immaculate Mr. Southey addresses his declamation against impurity!

[These are the lines in Gebir to which Byron alludes--

"But I have sinuous shells of pearly hue.

* * * * *

Shake one and it awakens; then apply Its polisht lips to your attentive ear, And it remembers its august abodes, And murmurs as the ocean murmurs there."

Compare, too, The Excursion, bk. iv.--

"I have seen A curious child, who dwelt upon a tract Of inland ground, applying to his ear The convolutions of a smooth-lipped shell, To which, in silence hushed, his very soul Listened intently," etc.

Landor, in his Satire upon Satirists, 1836, p. 29, commenting on Wordsworth's alleged remark that he "would not give five shillings for all the poetry that Southey had written" (see Letters, 1900, iv. Appendix IX. pp. 483, 484), calls attention to this unacknowledged borrowing, "It would have been honester," he says, "and more decorous if the writer of the following verses had mentioned from what bar he drew his wire." According to H. C. Robinson (Diary, 1869, iii. 114), Wordsworth acknowledged no obligation to Landor's Gebir for the image of the sea-shell. "From his childhood the shell was familiar to him, etc. The 'Satire' seemed to give Wordsworth little annoyance."]

[395] {615}[In his Preface to Cantos I., II. of Childe Harold (Poetical Works, 1899, ii. 5), Byron relies on the authority of "Ariosto Thomson and Beattie" for the inclusion of droll or satirical "variations" in a serious poem. Nevertheless, Dallas prevailed on him to omit certain "ludicrous stanzas." It is to be regretted that no one suggested the excision of sections xix.-xxi. from the second canto of The Island.]

[396] Hobbes, the father of Locke's and other philosophy, was an inveterate smoker,--even to pipes beyond computation.

["Soon after dinner he [Hobbes] retired to his study, and had his candle, with ten or twelve pipes of tobacco laid by him; then, shutting his door, he fell to smoking, and thinking, and writing for several hours."--Memoirs of the Family of Cavendish, by White Kennet, D.D., 1708, pp. 14, 15.]

[fp] Yet they who love thee best prefer by far.--[MS. D. erased.]

[397] ["I shall now smoke two cigars, and get me to bed.... The Havannah are the best;--but neither are so pleasant as a hooka or chiboque."--Journal, December 6, 1813, Letters, 1898, ii. 368.]

[398] {616} This rough but jovial ceremony, used in crossing the line, has been so often and so well described, that it need not be more than alluded to.

[399] {617} "That will do for the marines, but the sailors won't believe it," is an old saying: and one of the few fragments of former jealousies which still survive (in jest only) between these gallant services.

[400] {619} Archidamus, King of Sparta, and son of Agesilaus, when he saw a machine invented for the casting of stones and darts, exclaimed that it was the "grave of valour." The same story has been told of some knights on the first application of gunpowder; but the original anecdote is in Plutarch. [The Greek is "Ἀπόλωλεν, ἀνδρὸς ἀρετά [A)po/lôlen, a)ndro\s a)reta/]," Plutarch's Scripta Moralia, 1839, i. 230.]

[fq] {621} To people in a small embarrassment.--[MS. D. erased.]

[401] {622} [Fletcher Christian, born 1763, was the fourth son of Charles Christian, an attorney, of Moreland Close, in the parish of Brigham, Cumberland. His family, which was of Manx extraction, was connected with the Christians of Ewanrigg, and the Curwens of Workington Hall. His brother Edward became Chief Justice of Ely, and was well known as the editor of Blackstones Commentaries. For purposes of verification (see An Answer to certain Assertions, etc., 1794, p. 9), Bligh described him as "aged 24 years, five feet nine inches high, blackish or very dark brown complexioned, dark brown hair, strong made, star tatowed on the left breast," etc. According to "Morrison's Journal," high words had passed between Bligh and Christian on more than one occasion, and, on the day before the mutiny, a question having arisen with regard to the disappearance of some cocoa-nuts, Christian was cross-examined by the captain as to his share of the plunder. "I really do not know, sir," he replied; "but I hope you do not think me so mean as to be guilty of stealing yours." "Yes," said Bligh, "you ---- hound, I do think so, or you could have given a better account of them." It was after this offensive accusation that Christian determined, in the first instance, to quit the ship, and on the morning of April 28, 1788, finding the mate of the watch asleep, on the spur of the moment resolved to lay violent hands on the captain, and assume the command of the Bounty. The language attributed to Bligh reads like a translation into the vernacular, but if Christian kept his designs to himself, it is strange that they were immediately understood and acted upon by a body of impromptu conspirators. Testimony, whether written or spoken, with regard to the succession of events "in moments like to these," is worth very little; but it is pretty evident that Christian was a gentleman, and that Bligh's violent and unmannerly ratings were the immediate cause of the mutiny.

Contradictory accounts are given of Christian's death. It is generally believed that in the fourth year of the settlement on Pitcairn Island the Tahitians formed a plot to massacre the Englishmen, and that Christian was shot when at work in his plantation (The Mutineers, etc., by Lady Belcher, 1870, p. 163; The Mutiny, etc., by Rosalind A. Young, 1894, p. 28). On the other hand, Amasa Delano, in his Narrative of Voyages, etc. (Boston, 1817, cap. v. p. 140), asserts that Captain Mayhew Folger, who was the first to visit the island in 1808, "was very explicit in his inquiry at the time, as well as in his account of it to me, that they lived under Christian's government several years after they landed; that during the whole time they enjoyed tolerable harmony; that Christian became sick, and died a natural death." It stands to reason that the ex-pirate, Alexander Smith, who had developed into John Adams, the pious founder of a patriarchal colony, would be anxious to draw a veil over the early years of the settlement, and would satisfy the curiosity of visitors who were officers of the Royal Navy, as best he could, and as the spirit moved him.]

[fr] {625} The ruined remnant of the land's defeat.--[MS. D. erased.]

[402] {626}[Compare The Siege of Corinth, lines 438, 439, Poetical Works, 1900, iii. 467.]

[403] {629} Of this cave (which is no fiction) the original will be found in the ninth chapter of "Mariner's Account of the Tonga Islands" [1817, i. 267-279]. I have taken the poetical liberty to transplant it to Toobonai, the last island where any distinct account is left of Christian and his comrades.

[The following is the account given by Mariner: "On this island [Hoonga] there is a peculiar cavern, which was first discovered by a young chief, whilst diving after a turtle. The nature of this cavern will be better understood if we imagine a hollow rock rising sixty feet or more above the surface of the water, into the cavity of which there is no known entrance but one, and that is on the side of the rock, as low down as six feet under the water, into which it flows; and, consequently, the base of the cavern may be said to be the sea itself." Mariner seeing some young chiefs diving into the water one after another, and not rise again, he inquired of the last, ... what they were about? "'Follow me,'" said he, "'and I will take you where you have never been before....'" Mariner prepared to follow his companion, and, guided by the light reflected from his heels, entered the opening in the rock, and rose into the cavern. The light was sufficient, after remaining about five minutes, to show objects with some little distinctness; ... Nevertheless, as it was desirable to have a stronger light, Mariner dived out again, and, priming his pistol, tied plenty of gnatoo tight round it, and wrapped the whole up in a plantain-leaf: he directed an attendant to bring a torch in the same way. Thus prepared, he re-entered the cavern, unwrapped the gnatoo, fired it by the flash of the powder, and lighted the torch. "The place was now illuminated tolerably well.... It appeared (by guess) to be about forty feet wide in the main part, but it branched off, on one side, in two narrower portions. The medium height seemed also about forty feet. The roof was hung with stalactites in a very curious way, resembling, upon a cursory view, the Gothic arches and ornaments of an old church." According to one of the matabooles present, the entire family of a certain chief had, in former times, been condemned to death for conspiring against a rival tyrant--the chief to be taken out to sea and drowned, the rest of the family to be massacred. One of the chiefs daughters was a beautiful girl, to whom the youth who discovered the cave was attached. "He had long been enamoured of this young maiden, but had never dared to make her acquainted with the soft emotions of his heart, knowing that she was betrothed to a chief of higher rank and greater power, but now, ... no time was to be lost; he flew to her abode ... declared himself her deliverer if she would trust to his honour.... Soon her consenting hand was clasped in his: the shades of evening favoured their escape ... till her lover had brought a small canoe to a lonely part of the beach. In this they speedily embarked.... They soon arrived at the rock, he leaped into the water, and she, instructed by him, followed close after; they rose into the cavern, and rested from their fatigue, partaking of some refreshments which he had brought there for himself...." Here she remained, visited from time to time by her more fortunate Leander, until he was enabled to carry her off to the Fiji islands, where they dwelt till the death of the tyrant, when they returned to Vavaoo, "and lived long in peace and happiness."]

[404] {631} This may seem too minute for the general outline (in Mariner's Account) from which it is taken. But few men have travelled without seeing something of the kind--on land, that is. Without adverting to Ellora, in Mungo Park's last journal, he mentions having met with a rock or mountain so exactly resembling a Gothic cathedral, that only minute inspection could convince him that it was a work of nature.

[Ellora, a village in the Nizám's dominions, is thirteen miles north-west of Aurangábád. "It is famous for its rock-caves and temples. The chief building, called the kailás, ... is a great monolithic temple, isolated from surrounding rock, and carved outside as well as in.... It is said to have been built about the eighth century by Rájá Edu of Ellichpur."--Hunter's Imperial Gazetteer of India, 1885, iv. 348-351. The passage in Mungo Park's Journal of a Mission to the Interior of Africa, 1815, p. 75, runs thus: "June 24th [1805],--Left Sullo, and travelled through a country beautiful beyond imagination, with all the possible diversities of rock, sometimes towering up like ruined castles, spires, pyramids, etc. We passed one place so like a ruined Gothic abbey, that we halted a little, before we could satisfy ourselves that the niches, windows, etc., were all natural rock."]

[405] [Byron's quadrisyllable was, probably, a poetic licence. There is, however, an obsolete plural, stalactitæ, to be found in the works of John Woodward, M.D., Fossils of England, 1729, i. 155.]

[fs] {632} Where Love and Torquil might lie safe from men.--[MS. D. erased.]

[406] {633} The reader will recollect the epigram of the Greek anthology, or its translation into most of the modern languages--

"Whoe'er thou art, thy master see-- He was, or is, or is to be."

[Byron is quoting from memory an "Illustration" in the notes to Collections from the Greek Anthology, by the Rev. Robert Bland, 1813, p. 402--

"Whoe'er thou art, thy Lord and master see. Thou wast my Slave, thou art, or thou shall be."

The couplet was written by George Granville, Lord Lansdowne (1667-1735), as an Inscription for a Figure representing the God of Love. (See The Genuine Works, etc., 1732, I. 129.)]

[407] {634} The tradition is attached to the story of Eloïsa, that when her body was lowered into the grave of Abelard (who had been buried twenty years), he opened his arms to receive her.

[The story is told by Bayle, who quotes from a manuscript chronicle of Tours, preserved in the notes of Andreas Quercetanus, affixed to the Historia Calamitatum Abælardi: "Eadem defuncta ad tumulam apertum depertata, maritus ejus qui multis diebus ante eam defunctus fuerat, elevatis brachiis eam recepit, et ita earn amplexatus brachia sua strinxit."--See Petri Abelardi Opera, Paris, 1616, ii. 1195.]

[ft] {636} Too late it might be still at least to die.--[MS. D. erased.]

[fu] {637} The crag as droop a bird without her young.--[MS. D. erased.]

[408] In Thibault's account of Frederick the Second of Prussia, there is a singular relation of a young Frenchman, who with his mistress appeared to be of some rank. He enlisted and deserted at Schweidnitz; and after a desperate resistance was retaken, having killed an officer, who attempted to seize him after he was wounded, by the discharge of his musket loaded with a button of his uniform. Some circumstances on his court-martial raised a great interest amongst his judges, who wished to discover his real situation in life, which he offered to disclose, but to the king only, to whom he requested permission to write. This was refused, and Frederic was filled with the greatest indignation, from baffled curiosity or some other motive, when he understood that his request had been denied. [Mes Souvenirs de vingt ans de séjour à Berlin, ou Frédéric Le Grand, etc., Paris, 1804, iv. 145-150.]

[fv] He tore a silver vest----.--[MS. D. erased.]

[fw] {639} Their hollow shrine----.--[MS. D. erased.]

[fx]

As only a yet infant----.--[MS. D.] {As only an infantine World----. {As only a yet unweaned World----.--[Alternative readings. MS. D.]

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