The Works of Lord Byron Volume II Part 69

[379] ["Gems wrought into drinking-vessels, among which the least precious were framed of turquoise, jasper, or amethyst ... unnumbered jacinths, emeralds, sapphires, chrysolites, and topazes, and, lastly, those matchless carbuncles which, placed on the High Altar of St.

Mark's, blazed with intrinsic light, and scattered darkness by their own beams;--these are but a sample of the treasures which accrued to Venice"

(Villehardouin, lib. in. p. 129). (See _Sketches from Venetian History_, 1831, i. 161.)]

[380] [After the fall of Constantinople, in 1204, "the ill.u.s.trious Dandolo ... was permitted to tinge his buskins in the purple hue distinctive of the Imperial Family, to claim exemption from all feudal service to the Emperor, and to annex to the t.i.tle of Doge of Venice the proud style of Despot of Romania, and Lord of One-fourth and One-eighth of the Roman Empire" (_ibid._, 1831, i. 167).]

[ld] _Monarchs sate down_----.--[D. erased.]

[381] [The gondoliers (see Hobhouse's note ii.) used to sing alternate stanzas of the _Gerusalemme Liberata_, capping each other like the shepherds in the _Bucolics_. The rival reciters were sometimes attached to the same gondola; but often the response came from a pa.s.sing gondolier, a stranger to the singer who challenged the contest. Rogers, in his _Italy_, laments the silence which greeted the swan-song of his own gondolier--

"He sung, As in the time when Venice was Herself, Of Tancred and Erminia. On our oars We rested; and the verse was verse divine!

We could not err--Perhaps he was the last-- For none took up the strain, none answer'd him; And, when he ceased, he left upon my ear A something like the dying voice of Venice!"

_The Gondola_ (_Poems_, 1852, ii. 79).

Compare, too, Goethe's "Letters from Italy," October 6, 1786: "This evening I bespoke the celebrated _song_ of the mariners, who chaunt Ta.s.so and Ariosto to melodies of their own. This must actually be ordered, as it is not to be heard as a thing of course, but rather belongs to the half-forgotten traditions of former times. I entered a gondola by moonlight, with one _singer_ before and the other behind me.

They _sing_ their _song_, taking up the verses alternately....

"Sitting on the sh.o.r.e of an island, on the bank of a ca.n.a.l, or on the side of a boat, a gondolier will sing away with a loud penetrating voice--the mult.i.tude admire force above everything--anxious only to be heard as far as possible. Over the silent mirror it travels far."--_Travels in Italy_, 1883, p. 73.]

[le] {330} _The pleasure-place of all festivity_.--[MS. M.]

[382] {331} [The Rialto, or Rivo alto, "the middle group of islands between the sh.o.r.e and the mainland," on the left of the Grand Ca.n.a.l, was the site of the original city, and till the sixteenth century its formal and legal designation. The Exchange, or Banco Giro, was held in the piazza, opposite the church of San Giacomo, which stands at the head of the ca.n.a.l to the north of the Ponto di Rialto. It was on the Rialto that Antonio rated Shylock about his "usances." "What news on the Rialto?"

asks Solanio (_Merchant of Venice_, act i. sc. 3, line 102; act iii. sc.

1, line 1). Byron uses the word symbolically for Venetian commerce.]

[383] [Pierre is the hero of Otway's _Venice Preserved_. Shylock and the Moor stand where they did, but what of Pierre? If the name of Otway--"master of the tragic art"--and the t.i.tle of his masterpiece--_Venice Preserved, or The Plot Discovered_ (first played 1682)--are not wholly forgotten, Pierre and Monimia and Belvidera have "decayed," and are memorable chiefly as favourite characters of great actors and actresses. Genest notes twenty revivals of the _Venice Preserved_, which was played as late as October 27, 1837, when Macready played "Pierre," and Phelps "Jaffier." "No play that I know," says Hartley Coleridge (Essays, 1851, ii. 56), "gains so much by acting as _Venice Preserved_.... Miss O'Neill, I well remember, made me weep with Belvidera; but she would have done the same had she spoken in an unknown tongue." Byron, who professed to be a "great admirer of Otway," in a letter to Hodgson, August 22, 1811 (_Letters_, 1898, i. 339, note 1), alludes to some lines from _Venice Preserved_ (act ii. sc. 3), which seem to have taken his fancy. Two lines spoken by Belvidera (act ii.), if less humorous, are more poetical--

"Oh, the day Too soon will break, and wake us to our sorrow; Come, come to bed, and bid thy cares Good night!"]

[384] {332} [Compare _The Dream_, i.--

"The mind can make Substance, and people planets of its own With beings brighter than have been, and give A breath to forms which can outlive all flesh."

The ideal personages of the poet's creations have the promise of immortality. The ideal forms which people his imagination transfigure and supplant the dull and grievous realities of his mortal being and circ.u.mstance; but there are "things" more radiant, more enchanting still, the "strong realities" of the heart and soul--hope, love, joy.

But they pa.s.s! We wake, and lo! it was a dream.]

[lf] _Denies to the dull trick of life_----.--[MS. erased.]

[385]

["In youth I wrote because my mind was full, And now because I feel it growing dull."

_Don Juan_, Canto XIV. stanza x.

In youth the poet takes refuge, in the ideal world, from the crowd and pressure of blissful possibilities; and in age, when hope is beyond hope, he peoples the solitude with beings of the mind.]

[lg] {333} _And this worn feeling_----.--[Editions 1816-1891.]

[lh]

/ _springs_ _And, may be, that which_ { } ----.--[MS. M.]

_spreads_ /

[li] _Outs.h.i.+nes our Fairies--things in shape and hue_.--[MS. M.]

[lj] {334} ----_and though I leave behind_.--[MS. M.]

[lk] _And make myself a home beside a softer sea_.--[MS. erased.]

[ll]

----_to pine_ _Albeit is not my nature, and I twine_.--[MS. M. erased]

[386] [In another mood he wrote to Murray (June 7, 1819), "I trust they won't think of 'pickling, and bringing me home to Clod or Blunderbuss Hall' [see _The Rivals_, act v. sc. 3]. I am sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country." In this half-humorous outburst he deprecates, or pretends to deprecate, the fate which actually awaited his remains--burial in the family vault at Hucknall Torkard. There is, of course, no reference to a public funeral and a grave in Westminster Abbey. In the next stanza (x.

line 1) he a.s.sumes the possibility of his being excluded from the Temple of Fame; but there is, perhaps, a tacit reference to burial in the Abbey. If the thought, as is probable, occurred to him, he veils it in a metaphor.]

[387] {335} The answer of the mother of Brasidas, the Lacedaemonian general, to the strangers who praised the memory of her son.

[??as?da? ??? ?? ?? ???? ??a??? [Brasi/das gar e~)n men a)ner a)gathos], ??p????? d' ??e???? ??e?ss??e? ?? t? Sp??t? [polloi d'

e)kei/nou krei/ssones e)n te~| Spa/rte|]. Plutarchi _Moralia, Apophthegmata Laconica_ (Tauchnitz, 1820), ii. 127.]

[lm] _The widowed Adriatic mourns her Doge_.--[MS. M erased.]

[388] [The Bucentaur, "the state barge in which, on Ascension Day, the Doge of Venice used to wed the Adriatic by dropping a ring into it," was broken up and rifled by the French in 1797 (note, by Rev. E. C. Owen, _Childe Harold_, 1897, p. 197).

Compare Goethe's "Letters from Italy," October 5, 1786: "To give a notion of the Bucentaur in one word, I should say that it is a state-galley. The older one, of which we still have drawings, justified this appellation still more than the present one, which, by its splendour, makes us forget the original....

"The vessel is all ornament; we ought to say, it is overladen with ornament; it is altogether one piece of gilt carving, for no other use.... This state-galley is a good index to show what the Venetians were, and what they considered themselves."--_Travels in Italy_, 1883, p. 68.

Compare, too, Wordsworth's sonnet "On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic"--

"She was a maiden City, bright and free; No guile seduced, no force could violate; And when she took unto herself a Mate, She must espouse the everlasting Sea."

_Works_, 1888, p. 180.]

[389] {336} [For "Lion," see Hobhouse's note iii. The "Horses of St.

Mark" (_vide post_, stanza xiii. line 1), which, according to history or legend, Augustus "conveyed" from Alexandria to Rome, Constantine from Rome to Constantinople, Dandolo, in 1204, from Constantinople to Venice, Napoleon, in 1797, from Venice to Paris, and which were restored to the Venetians by the Austrians in 1815, were at one time supposed to belong to the school of Lysippus. Haydon, who published, in 1817, a curious etching of "The Elgin Horse's Head," placed side by side with the "Head of one of the Horses ... now at Venice," subscribes the following critical note: "It is astonis.h.i.+ng that the great principles of nature should have been so nearly lost in the time between Phidias and Lysippus. Compare these two heads. The Elgin head is all truth, the other all manner." Hobhouse p.r.o.nounces the "Horses" to be "irrevocably Chian," but modern archaeologists regard both "school" and exact period as uncertain.]

[ln] _Even on the pillar_----.--[MS. M., D. erased.]

[390] [According to Milman (_Hist. of Lat. Christianity_, v. 144), the humiliation of Barbarossa at the Church of St. Mark took place on Tuesday, July 24, 1177. _a propos_ of the return of the Pope and Emperor to the ducal palace, he quotes "a curious pa.s.sage from a newly recovered poem, by G.o.dfrey of Viterbo, an attendant on the Emperor. So great was the press in the market that the aged Pope was thrown down--

"Jam Papa perisset in arto, Caesar ibi vetulum ni releva.s.set eum."

"This," he remarks, "is an odd contrast of real life with romance."]

[391] {337} ["Oh, for one hour of Dundee!" was the exclamation of a Highland chieftain at the battle of Sheriff-muir, November 13, 1715 (Scott's _Tales of a Grandfather_, III. Series, chap. x.; _Prose Works_, Paris, 1830, vii. 768). Wordsworth makes the words his own in the sonnet, "In the Pa.s.s of Killicranky (an Invasion being expected, October, 1803)" (_Works_, 1888, p. 201)--

"O for a single hour of that Dundee, Who on that day the word of onset gave!"

And Coleridge, in a letter to Wordsworth (February 8, 1804), thinking, perhaps, less of the chieftain than the sonnet, exclaims, "'Oh for one hour of Dundee!' How often shall I sigh, 'Oh for one hour of _The Recluse!_'"--an aspiration which Byron would have worded differently.]

[lo]

----_who quelled the imperial foe_.--[MS. M. erased.]