3, 8 Manichean Manichaeism flourished from the third to the fifth century AD. Central in its theology was the acceptance of the duality of light and darkness, God and Satan, good and evil, which are in eternal conflict. See note to Canto XIII 41, 5–6.
4, 7–8 Actium lost;…/ Outbalance… victories When the first edition disregarded Byron’s manuscript dash after ‘lost’ and put a comma after ‘Actium’, it misled later editors, who regarded ‘Actium’ as the subject of the verb, which they then made singular: ‘Outbalances’. The present text follows the manuscript and makes ‘eyes’ the subject of the verb.
5, 6 Gave what I had – a heart A reference to Byron’s youthful idealistic love for Mary Chaworth.
6, 1 the boy’s ‘mite’… like the ‘widow’s’ While Jesus in the temple was watching people contribute to the treasury, ‘there came a certain poor widow, and she threw in two mites, which make a farthing’. Jesus then observed to his disciples ‘that this poor widow hath cast more in’ than all the others, because she ‘cast in all that she had’ (Mark xii 41–4).
7, 7–8 Heroic, stoic Cato…/… lent his lady to his friend Hortensius Cato divorced his wife Marcia so that his friend Hortensius could marry her. When the latter died, he took her back again, a wealthy widow. Julius Caesar, his enemy, charged Cato with ‘trafficking in marriage’ for profit, with using Marcia as bait to enrich himself. Plutarch regarded the charge as absurd (Cafo the Younger, sections 25, 52, Lives, trans. B. Perrin (1919), VIII 292–5, 360–63).
9, 1–2 I am not, like Cassio, ‘an arithmetician’, / But by ‘the bookish theoric’ Though Shakespeare in Othello (I i 19–24) meant that Cassio was a ‘theoretical’ soldier, Byron’s context here (8, 7–9, 7) implies that this jest is arithmetical in the modern sense.
9, 3 ] If
9, 7 fifteen-hundredth ] fifteenth-hundred BM, M, 1823
11, 8 The Tigris hath its jealousies like Thames Women are jealous the world over, in Eastern Moslem countries, where polygamy was permitted, as well as in Western monogamous nations. The Tigris River flows in southeast Turkey and Iraq.
12, 5 moderate woman wed ] foolish woman wed BM, M
12, 8 ‘bed of Ware’ The famous bed, measuring twelve feet square, to which an allusion is made in Twelfth Night (III ii 44) – ‘although the sheet were big enough for the bed of Ware’ – was formerly at the Saracen’s Head Inn at Ware, Hertfordshire. It was exhibited in London in 1931.
13, 2–6 ]
By all his edicts (even to the blind
Who saw his Virtues as they saw the rest)
His Highness quite connubially inclined
Had deigned that night to be Gulbeyaz’ Guest,>
13, 4–5 those sad hungry Jacobins the worms, / Who on the very loftiest kings have dined Jacobins – destroyers of kings – from the Jacobin Club of radical reformers during the French Revolution. See Hamlet IV iii 22–5: ‘Your worm is your only emperor for diet… your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable service.’
13, 8 A ‘Highland welcome’ See Sir Walter Scott’s account of Waverley’s entertainment by the Highlanders, entitled ‘A Highland Feast’ (Waverley ch. 20). On 1 March 1821 Byron asked Murray to send him three of Scott’s novels, including Waverley, of which Byron said he had not had a copy for five years.
14, 3] May look like what
15, 5 ] Are
16, 1–2 over warmth…/… ’tis no great lease of its own fire Excessive carnality cannot guarantee a contract or bond (‘lease’) that will last a long time. It is ‘precarious’ (line 5), because such carnal desire will probably be transferred ‘to the first buyer’ (lover) ‘at a sad discount’ (lines 6–7), a loss to itself and to its first beloved.
17, 4] And see
And see passion glow
17, 6 his monastic concubine of snow After Francis rolled in deep snow to overcome carnal passion, he made seven little snowballs, set them before him, and lectured his body: the big one was its wife, the four smaller ones its sons and daughters, and the other two its servants. He bade his body to clothe them, ‘ “for they the of cold! But if all such cares are grievous to thee, then serve one master warely!” At this the Devil fled in confusion, and the saint returned to his cell, glorifying God’ (The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, trans. Granger Ryand and Helmut Ripperger (1941), II 601–2). The devil may not have been the last to be confused by the subtle, frigid homily of St Francis. The hagiography of Jacobus, translated and published by William Caxton in 1483, was often denounced by church scholars as fantastic and immoral. See also note to Canto I 64, 4.
17, 8 Horatian: medio tu tutissimus ibis Byron confused Horace with Ovid. His quotation (without the extra ‘tu’) comes from Metamorphoses II 136: ‘In the middle is the safest path.’ The Horatian maxim he may have had in mind is in Epistle I 18, 9: ‘Virtus est medium vitiorum et utrimque reductum’ (‘Virtue is a mean between vices, remote from both extremes’ [for instance, servility and truculence]), trans. H. R. Fairclough (1926), 368–9.
18, 3 And not the pink of old hexameters See Appendix.
18, 5–8 ]
Which I have crammed> to close the Octave’s chime,
I own
Harmonious > fragment
19, 3 ]
19, 7–8 ] And Nothing ever heard of save Starvation
Could stop the tendency to Propagation
20, 8 with petty cares ] with
21, 5 A bad old woman making a worse will An oblique reference to Lady Noel’s will, which left to her trustees a portrait of Byron with directions that it was not to be shown to Ada Byron until she was twenty-one, and then only with Lady Byron’s consent.
21, 6 Which leaves you minus ] Which
22, 1 confound them all! ] G—d damn them all! BM, M
22, 2 ] Bills – women – wives, dogs, horses – and mankind
23, 2 Athanasius’ curse The Athanasian Creed, beginning ‘Quicunque vult’, a confession of faith of unknown origin, has been an accepted part of the creeds of some Christian sects since the ninth century. Its opening verses appear as follows in The Book of Common Prayer: ‘Whosoever will be saved: before all things it is necessary that he hold the Catholick faith, which faith, except every one do keep whole and undefiled: without doubt he shall perish everlastingly.’
25, 5–6 ‘driven / Snow’ The bards of Queen Caroline in The Times during the period of her trial praised the ‘driven snow’ of her purity. ‘She stands before her husband’s admiring subjects as white as unsunned snows’ (The Times, 23 August 1820). Jump (NQ, 302) compares The Winter’s Tale(IV iv 218): ‘Lawn as white as driven snow’.
27, 2–3 The tyrant’s wish…/… might pierce ‘Angered at the rabble for applauding a faction which he opposed, he [Caligula] cried, “I wish the Roman people had but a single neck” ’ (Suetonius, Caligula, section 30, The Lives of the Caesars, trans. J. C. Rolfe (1924), I 452–3). Boswell told Dr Johnson about Caligula’s atrocious wish. Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. R. W. Chapman (1961), 941. Byron, in his letters, often mentioned and quoted Boswell’s Fohnson, and in DF used Johnson’s opinions.
28, 1 Briareus In Greek mythology, a giant with a hundred hands and fifty heads. In some accounts he is the giant under Mount Etna, thrown there after the war of the giants against the gods.
28, 5 travelling in Patagonian lands The stature of the Indian natives of Patagonia in southern Argentina was so exaggerated by seventeenth-and eighteenth-century travellers that their size became legendary. Some writers said they were eight to ten feet tall; others reported them to be less than six feet. See IX 46, 7–8.
29, 1 odalisques ‘The ladies of the seragli
o’ (this note, possibly by Byron, was printed in the 1833 edition).
31, 3–5 her seraglio title… / Cantemir can tell you, or De Tott Demitru Cantemir, The History of the Growth and Decay of the Othman Empire, trans. N. Tindal (1734–5). Baron FranÇois de Tott calls this official the ‘Kiaya Kadum’, that is, ‘Mistress of the Ladies’ (Memoirs… Containing the State of the Turkish Empire… (1786) I 72). The Encyclopaedia of Islam (1927), however, identified the ‘Kiaya Kadim’ as the first lady of the palace, the housekeeper in charge of the domestic arrangements and the servants. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in describing her visit to the Sultana in Constantinople, wrote that ‘Kuslir Aga’ was the title of the person who informed the women of the Seraglio each evening whom the Sultan had chosen for his bedpartner (The Complete Letters, ed. R. Halsband (1965), I 383). Halsband (383) quotes from P. Rycaut’s Present State of the Ottoman Empire(1668), who used the same title Byron did: ‘Mother of the Maids’ (39).
36, 3 ‘beautiful exceedingly’
I guess, ’twas frightful there to see
A lady so richly clad as she –
Beautiful exceedingly!
(S. T. Coleridge, Christabel I 66–8)
36, 4 brightest Georgians Gibbon wrote that the women of Georgia and Circassia were models of beauty and seemed formed for love (Gibbon, II, ch. 42, 1382).
37, 2–3 ] Though –
After the first
38, 7 ]
39, 8 padishah or pasha In Turkey ‘padishah’ was a title of the chief ruler or sultan; ‘pasha’ was the title of a high-ranking officer, especially a military commander or a governor of a province.
40, 3 Lolah, Katinka, and Dudù Byron is thinking of Teresa, Katinka and Mariana Macri, and their cousin Dudu Roque, whom he knew in Athens in 1810. Dudu was also a pet name for Teresa and Mariana. Katinka Macri was blonde (41, 2–3). See LJ I 269.
41, 7 languishing and lazy ]
41, 8 would drive you crazy ] would
42, 2 ‘murder sleep’ Macbeth II ii 37.
42, 4 Her Attic forehead and her Phidian nose Dudù had facial features similar to those of the ancient Greeks, as sculptured by Phidias (fifth century BC). The usual feminine profile on vases and statues had a narrow brow with a long nose extending down from it in a straight line without an indentation.
43, 4 a tender taking An agitated state of mind. ‘Lord! what a taking poor Mr Edward will be in when he hears of it’ (Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811),ch. 37).
45, 3 at her steadfastly, she sighed ] at her
46, 6 You had best A contraction – you’d best – gives a more satisfactory metrical reading. Similar contractions are feasible in the following lines of this canto: I’m not less free (56, 8); she’d been obliged (79, 6); we’d better not (98, 6); He’d passed (99, 8).
47, 2 soundly, and I cannot bear ] soundly – and
48, 6 Of guebres, giaours and ginns and gouls in hosts ‘Guebres’, Zoroastrian fire worshippers (the word appears in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817) as ‘gheber’); ‘giaours’, non-Mussulmen, especially Christians (the word is a variant of ‘guebre’); ‘ginns ’ (a variant of ‘jinn’), an order of spirits in Mohammedan demonology; ‘gouls’ (a variant of ‘ghoul’), evil spirits supposed in Mohammedan countries to rob graves and prey on human corpses.
51, 3–4 more than this / I might describe, as I have seen it all Byron usually did not claim to have been in places where he never had been, but here he makes the doubtful boast of having visited a harem.
53, 1 landscape of mild earth ] landscape of
53, 3 budding, cheerful without mirth ] budding, <& beautiful and fresh> ] budding,
53, 4–6 ]
Of all the Elements which people say
Is the Sublime – I wish that they would> try it
53, 5–6 mighty passions… / Which some call ‘the sublime’ Byron may be recalling the section of Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into our Ideas of the Sublime (1756) entitled ‘Of the Passion caused by the Sublime’.
55, 5 Lucus a non lucendo The Latin word ‘lucus’ (a grove) was said to be derived from ‘non-lucendo’ (not admitting light), but Quintilian doubtfully asked, ‘But are we also to admit the derivation of certain words from their opposites, and accept “lucus a non lucendo”, since a grove is dark without shade…? ’ (Institutio Oratoria I, ch. 6, section 34, trans. H. E. Butler (1963), I 126–7). Byron may have known Charles Churchill’s The Ghost: ‘As by the way of Innuendo / Lucus is made a non lucendo’ (II 25, 7–8, The Poetical Works of Charles Churchill, ed. D. Grant (1956), 87).
56, 1 Corinthian brass This brass, famous in antiquity, is a mixture of gold, silver and copper.
57, 7–8 ]
For Woman’s Silence startles more than> Thunder
58, 5 integrity of laws ]
62, 2 rashly touched ] rashly
67, 1 This is no bull No trickery, fraud – a use of the word more common in the seventeenth century than in Byron’s day.
67, 6–8 ] Beloved – and deplored – while slowly
Their way through her sealed eyelids’ glossy fringes
A tear or two with their > fragment
68, 5 Lot’s wife done in salt When the Lord decided to destroy the wicked city of Sodom, his angels urged Lot and his family to flee and ‘look not behind thee’, but as they hastened to escape, Lot’s ‘wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt’ (Genesis xix 13–17, 22–6).
68, 7 choose 1833 and later editions ] chuse BM, M, 1823
69, 2 ‘a certain age’ ‘She was not old nor young, nor at the years / Which certain people call a “certain age”’ (Beppo 22, 1–2).
72, 5–6 bright as any meteor ever bred / By the North Pole The use of ‘meteor’ referring to the aurora borealis was common in Byron’s day.
73, 8 ]
74, 7 But being ‘no orator as Brutus is’ Julius Caesar III ii 216.
75, 3–4 A ‘wood obscure’ like that where Dante found / Himself ‘In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to my senses in a dark forest [‘una selva oscura’], for I had lost the straight path’ (Inferno I 1–3, trans. H. R. Huse, 1954). Byron used the same Dante verse in Canto X 27.
78, 7 ‘A strange coincidence’ A note in the 1833 edition explains Byron’s allusion: ‘One of the advocates employed for Queen Caroline in the House of Lords spoke of some of the most puzzling passages in the history of her intercourse with Bergami, as amounting to “odd instances of strange coincidence”.’
80, 5 Would make us think the moon is at its full Traditionally at the full of the moon the humours were at their fullest expression; thus the most dangerous time for human beings.
84, 3–4 ] Where she then was,
Not the least inconvenience> ]
85, 4 ]
86, 2 Good morrow, for the cock had crown This seems to be the only appearance of the unusual participial form ‘crown’ in Byron’s verse. The O E D lists no eighteenth-century example but does cite an 1834 occurrence. It is listed as a dialect form in North England, which would explain why Byron heard it in his youth.
86, 4 the mosque crescent ] the
86, 8 where Kaff looks down upon the Kurds ‘Where Kaff is clad in rocks, and crowned with snows sublime’ (EB & SR 1022). Byron’s note to this passage reads: ‘Mount Caucasus. Saw the distant ridge of, 1810, 1811.’
In the eighteenth century the Kurds occupied a region named Kurdistan in eastern Turkey and western Persia about 600 miles long and 120–50 miles wid
e. Today the Kurds still inhabit corresponding parts of Turkey, Iran and Iraq.
87, 5 The nightingale that sings with the deep thorn This legend was used by Thomas Lodge, Giles Fletcher, Sir Philip Sidney in Astrophel and Stella, Shakespeare in The Rape of Lucrece, the anonymous author of The Passionate Pilgrim, Sir Thomas Browne, Andrew Marvell and John Pomfret. E. A. Armstrong (The Folklore of Birds (1958), 188–90) believed that the legend came to England from Persia (Hafiz) via the French troubadours. Byron could have met it not only in Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817) and in Samuel Henley’s note on a passage in William Beckford’s Vathek (1786), but in other ‘Oriental’ books that had been a fashion since early in the eighteenth century. For Byron’s mockery of the fad see DJ V 42, 52, and his Persian miscellany: III 18, 35, 64, 68; XIII 17, 41; XVI 1.
89, 2–4 Softer than the soft Sybarite’s… /… by his side Mindyrides of Sybaris ‘complained that he felt worse because the rose-leaves upon which he had lain were crumpled’ (Seneca, Moral Essays, On Anger II, section 25, trans. J. W. Basore (1928), I 219).
89, 4 brook a ruffled rose leaf] brook too thick a rose-leaf
90, 7–8 ] The
Than
91, 5 ]
91, 6 Divan Council of state or royal court.
91, 7 fit of love or duty ] fit of
93, 1–3 ] Oh thou
Thine ear
93, 1–2 grand legitimate Alexander!/ Her son’s son Talleyrand and Alexander, in the name of ‘legitimacy’, justified the restoration of the Bourbon heir to the French throne in 1814. The principle could not be consistently applied in the many arrangements made by the Congress of Vienna, but it was used often enough to become a derisive catchword. Even though Catherine was a whore, Alexander is legitimate and entitled to imperial power if he be his father’s son. ‘Grand’ is another reminder of the Quadruple Alliance. See note to Dedication 14, 5 and note to Preface to Cantos VI–VIII 76–7.
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