at last,

Sighs o'er her name; and many an

islander

54 However, he did pretty well, and was
Admitted as an aspirant to all
The coteries, and, as in Banquo's glass,'
At great assemblies or in parties small,
He saw ten thousand living authors pass,
That being about their average numeral;
Also the eighty "greatest living poets,'
As every paltry magazine can show its.

Yields him but vinegar for his reward,

That neutralized dull Dorus of the Nine; That swarthy Sporus, neither man nor bard;

That ox of verse,' who ploughs for

every line:

Cambyses' roaring Romans beat at least The howling Hebrews of Cybele's priest.

Campbell

60

Before and after: but now grown more 61
holy,

The Muses upon Sion's hill must ramble
With poets almost clergymen, or wholly:
And Pegasus has a psalmodic amble

Beneath the very Reverend Rowley
Powley,

Who shoes the glorious animal with stilts, A modern Ancient Pistol-by the hilts!* 58 Still he excels that artificial hard

Laborers in the same vineyard, though
the vine

1 The glass in which Macbeth saw Banquo and
his descendants as kings of Scotland.-Mac-
beth, IV, 1, 119-20.

That is, Byron's heroes, Juan, Fallero, and
Cain, were great literary disasters for him, as
the battles mentioned were disasters for Na-
poleon.

3 The handsome Alliance. A reference to the
Lake poets-Wordsworth, Coleridge, and

Southey.

4 See 1 Henry IV. II, 4, 197.

Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868), who Byron mistakenly thought wrote the critique which "killed John Keats." See st. 60 and n. 5.

they say,

Sets up for being a sort of moral me; He'll find it rather difficult some day To turn out both, or either, it may be. Some persons think that Coleridge hath the sway;

And Wordsworth has supporters, two or three;

And that deep-mouth'd Baotian "Savage Landor"

Has taken for a swan rogue Southey's gander

John Keats, who was kill'd off by one critique,

5

1 Milman recently had been appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford.

2 The shouting soldiers in Croly's Cataline, V. 2. Croly is Powley of st. 57.

3 Bryan Waller Procter (Barry Cornwall), who had been said by Jeffrey, in The Edinburgh Review, Jan., 1820 (Vol. 33, p. 153), to possess the better qualities of Byron-elegance, delicacy, and tenderness-without the prof ligacy, horror, mocking of virtue and of honor, and mixture of buffoonery and grandeur.

The Baotians were proverbial for dullness. Landor had recently published a volume of Latin poems as the work of Savaglus Landor. Savage was his middle name.

A reference to the article on Endymion in The Quarterly Review, April, 1818 (Vol. 19, pp. 204-08). See Byron's Who Kill'd John Keats (p. 613) and Shelley's Preface to Adonais (see Critical Note on Shelley's Adonais) and stanzas 36-37 (p. 735). The article referred to was written by J. W. Croker (p. 913), but it did not kill Keats. See Keats's letter to George and Georgiana Keats, October, 1818 (p. 864).

See Horace's Satires, II, 2, 79.

64 My Juan, whom I left in deadly peril Amongst live poets and blue ladies," pass'd

With some small profit through that field so sterile,

1 For an account of the body of pretenders to the Roman Empire, in the 3rd century, popularly called "The Thirty Tyrants," see Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ch. 10.

66

The prætorian cohorts, a body of troops sta- 68 tioned just outside the walls of Rome and acting as a special guard of the Emperor. At times they controlled the selection of Emperor. See Gibbon's History, ch. 5. King Lear, IV, 6, 15.

A former body of Turkish infantry constituting the Sultan's guard and the main part of the standing army. Before it was abolished in 1826, it became very powerful and turbulent. * Literary pedants. See p. 585b, n. 1.

Then glare the lamps, then whirl the

wheels, then roar

Through street and square fast flashing chariots hurl'd

Like harness'd meteors; then along the floor

Chalk mimies painting; then festoons are twirl'd;

Then roll the brazen thunders of the door,

Which opens to the thousand happy few An earthly Paradise of "Or Molu."'2

There stands the noble hostess, nor shall sink

With the three-thousandth curtsy; there

the waltz,

The only dance which teaches girls to think, 1 In Moore's "phrase," a bower is a secret place for two.

2 Gilded Bronze.

612

And that I sing of neither mine nor me, Though every scribe, in some slight turn of diction,

Will hint allusions never meant. Ne'er doubt

This-when I speak, I don't hint, but speak

out.

89 Whether he married with the third or fourth

Offspring of some sage husband-hunting countess,

Or whether with some virgin of more

worth.

(I mean in bounties)

Fortune's matrimonial

He took to regularly peopling Earth,
Of which your lawful, awful wedlock
fount is-

Or whether he was taken in for damages,
For being too excursive in his homages,-

90 Is yet within the unread events of time. Thus far, go forth, thou lay, which I will back

Against the same given quantity of rhyme,
For being as much the subject of attack
As ever yet was any work sublime,

By those who love to say that white is
black.

So much the better!-I may stand alone,
But would not change my free thoughts for

a throne.

When a man hath no freedom to fight for at home,

Let him combat for that of his neighbors;

Let him think of the glories of Greece and of Rome,

And get knock'd on his head for his labors.

5 To do good to mankind is the chivalrous plan,

And is always as nobly requited;
Then battle for freedom wherever you can,
And, if not shot or hang'd, you'll get
knighted.

THE WORLD IS A BUNDLE OF HAY
1821
1830

The world is a bundle of hay,
Mankind are the asses who pull;
Each tugs it a different way.

And the greatest of all is John Bull.

And "a pull all together," as they say At sea-which drew most souls another way.

2 The angels all were singing out of tune, And hoarse with having little else to do, Excepting to wind up the sun and moon, Or curb a runaway young star or two, Or wild colt of a comet, which too soon Broke out of bounds o'er the ethereal blue,

1 See Byron's Don Juan, XI, 60 and n. 5 (p. 610).

2 See Southey's A Vision of Judgment (p. 409). The French Revolution, which began in 1788,