Don Juan
Page 78
59, 7–8 that deep-mouthed Boeotian Savage Landor, / Has taken for a swan rogue Southey’s gander In the Preface to The Vision of Judgment Byron commented at length on Landor’s friendship with Southey. He may have borrowed two epithets (line 7) from William Gifford, whose satirical methods he had followed in EB & SR and whose literary judgement he respected. In a note to the Introduction of The Baviad, Gifford mocked ‘the odes of that deep-mouthed Theban, Bertie Greathead, Esq.’ (8th edn, 1811, p. xiii).
The Athenians thought the Boeotians, who lived in central Greece, boorish and dull witted. Though Thebes was the chief city-state of Boeotia, ‘Theban’ was not derogatory in the same sense that ‘Boeotian’ was. But since Pindar lived in Thebes, Gifford and Byron may have had in mind pretentious and hollow imitations of Pindar’s elaborate verse.
60, 1–8 John Keats, who was killed off by one critique, /… snuffed out by an article This was the review by John Wilson Croker in the Quarterly Review, XIX (April 1818), 204–8. Byron’s erroneous notion of the effect of the review on Keats came from Shelley, who gives a similar account in the Preface to Adonais. In a note to ‘Observations upon an Article in Blackwood’s Magazine’, dated 12 November 1821, Byron repeats the story and gives a sympathetic appraisal of Keats’s poetry: ‘My indignation at Mr Keats’s depreciation of Pope has hardly permitted me to do justice to his own genius, which, malgré all the fantastic fopperies of his style, was undoubtedly of great promise. His fragment of “Hyperion” seems actually inspired by the Titans, and is as sublime as Aeschylus. He is a loss to our literature; and the more so, as he himself, before his death, is said to have been persuaded that he had not taken the right line, and was reforming his style upon the more classical models of the language’ (LJ IV 474). This criticism reflects the influence of Shelley, who also singled out Hyperion for praise and ignored the odes. In the text of the ‘Observations’, Keats is called a ‘tadpole of the Lakes’ and is roughly handled for his depreciation of Pope.
60, 7–8 ] Tis strange the Mind
Chief Impulse with a few frail paper pellets>
that very fiery particle Byron’s 1823 note quoted Horace, Satire II 2, 79:‘ “Divinae Particulam Aurea” ’ (‘that particle of the divine breath’).
61, 1 dead pretenders ] dead
61, 7–8 the thirty / Mock tyrants Gibbon scornfully thought that the fancy of historians popularized the number ‘thirty’ by their shallow and misleading comparisons between the thirty tyrants of Rome and the thirty tyrants of Athens (Gibbon, I, ch. 10, 214).
62, 2 the Praetorian bands In AD 193 the Praetorian Guard, after murdering the Emperor Pertinax, offered to sell the empire at public auction. A vain and wealthy senator Didius Julianus bought it, and the guards proclaimed him emperor (Gibbon, I, ch. 5, 81–5).
62, 3 A ‘dreadful trade’ like his who ‘gathers samphire’ Samphire is a European plant that grows on rocks near the sea. Its fleshy, aromatic leaves are used in making pickles. Edgar in King Lear says that the man he pretends to see is engaged in a fearful trade because he clings perilously half way down a cliff as he gathers samphire (IV vi 15–16).
62, 7 I ’d try conclusions with those Janizaries
Unpeg the basket on the house’s top,
Let the birds fly, and, like the famous ape,
To try conclusions, in the basket creep,
And break your own neck down.
(Hamlet III iv 193–6)
‘I will try confusions [conclusions] with him’ (Launcelot Gobbo in The Merchant of Venice II ii 39). To try conclusions: to engage in a trial of skill or strength; to try the issue to see what will come of it (OED).
The Janizaries were the Turkish standing army.
63, 4–5 ] Indeed Bile –
65, 4 ]
And Centaur-Nessus garb of mortal clothing When Hercules was unfaithful to Deianira, she sent him the poisoned tunic of the centaur Nessus, which had the power of reclaiming a husband from unlawful loves. It achieved this by killing him.
66, 3–4 those vegetable puncheons / Called parks In II 47 Byron had used ‘puncheon’ with the literal meaning of a large cask for liquids; here his figurative use may connote not only the artificiality of the parks as contained areas of trees, shrubs and flowers, but also his usual jibe about the soggy London climate. He did not use the word elsewhere in his poetry.
66, 6–7 the only ‘bower’ / (In Moore’s phrase) Moore (XVII 27) quotes his own poem: ‘Come to me, love, the twilight star / Shall guide thee to my bower.’
67, 4–5 Then along the floor / Chalk mimics painting In the Regency period floors were decorated for special occasions with elaborate pictures in chalk. The custom remains in the chalk pictures done on London pavements. Wordsworth in the first of his sonnets entitled Personal Talk (1807) used the same image: ‘… like Forms with chalk / Painted on rich men’s floors, for one feast-night’ (lines 5–8).
67, 8 An earthly paradise of ormolu Gilded bronze (ormolu) decorations for furniture were much in use during the Regency.
68, 1 hostess, nor shall sink ] Hostess –
72, 3 ambrosial moments ]
72, 5 sits ]
72, 4–5 bogle / Which sits forever upon memory’s crupper A bogle in Scottish or North England dialect is a goblin or fearful nocturnal spectre. OED cites Byron’s use of it here. ‘Memory’s crupper’ (rump, hind quarters) is typical of Byron’s absurd and incongruous metaphors.
74, 6 ‘rack and manger’ Waste and destruction; the modern phrase is ‘rack and ruin’. OED quotes Fielding, The Grub Street Opera (1731) III 2: ‘The moment my back is turned, everything goes to rack and manger.’
74, 7 toil and trouble Macbeth IV i 10: ‘Double, double, toil and trouble.’
74, 8 I wish they knew the life of a young noble Byron described for Medwin his life in London before 1809. ‘My own master at an age when I most required a guide, and left to the dominion of my passions when they were the strongest, with a fortune anticipated before I came into possession of it, and a constitution impaired by early excesses, I commenced my travels in 1809, with a joyless indifference to a world that was all before me’ (Medwin, 72).
75, 2 Handsome but wasted ] Handsome, but “blasè”
75, 5–6 Both senates see their nightly votes participated / Between the tyrant’s and the tribunes’ crew The young noble sacrifices his vote to party politics and does not express any principles of his own, a situation seen nightly, Byron says, in both Houses of Parliament. ‘The tyrant’s and the tribunes’ crew ’refers to the Tories and Whigs.
<75–76> Byron cancelled two stanzas that he numbered 75 and 76 and that follow 75 (numbered 74 on S). In the transcription below, Byron’s capitalization has been reduced and punctuation provided. His deleted variants have been omitted here.
<75>
Of rank enough to set in stone or lead.
Far easier though for the good town of Manchester
To find retorts [ sic?] for innocent blood shed
By butchers in her streets than for the staunchest or
Proudest of Parian patrician (bred
They know not how), the one half the present case
Of peers, to prove their title no disgrace.>
<76>
Scotch with blue-green ribbons, Irish with a blue,
Some for having turned converted [ sic?] cullies,
Others for other dirty work gone through,
Dukes, fools by birth, while Clogher’s Bishop sullies
The law, at least until the Bench revert to true,
Plain, simple fornication, nor behold
The senate which Tiberius met of old.>
<75, 3> Manchester This is ap
parently Byron’s only explicit reference to the Manchester violence of 16 August 1819, when mounted militia armed with swords charged a large reform meeting that was being addressed by ‘Orator’ Hunt. Several people were killed and a few score wounded.
<75, 6> Proudest of Parian patrician Paros, an island consisting of one marble mountain in the Cyclades, prospered in ancient times by exporting its white marble. Praxiteles and other Athenian sculptors used it. The adjective ‘parian’ came to mean ‘like marble’ and was also applied to fine unglazed porcelain resembling the marble of Paros. Either sense is appropriate to Byron’s sardonic and aristocratic epithet.
<76, 1> borough mongers Politicians bought and sold boroughs and their representatives in the House of Commons. Such trading was easy in boroughs where few people were qualified voters.
<76, 2> Scotch with blue-green ribbons, Irish with a blue The Scottish Order of the Thistle and the Irish Order of St Patrick, the second and third highest honours after the Garter. The former, which had existed in Scotland since the fifteenth century, was established in England by James II in 1687. Its decorations consisted of an elaborate collar with sixteen thistles and a medallion of St Andrew and his cross, a badge, a silver star, and a dark green ribbon. The Order of St Patrick had been founded by George III in 1783, but it never became popular because it was often given to rich absentee landlords. Its gold collar had alternating roses and harps, its badge an ornate cross of St Patrick. Its ribbon was sky blue.
<76, 3> cullies tricksters, cheaters.
<76, 5> Clogher’s Bishop See note to Canto VIII 76, 1–2.
<76, 8> The senate which Tiberius met The Emperor Tiberius was notorious for having stripped the Roman Senate of its power by violence and fraud.
76, 1 ‘Where is the world?’ cries Young at eighty Edward Young was more than eighty years old when he published his poem, Resignation.
76, 3–4 Where is the world of eight years past? ’Twas there–/…’tis gone In a letter to Moore, 18 June 1822, Byron, after a visit from Lord clare, recalls the ‘fooleries of the time’ eight years past (LJ VI 80).
See also Hamlet I i 141–2:
BERNARDO: ’Tis here.
HORATIO: ’Tis here. [ Exit Ghost.]
MARCELLUS: ’Tis gone.
76, 5 ] And frailer, since without a breath of air
77, 3–6 Where Grattan, Curran, Sheridan…/… unhappy Queen…/… the daughter Henry Grattan, Whig statesman and supporter of Irish interests in Parliament, died in 1820. John Philpot Curran, a colleague of Grattan’s in attempting to achieve parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation, died in 1817. Richard Brinsley Sheridan, dramatist, parliamentary orator and wit, died in 1816. Princess Charlotte, heiress to the throne, died in childbirth in 1817; her mother, Queen Caroline, wife of George IV, in 1821.
77, 7 ]
Where are those martyred saints the five per cents? Of ‘the five per cents’ (British bonds), Byron complained to Kinnaird, 18 January 1823: ‘I have already written more than once to express my willingness to accept the, or almost any, mortgage, anything to get out of the tremulous funds of these oscillating times’ (LJ VI 162–3).
78, 1 Where’s Brummell? Dished. Where’s Long Pole Wellesky? Diddled Both verbs have the same meaning: completely done for or ruined.
Beau Brummell had been forced to retire to Calais in 1816 because of his debts. William Pole Tylney Long Wellesley (1788–1857), whom Byron refers to in The Waltz 21, was already notorious for wasting his property on high living.
78, 2 Where’s Whitbread? Romilly? Samuel Whitbread, Whig politician and champion of the cause of Queen Caroline, had committed suicide in 1815;Sir Samuel Romilly, in 1818 (see note to Canto I 15, 4).
78, 3 ]
Where is his will George III made two wills, 1770 and 1810, but left the latter unsigned. The earlier will was therefore official, though many of its provisions were inoperative.
78, 4 And where is ‘Fum’ the Fourth, our ‘royal bird’? Moore in a note prefixed to his satire, Fum and Hum, the Two Birds of Royalty, referred readers to a ‘florid description of the Pavilion at Brighton, in the apartments of which… “Fum, the Chinese Bird of Royalty, is a principal ornament” ’ (Poetical Works (1841) VII 75–8). This satire was originally appended to The Fudge Family in Paris. ‘Hum’, a nickname for George IV, was used by Keats in The Cap and Bells and by Shelley (Gadfly’s song ‘Hum! hum! hum!’) in Oedipus Tyrannus (1820).
78, 5 Gone down it seem to Scotland George IV visited Scotland in 1822, when Sir William Curtis affected his Scottish kilt in imitation of the King.
78, 6 Sawney’s violin Sawney (Sandy) was a derisive term for a Scotsman. Byron is scornful of Scottish servility.
78, 7 ‘Caw me, cow thee’ From the old phrase ‘ka me [claw or scratch me] and I’ll ka thee’, in the sense of mutual flattery or service.
79, 7 Where ore the Grenvilles? Turned as usual George Grenville (1712–70). a supporter of Pitt, who broke with him on the Stamp Act, had three sons: William Wyndham, Baron Grenville (1759–1834), a social reformer in early career and later a repressive Tory and briefly prime minister; Thomas, out of Parliament after 1818; and George, who died in 1813.
80, 1 the Lady Carolines and Franceses? After her affair with Byron, for some years Lady Caroline Lamb (1785–1828) and her husband were partly estranged. No actual separation took place until 1825.
Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster (d. 1837) left her husband in 1821, and Byron aided her in effecting a reconciliation about the time this canto was written.
80, 2 Divorced or doing thereanent Or doing something concerned with divorce. ‘Thereanent’ (relating thereto) is Scottish or North England dialect.
80, 7 ]
81, 1 Some who once set their caps at cautious dukes Possibly an allusion tothe gossip that there was an affair between Lady Frances Wedderburn Webster and the Duke of Wellington.
82, 2; 83, 1 and 6; 84, 1, 2, 4–7; 85, 3 and 8 I have seen In these lines the verb should be read: ‘I’ve seen’. Byron himself made the contraction in 85, 4 and 5, and might have done so in the other lines had he made his own fair copy. In 85, 6, contraction sounds better, but it would give us a decasyllabic verse with an unstressed ending, a cadence he used only inadvertently. The first verbs in 83, 5, and 87, 7, should be read ‘it’s time’ and ‘You’re not a moral people’.
83, 2 a duke probably Wellington.
83, 5 blue peter A blue flag with a white square in the centre, hoisted as thesignal of immediate sailing.
83, 7 the King hissed and then carest George IV was unpopular when, as Prince of Wales, he tried to divorce Caroline in 1806 and tried again as King in 1820. But in 1821 he was adulated during his visit to Ireland.
84, 1–4 landholders without a rap … Johanna Southcote… The House of Commons turned to a tax-trap /… that sad affair of the late Queen See notes on the following lines: Preface to Cantos I and II, 24–5 (on Joanna Southcott); V 61, 1–8, and XII 84, 1–4 (on George IV and Queen Caroline); I 183, 4; VII 44–5; and VIII 125, 5 (on taxation and the economic depression).
84, 6 a congress doing all that’s mean Of th
e several international conferencesor congresses since the meeting at Chaumont early in 1814, the one at Vienna in Byron’s judgement may have been the meanest. See notes to Dedication 11, 8; 14, 5; note to Canto IX 3, 3. Three other meetings of the Quadruple Alliance that he knew about before he wrote this canto were those at Aix-la-Chapelle (1818); at Troppau (1820), convened for the purpose of sanctioning intervention to counteract revolution (England dissented) after the Neapolitans had forced Ferdinand I, King of the Two Sicilies, to accept a liberal constitution; and at Laibach (1821), where Ferdinand invited the Austrian army to restore order in Naples. The Austrians quickly reinstated Ferdinand, whose tyranny thereafter was reputed to be the most oppressive at that time in Europe. Since Byron in letters and a journal expressed his frustration over the Neapolitan failure, perhaps at the moment the Congress at Laibach seemed the meanest.
He may not here have known about the discussion at the Congress of Verona (20–30 October 1822). He finished Canto XI by 17 October except for a few stanzas, including 83–5, and had sent Mary Shelley’s copy to London by 31 October. See note to Canto XV 61, 1–4.
84, 7–8 some nations…/ Kick off their burdens The revolts in Spain, Mexico and South America. See note to Canto XII 6, 6–8.
85, 3 the Funds at war with house and land See notes to Canto VIII 125, 5; XI 77, 7; XVI 99, 6–8.
85, 4 squeakers In modern parlance ‘squawkers’, at having their taxes raised to pay the Napoleonic War debt.
85, 5–6 I’ve seen the people ridden o’er like sand / By slaves on horseback Byron may refer to scenes of political unrest he had witnessed in Italy, or perhaps to the Peterloo Massacre at Manchester, 16 August 1819, which inspired Shelley’s The Mask of Anarchy.
85, 7 ‘thin potations’ Henry IV Part II IV iii 120–24. English brewersresorted to making ‘thin potations’ in order to avoid the malt tax.