made no one unhappy; not an insect hath perished by my hand’ (Henry Spalding, Suvóroff (1890) 228 n.; quoted in Poetry VI 321 n.).
72, 6 awkward scrape 1833 ] awkward step B M, M, 1823. Since 1833, editions have used ‘scrape’ because of the rhyme.
77, 3 Life as so much dross Dross in the sense of rubbish or refuse. See note on Canto VIII 3, 5.
77, 7 As wife and friends did for the boils of Job Job’s wife may be too casual and abrupt (ii 7, 9–10). Though his friends (Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar) seemed to be concerned about his plight (ii 11–13), they were intent on combating his complaints, and on delivering moral lectures and rebukes. Job condemned them as deceitful (vi 15) and useless physicians (xiii 4), and as scoffers (xvi 2–6; xx), who only made him feel worse (xix 1–6, 13–14, 17, 19). Finally Jehovah was also displeased with Job’s three friends (xvii 7). The story of Job was one of Byron’s favourites. In DJ he alluded to it in Canto I 162, VIII 50, XIV 48 and XVI 113.
78, 5 Priam’s son Hector, slain by Achilles in the Trojan War, Iliad XXII.
78, 6 escalade an attack on a fortified place made by scaling the walls by the use of ladders.
81, 5–8 ]
Whatever deeds be done – I will relate ’em,
With some small variations in the list
Of killed and wounded, who will not be misst>
82, 1 Bonaparte Sometimes on the manuscripts and in the first edition Byron used the Italian spelling ‘Buonaparte’ (see I 2; IX 14); and he always pronounced the last syllable, here rhyming it with ‘hearty’; likewise in IX 14, 32; XII s; XIV 90.
82, 3 Leonidas This king of Sparta was the hero of the defence of Thermopylae against the Persians in 480 BC.
84, 1–5 Medals, ranks, ribbons, lace, embroidery, scarlet Are things immortal… As purple to the Babylonian Harlot … … a crimson varlet Byron, mocking man’s delight in decorations as a spurious, materialistic value, links this vanity with the Babylon symbol of the degradation of spirit: ‘I will show unto thee the judgment of the great whore.… With whom… the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication.… I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast.… And the woman was arrayed in purple and scarlet color, and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls.… And upon her forehead was a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH’ (Revelation xvii 1–5).
84, 3 ]
84, 8 ask the pig who sees the wind Pigs were proverbially said to see the wind or the coming storm, which made them restless. ‘Had lights where better eyes were blind, / As pigs are said to see the wind ’ (Samuel Butler, Hudibras, ed. John Wilders (1967), The Third Part, II 1107–8). Wilders (p. 434) quoted T. Ratcliffe’s note: ‘Villagers always said that the reason why pigs ran squealing when the wind blew in their faces was because the wind appeared to them as long streaks of fire’ (NQ, 7th Series IX (4 January 1890), 14).
85, 8 Like a bob major from a village steeple The bob major, a term used by bell-ringers, is rung upon eight bells, the bob minor upon six.
86, 6–8 stars peep through… /… the smoke / Of hell shall pall them in a deeper cloak These and other words in this ‘cold dull night’ scene indicate that Byron remembered the close of Lady Macbeth’s ferocious soliloquy:
Come, thick night,
And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of hell,…
Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark.…
(Macbeth I v 50–51, 53)
See Maxwell (NQ, 302–3).
CANTO VIII
Byron wrote this canto in Pisa during July 1822, and completed the first draft (Tx) by the end of the month or early in August. It was published with the preceding two cantos on 15 July 1823. All variants are taken from Tx, unless otherwise indicated. M is Mary Shelley’s fair copy. Since Byron at first intended to end the canto with stanza 137, the last four stanzas (138–41) may be regarded as additions.
2, 5 Hydra A water serpent with nine heads, of which the middle one was immortal. Hercules tried to kill it, but two new heads replaced each one he cut off. With the aid of Iolaus, he burned away the mortal heads of the Hydra and buried the immortal ninth one.
3, 5 so much gold for a little dross Dross is the scum of impurities and worthless residue after the valuable minerals have been extracted in smelters from the ore. Byron repeats the contrast in XI 26, 3, and uses ‘dross’ in a more general figurative sense in VII 77 and XII 4.
4, 7 ] Yet in the end –
5, 2 Leonidas and Washington See note to Canto VII 82, 3. For Byron’s other references to Washington, see Poetry IV 516; also Joseph J. Jones, ‘Lord Byron on America’, University of Texas Studies in English (1941), 121–37.
6, 3 Which arched the horizon ] Which
6, 5 The volleying roar ] The
7, 7–8 blazed like Etna when / The restless Titan hiccups in his den In some legends Enceladus was a giant and not a Titan, whom Zeus slew and buried, or merely imprisoned alive, under Etna. In an earlier war the defeated Titans were consigned to Tartarus. They and the giants were often interchanged in story. Since Byron on his MS originally wrote ‘Titans struggle in their den’, he did not at first have a particular one in mind.
8, 6 thickening ] thick’ning M, 1823. One of the few words for which Mary Shelley and the first edition marked elision.
8, 8 ‘Allah! Allah! Hu!’ ‘ “Allah Hu!” is properly the war cry of the Mussulmans, and they dwell long on the last syllable, which gives it a very wild and peculiar effect’ (Byron, 1823).
9, 4 Arseniew Mikhail Mikhailovich Arseniev, a lieutenant general, commanded the right wing of the Russian army that stormed Ismail from the river side. After the victory, the generals, except for Suvorov, who disapproved, participated in looting the city; this may also account for the gory soubriquet that Byron gave Arseniev.
9, 6 ‘Carnage’ (so Wordsworth tells you) ‘is God’s daughter’
But Thy* most dreaded instrument
In working out a pure intent,
Is man arrayed for mutual slaughter;
Yea, Carnage is thy daughter!
(Wordsworth’s Thanksgiving Ode)
*‘To wit, the Deity’s: this is perhaps as pretty a pedigree for Murder as ever was found out by Garter King at Arms. – What would have been said, had any free-spoken people discovered such a lineage?’ (Byron, 1823).
Ruskin noted that after Byron’s criticism, Wordsworth recast these lines; his altered version appeared in all editions after 1843 (Fiction Fair and Foul, in The Works, eds. E. T. Cook and A. Wedderburn XXXIV (1908), 326–7 and n., 369).
10, 2 ]
12, 5–6 tick / Like the deathwatch A deathwatch is a beetle or other insect that bores into old wood; it makes a ticking sound, that is supposed to portend death.
13, 5 The groan, the roll ] The shriek – the roll Tx, M
14, 8 ] Half-pay for life –
Half-pay for life – Makes
Although both manuscripts have the singular verb, 1823 and later editions print ‘make’.
15, 7 ]
16, 1–2 ] And this was admirable, for
Was damnable, Conceive> Vesuvius loaded
16, 7–8 ]
The Hounds stand> fragment
16, 8 Hounds, when the huntsman tumbles, are at fault Byron, as elsewhere, refers to the person whose office it is to manage the hunt. If this leader falls from his horse or blunders or is in any way disorderly (‘tumble’ may here have one of its more general meanings), the dogs lose the scent and the hunt is ruined.
17, 8 ] Would form a
18, 8 Was printed Grove, although his name was Grose‘A fact: see the
Waterloo Gazettes. I recollect remarking at the time to a friend: – “There is fame! a man is killed, his name is Grose, and they print it Grove.” I was at college with the deceased, who was a very amiable and clever man, and his society in great request for his wit, gaiety, and “chansons à boire” ’(Byron, 1823).
20, 8 sprawling in his gore ]
22, 4 Frederick the Great from Molwitz deigned to run Frederick fled with his troops when they were routed by the Austrian cavalry; the battle (1741) was later won by the courage of his foot soldiers.
22, 5 a pad a highway robber.
23, 3–8 (The antiquarians… /… and not national.) Byron in a note mentioned General Charles Vallancey and Sir Laurence Parsons. The former in an ‘Essay on the Celtic Language’ (1782) wrote that ancient Irish had ‘an affinity with the Punic ’. Parsons in his Defence of the Ancient History of Ireland (1795) also argued that the Irish and Carthaginian were originally the same.
24, 1 ‘a broth of a boy’ An Irish colloquialism meaning he was what a real boy should be.
24, 4 sensation In italicizing ‘sensation’ Byron mocks the current technical vocabulary popularized by eighteenth-century psychological philosophers, such as Francis Hutcheson and David Hartley.
25, 8 such meaning should pave hell ‘The Portuguese proverb says, that “Hell is paved with good intentions” ’ (Byron, 1823).
26, 7 ]
26, 8 Pall Mall Pall Mall, the centre of London club life, was, Byron suggests, the centre of the gambling hells.
27, 3–8 Like chastest wives from constant husbands’ sides … … and friends retiring Another allusion to his separation from Lady Byron, about which Byron always professed to be puzzled.
28, 5–8 Caesar himself… … And rally bact his Romans The Nervii in a surprise attack routed the Roman cavalry and surrounded two legions. Had hot Julius Caesar ‘snatched a shield… and hurled himself upon the Barbarians; and had not the tenth legion at sight of his peril, run down… and cut… the enemy to pieces, not a Roman… would have survived… owing to Caesar’s daring, they fought beyond their powers…’ (Plutarch, Caesar, section 20, Lives, trans. B. Perrin (1919), VII 492–3).
29, 6–7 great Homer thought / This simile enough for Ajax ‘He was as stubborn as a donkey who gets the better of the boys in charge of him, turns into a field they are passing, and helps himself to the standing crop. So many sticks have been broken on his back that their feeble cudgelling leaves him unconcerned, till at last they drive him out with much ado, but not before he has eaten all he wants. Thus the proud Trojans and their far-famed allies hung on the heels of the great Telamonian Aias, pricking the centre of his shield with their spears’ (Iliad, trans. E. V. Rieu (1950), XI 212).
32, 5 ignis fatuus The will-o’-the-wisp, a phosphorescent light hovering or flitting at night over marshes, possibly caused by the combustion of marsh gas (methane). The Romantic poets liked this image of a delusive, treacherous light that could lead travellers astray. Byron had used it in VII 46 and returned to it in later cantos (XI27, XV 54). See Appendix.
33, 2–8 ] For he was dizzy – busy –
Lightening along his veins; and where he heard
The liveliest fire,>
Of Friar Bacon’s bright invention – shared
By Turk and Christian equally, he could
No longer now resist the attraction of Gunpowder –
But flew to where the pleasant noise grew louder.>
33, 8 By thy humane discovery, Friar Bacon As Byron noted in the 1823 edition, gunpowder is said to have been discovered by Roger Bacon (?1214–94).
34, 8 glacis The slope from the top of the counterscarp of a fortification towards the open country.
35, 6 ‘to cut and come again’ The faculty of cutting (from a joint of meat) and of returning to help oneself as often as one likes; hence, as here, with an eye to taking advantage of things.
36, 8 ‘shadows of death’s valley’ Psalm xxiii 4: ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death.…’
37, 7 chasseurs Lightly armed troops, trained for rapid movement.
38, 2–4 ‘the spirits from / The vasty deep’… /… leave their home
GLENDOWER. I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
(Henry IV Part I III i 53–5)
39, 4 We shall not see his likeness An echo of Hamlet’s description of his father: ‘I shall not look upon his like again’ (I ii 188).
41, 3–4 somewhat misty bourn, / Which Hamlet tells us is a pass of dread A pass of dread is either a road or passage to death (as in our ‘passing away’) or a dreadful predicament (as in the phrase ‘things have come to a pretty pass’). Hamlet did not use the word ‘pass’ in the passage that Byron recalled here:
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovered country from whose bourne
No traveller returns, puzzles the will.…
(Hamlet III i 78–80)
41, 6 galvanism upon the dead See note to Canto I 130, 2.
43, 1–2 They fell as thick as harvests beneath hail, / Grass before scythes, or corn below the sickle The agricultural imagery here was common in the Bible: ‘the hail smote every herb in the field’ (Exodus ix 25); ‘as rain in harvest’ (Proverbs xxvi 1); ‘they shall soon be cut down like the grass’ (Psalm xxxvii 2); ‘he destroyed their vines with hail’ (Psalm lxxviii 47); ‘him that handleth the sickle in the time of harvest’ (Jeremiah i 16); ‘Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe’ (Joel iii 13); for other instances see note on Canto V 17, 6.
44, 1 traverses Parapets raised at intervals across the top-level surface of a rampart (broad embankment) to prevent its being raked by artillery or musket fire along its entire length.
44, 8 Reached the interior talus of the rampart The talus was the sloping side of a rampart or bastion. Apparently Johnson and a few others had already scaled the exterior side (talus or slope), reached the top of the embankment and scrambled down the ‘interior talus’. However, in the next stanza Byron seems to reverse the narrative: he describes the dangerous ascent up the rampart. He might have been clearer had he written in 44, 8, ‘exterior talus of the rampart’.
45, 3 All neck or nothing A phrase used by sportsmen, meaning ready to venture everything, to take all risks.
46, 3 Turkish Cohorn’s ignorance Baron Menno van Coehoorn (1641–1704), the Dutch military engineer, introduced into warfare the mortar for throwing grenades.
48, 4 allied nations See note to Dedication 14, 5, and note to Preface to Cantos VI–VIII76–7.
49, 1–5 Blücher, Bulow, Gneisenau Prussian generals, without whose forces, some maintain, Wellington might have been defeated by Napoleon at Waterloo.
49, 6–7 Wellington… /… pensions See note to Canto IX 3, 1.
50, 5 The veriest jade will wince whose harness wrings ‘… let the galled jade wince, our withers are unwrung’ (Hamlet III ii 245–6).
50, 7 Beyond the rules of posting beyond the rules for the care of post-horses.
51, 7–8 revolution / Alone can save the earth By 1813, Byron had given up the hope that social reforms could be achieved through parliamentary means.
53, 6] Which Rousseau
55, 2 at the five-bar gate ] at the
55, 3 double post and rail Fences used as jumping obstacles. See note to XIV 33, 2.
55, 7 even then his Tx ] even there his M, 1823. The present text follows Byron’s holograph manuscript.
56, 7 ‘base Bezonian’ / (As Pistol calls it) Byron, quoting from memory, confuses two passages. In Henry VI Part II IV i 134, Suffolk says, ‘Great men oft die by vile Bezonians’; in Henry IV Part II V iii 11
2, Pistol says, ‘Under which King? Bezonian, speak, or die.’
Byron probably has Shakespeare’s meanings of ‘bezonian’ in mind: ‘raw recruit, beggar, rascal’. Byron may have known the Italian words ‘bisogno’ (need) and ‘bisognoso’ (pauper) that the Italians derisively applied to the ill-equipped Spanish soldiers who came to Italy.
56, 8 Livonian A citizen of a Russian province along the Baltic in Estonia and Latvia.
60, 2–3 ‘God made the country… / So Cowper says William Cowper, The Task I 749.
61, 1–2 Sylla the man-slayer, / Who passes for in life and death most lucky Sulla, to consolidate his power, had multitudes slaughtered in Italy (six thousand at one time, twelve thousand at another) and hundreds of political foes and rich men proscribed because he coveted their property. Yet two years after he proclaimed himself dictator, he resigned the office and restored the powers of the Senate. He attributed every success to Fortune, and upon his triumph as dictator, ‘ordered that he receive the surname of “Fortunate” (for this is what the word “Felix” most nearly means)’. He wrote in his Memoirs that ‘the Chaldeans foretold him that… he was to end his days at the height of his good fortunes ’, and this did occur after a virulent illness. Then Pompey, because of the weather and the efforts of some to withhold burial honours, was barely able to secure Sulla’s interment The pyre was lighted on a cloudy day, but a strong wind ‘roused a mighty flame’, and there was just time to collect the bones before a heavy rain fell. ‘Therefore [Sulla’s] good fortune would seem to have lasted to the very end, and taken part in his funeral rites’ (Plutarch, Sulla, sections 6, 30–32, 34, 36-8, Lives, trans. B. Perrin (1916), IV 341–3, 422–35, 438–45). Byron, who was impressed by Sulla, had used some of these events in Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte, stanza 7, 1–4, in CH IV 83–4, and in a Journal: ‘He revenged and resigned in the height of his sway’(LJ II 409).
61, 4 General Boon An American told Byron in 1821 about the career of Daniel Boone (1734–1820), ‘the backwoodsman of Kentucky, which made a strong impression upon him’. This acquaintance thought that his talk was the source of the Boone stanzas (‘Conversations of an American with Lord Byron’ (signed with the initials A. D.), New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, XLV (October, November 1835), 193–203, 291–302). Byron also read about Boone in books, one of which according to Van Wyck Brooks was H. M. Brackenridge’s Views of Louisiana (1814).
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