Soldiers (deposing their arms and departing). We obey!

Arn. (to OLIMPIA). Lady, you are safe.

Olimp. I should be so, Had I a knife even; but it matters not— Death hath a thousand gates; and on the marble, Even at the altar foot, whence I look down Upon destruction, shall my head be dashed, Ere thou ascend it. God forgive thee, man! 110

Arn. I wish to merit his forgiveness, and Thine own, although I have not injured thee.

Olimp. No! Thou hast only sacked my native land,— No injury!—and made my father's house A den of thieves! No injury!—this temple— Slippery with Roman and with holy gore! No injury! And now thou wouldst preserve me, To be——but that shall never be!

[She raises her eyes to Heaven, folds her robe round her, and prepares to dash herself down on the side of the Altar opposite to that where ARNOLD stands.

Arn. Hold! hold! I swear.

Olimp. Spare thine already forfeit soul A perjury for which even Hell would loathe thee. 120 I know thee.

Arn. No, thou know'st me not; I am not Of these men, though——

Olimp. I judge thee by thy mates; It is for God to judge thee as thou art. I see thee purple with the blood of Rome; Take mine, 'tis all thou e'er shalt have of me, And here, upon the marble of this temple, Where the baptismal font baptized me God's, I offer him a blood less holy But not less pure (pure as it left me then, A redeemed infant) than the holy water 130 The saints have sanctified!

[OLIMPIA waves her hand to ARNOLD with disdain, and dashes herself on the pavement from the Altar.

Arn. Eternal God! I feel thee now! Help! help! she's gone.

Caes. (approaches). I am here.

Arn. Thou! but oh, save her!

Caes. (assisting him to raise OLIMPIA). She hath done it well! The leap was serious.

Arn. Oh! she is lifeless!

Caes. If She be so, I have nought to do with that: The resurrection is beyond me.

Arn. Slave!

Caes. Aye, slave or master, 'tis all one: methinks Good words, however, are as well at times.

Arn. Words!—Canst thou aid her?

Caes. I will try. A sprinkling Of that same holy water may be useful. 140 [He brings some in his helmet from the font.

Arn. 'Tis mixed with blood.

Caes. There is no cleaner now In Rome.

Arn. How pale! how beautiful! how lifeless! Alive or dead, thou Essence of all Beauty, I love but thee!

Caes. Even so Achilles loved Penthesilea;[249] with his form it seems You have his heart, and yet it was no soft one.

Arn. She breathes! But no, 'twas nothing, or the last Faint flutter Life disputes with Death.

Caes. She breathes.

Arn. Thou say'st it? Then 'tis truth.

Caes. You do me right— The Devil speaks truth much oftener than he's deemed: 150 He hath an ignorant audience.

Arn. (without attending to him). Yes! her heart beats. Alas! that the first beat of the only heart I ever wished to beat with mine should vibrate To an assassin's pulse.

Caes. A sage reflection, But somewhat late i' the day. Where shall we bear her? I say she lives.

Arn. And will she live?

Cas. As much As dust can.

Arn. Then she is dead!

Caes. Bah! bah! You are so, And do not know it. She will come to life— Such as you think so, such as you now are; But we must work by human means.

Arn. We will 160 Convey her unto the Colonna palace, Where I have pitched my banner.

Caes. Come then! raise her up!

Arn. Softly!

Caes. As softly as they bear the dead, Perhaps because they cannot feel the jolting.

Arn. But doth she live indeed?

Caes. Nay, never fear! But, if you rue it after, blame not me.

Arn. Let her but live!

Caes. The Spirit of her life Is yet within her breast, and may revive. Count! count! I am your servant in all things, And this is a new office:—'tis not oft 170 I am employed in such; but you perceive How staunch a friend is what you call a fiend. On earth you have often only fiends for friends; Now I desert not mine. Soft! bear her hence, The beautiful half-clay, and nearly spirit! I am almost enamoured of her, as Of old the Angels of her earliest sex.[250]

Arn. Thou!

Caes. I! But fear not. I'll not be your rival.

Arn. Rival!

Caes. I could be one right formidable; But since I slew the seven husbands of 180 Tobias' future bride (and after all Was smoked out by some incense),[251] I have laid Aside intrigue: 'tis rarely worth the trouble Of gaining, or—what is more difficult— Getting rid of your prize again; for there's The rub! at least to mortals.

Arn. Prithee, peace! Softly! methinks her lips move, her eyes open!

Caes. Like stars, no doubt; for that's a metaphor For Lucifer and Venus.

Arn. To the palace Colonna, as I told you!

Caes. Oh! I know 190 My way through Rome.

Arn. Now onward, onward! Gently! [Exeunt, bearing OLIMPIA. The scene closes.



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 CAESAR.

Caes. (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.

Caes. 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 Caesar. {Olympia at first not liking Caesar {—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?

Caesar. 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.

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

Arn. Ah!

Caes. You are grave—what have you on your spirit!

Arn. Nothing.

Caes. 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?

Caes. 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!

Caes. I thought as much—go on.

Arn. I thought she had loved me.

Caes. 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—

Caes. 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.

Caes. 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.

Caes. These are nothing. You seek for Gratitude—the Philosopher's stone.

Arn. And find it not.

Caes. 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?

Caes. Yes! and not believe The answer—You are jealous.

Arn. And of whom?

Caes. 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.

Caes. 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!

Caes. 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.

Caes. Leave her.

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

Caes. 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.

Caes. 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 resume 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, Vitae C. Julius Caesar, cap. xiv., Opera Omnia, 1826, i. 105.]

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

[212] ["Sed ante alias [Julius Caesar] 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 Caesar, 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" ([Greek: o(Sote/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 Hetaerae 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] [Timur Bey, or Timur Lang, i.e. "the lame Timur" (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 Epopees Francaises, by Leon 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, Superata Italia, Pontifice obsesso, Roma capta, 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, saepe 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 laureae coronae perpetuo gestandae."—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}[Brantome (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 Caesar, 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}["Des l'aube du lundi 6 mai 1527, le connetable, a cheval, la cuirasse couverte d'un manteau blanc, marcha vers le Borgo, dont les murailles, a la hauteur de San-Spirito, etaient d'acces facile.... Bourbon mit pied a terre, et, prenant lui-meme une echelle l'appliqua tout pres de la porte Torrione."—De l'Italie, par Emile Gebhart, 1876, p. 255. Caesar Grolierius (Historia expugnatae ... 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 gratia. Compare The Island, Canto II. line 199.]

[241] ["Le bouillant Bourbon, a la tete des plus intrepides assaillans tenoit, de la main gauche une echelle appuyee centre le mur, et de la droite faisoit signe a ses soldats de monter pour suivre leurs camarades; en ce moment il recut dans le flanc une balle d'arquebuse qui le traversa de part en part; il tomba a terre, mortellement blesse. On rapporte qu'avant d'expirer il prononca ces mots: 'Officiers et soldats, cacher ma mort a l'ennemi et marchez toujours en avant; la victoire est a vous, mon trepas 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 a cryer: 'Jesus!' et puis il dist 'Helas! mon Dieu, je suis mort!' Si prit son espee par la poignee en signe de croix en disant tout hault, 'Miserere mei, Deus, secundum 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 recut son Createur."'—De l'Italie, par Emile 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). Brantome (Memoirs de Messire Pierre de Bourdeille.... Leyde, 1722, i. 230) gives a vivid picture of their fanatical savagery: "Leur cruaute ne s'estendit pas seulement sur les personnes, mais sur les marbres et les anciennes statues. 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 fuer den Verfasser der Antichrist, der durch Lug und Trug seine Herrschaft in der Welt behauptet."

"Quant a l'armee imperiale, on n'en vit jamais de plus etonnante.... Allemands et Espagnols, lutheriens iconoclastes qui brulaient les eglises, ou furieux mystiques qui brulaient Juils et Maures, barbares plus raffines que leur vieux ancetres 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 precipitamment par un long corridor pratique dans un mur double et se laissoit emporter de son palais an chateau 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 Graeciae, 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 Caesar, 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^ Helene, 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 "Heros 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 rosa 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 proces 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 L2,000,000 in 1792 to L8,000,000 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 AEgean 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 Caesar'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 Caesar, 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' AEgean, 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 armed 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 AEsop'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 aged 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 Sinope:[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 pates 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 "Desire?" 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 uncountry 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 Buonaparte'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 accursed 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 eclat, To furnish articles for the "Debats;" 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), Ptolemaeus 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 Ptolemaeus 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 L8000 to L12,000 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—

"Napoleon.

Ne a Ajaccio le 15 Aout, 1769, Mort a Ste. Helene 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 "Napoleon Bonaparte," but, on his own admission, did refuse the inscription of the one word "Napoleon."—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 Vendome, 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 Dome des Invalides. Above the entrance are these words, which are taken from his will: "Je desire que mes cendres reposent sur les bords de la Seine, au milieu de ce peuple Francais que j'ai tant aime."]