ABBREVIATIONS.

D. Darmesteter. An edition of Childe Harold, with notes in French, by James Darmesteter. Paris, 1882.

M. Mommsen. An edition; with notes in German, by August Mommsen. Berlin, 1885.

R. Rolfe. An edition, with notes, by William J. Rolfe. Boston,

1886.

T. Tozer. An edition, with notes, by H. F. Tozer. Oxford, 1885. Sk. Skeat's Etymological Dictionary.

H.E.D. Historical English Dictionary. This invaluable work is sometimes referred to as the New English Dictionary, sometimes as the Oxford English Dictionary. But from an article in Notes and Queries, it would seem as if H. E.D. would be in future the correct short description.

In the present edition sundry notes are taken from the above books. The editor does not wish to take them without acknowledgment, but if the names are given in full the learner may attach more importance to the source than to the substance. An editor who has taught the young knows that the good learner frequently learns notes by heart. Such an editor therefore tries to diminish the number of names.

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NOTES.

CANTO THE THIRD.

I. 2. Ada. Byron married Miss Milbanke Jan. 2, 1815. Ada was born Dec. 10 of the same year. In the middle of January, Ada being five weeks old, Lady Byron left her husband, and on April 25, 1816, Byron quitted England for ever. Ada married the Earl of Lovelace, and died in 1852.

3. The tone of this line is somewhat different from Byron's letter to Moore, dated Jan. 5: "The little girl was born on the 10th of December last; her name is Augusta Ada (the second a very antique family name,-I believe not used since the reign of King John). She was and is very flourishing and fat, and reckoned very large for her days-squalls and sucks incessantly." 5. Awaking 'I' is the subject expected. Now grammatically ' awaking' agrees with 'me.'

II. 1. Once more. Notice in the repetition the accent is varied: in the first place 'once' is accented, not in the second. D. finds a reminiscence of Henry V., III. i. 1:

"Once more unto the breach, dear friend."

2. The comparison of the waves to a steed has been much admired.

7. must I on. The verb of motion is omitted, as frequently in Shakspere.

weed, sc. sea-weed. Because of his trouble with his wife, the poet has left England to wander without purpose over the face of the globe.

III. 1. my youth's summer. He was only twenty-eight, when he speaks of his youth's summer as past.

One, Childe Harold. In the first two cantos Byron maintains the character of Childe Harold, a thin veil for himself.

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2. An outlaw made to wander by unhappiness.

5. Tale, for poem.

6. furrows of thought. T. says the elaborate metaphor "is derived from a torrent-bed, which when dried up serves for a sandy or shingly path, as is often the case in southern Europe." The metaphor is certainly too elaborate. Furrow of thought is good, but what follows is confused-the dried-up tears, ebbing, leaving a track, over which the years plod the sands.

IV. 5. dreary strain. He is not complimentary to Childe Harold. Byron desires to clear himself of introspection by going on with his poem; but, as has been often said, there is a great deal of Byron's self in Childe Harold. 'Ce n'est pourtant que lui-même et sa douleur égoïste qui, plus que jamais, occupe tout le poème, et de là sa vérité poétique et sa force " (D.).

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V. 1. He, repeated again in 6. 'Who grown' is also an incomplete clause.

2. in deeds, not years. D. compares Manfred II. 1:

"Think'st thou existence doth depend on time?

It doth; but actions are our epochs."

R. quotes from Bailey's Festus:

"We live in deeds, not years; in thoughts, not breaths; In feelings, not in figures on a dial.

We should count time by heart-throbs."

And Sheridan, Pizarro iv. 1 (published 1799): "A life spent worthily should be measured by a nobler line,-by deeds, not years."

3. so that. In iv. 6 and here 'so that' is used in different senses: in the earlier it means 'provided that'; in this case it points to a result.

VI. 1. We endow our fancy with form in order that by creation we may live a more intense life.

5. thou, Childe Harold.

VII. 4. phantasy, etymologically the same as fancy, which comes through French fantaisie; but both are from Greek pavracia (appearance), which is from the verb palvw, to show. Nowadays phantasy is the power of bringing images back to the mind; fancy is the lower form of imagination, the picturing power, that forms graceful or whimsical mental images.

VIII. 1. something too much of this. A quotation from Hamlet, III. ii. 69.

2. spell seal, the incantation which is to subdue the evil spirits raging within him is concluded by the seal of silence (cp. IV. cxxxviii. 1).

3. long absent, four-and-a-half years.

IX. 3. a purer fount, "the love of nature and of classical antiquity" (D.). No reference to marriage.

8. pined. sc. caused pain, which' refers to chain.' This transitive use is archaic. The modern use of pine is intransitive, 'to waste away.'

X. 1. The reference is to Byron's return to English society.

XI. 1. Reference to his courtship and marriage.

2. curiously, with careful observation. In English curiously' is generally used in a bad sense; not so its French equivalent. 3. sheen. See I. xvii. 2, note.

5. Reference to Byron's short-lived parliamentary ambition rather than to literary fame.

9. fond, in the old sense, 'foolish.'

XII. With this and the next stanza much of Manfred may be compared. Byron was writing Manfred at about the same time as this canto.

4. quell'd, lit. to choke, strangle, suffocate; later, to kill, although not etymologically connected with kill. "The origin, like that of German Kehle, throat, is to be found in a representation of the guttural noises made by a person choking " (Wedgwood). In Shaks. M. N. D. v. i. 292,

'Crail, crush, conclude and quell."

XIII. 3. extends, sing., agreeing with a blue sky,' 'glowing clime' being regarded as equivalent to 'blue sky.'

6

7. a mutual language. Byron means a common' language. It is the old mistake, perpetuated in Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.

tome, a French word meaning 'volume,' from the Greek TéμVEL, to cut. It is often used as equivalent to book.

Byron means that he would often neglect the study of English books in order to study Nature.

9. Byron was writing on the Lake of Geneva, and its scenery is before his mind.

XIV. 1. the Chaldean.

The Chaldeans were great astrologers.

6. had been, would have been.

XV. 4. were, would be.

5. Then came. An adapted quotation from Macbeth, III. iv. 21: "Then comes my fit again."

which to o'ercome, to overcome which fit the heat of his impeded soul would eat through his bosom, exactly as the

imprisoned bird will eagerly beat his breast against the bars of his cage, until the blood comes.

XVI. 6. plunder'd wreck, sc. ship plundered by pirates and then abandoned in a helpless state. The picture of the sailors drinking under such circumstances is borrowed from his grandfather's narrative of his shipwreck in the Straits of Magellan.

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XVII. 1. Stop. In a note on II. lxxxix. Byron quotes: "Siste Viator-heroa calcas," Stop, thou that passest: thou art treading on a hero."

This is the introduction to Byron's Waterloo. It must be remembered that Byron visited Waterloo within less than a year of the battle.

an Empire's dust. Byron's sympathies were strongly with Napoleon.

2. Earthquake. Tennyson, Ode on the Duke of Wellington, has "That world's earthquake, Waterloo."

3. spot mark'd. It is now-by the Belgian lion-but England has erected no colossal bust, no trophied column. And in order to make the mound on which the lion stands, the face of the ground has been altered.

9. first and last of fields, first, sc. most important. It is a question whether history would modify this verdict.

king-making, establishing Louis XVIII. on the French throne, and indirectly all the sovereigns of Europe, as crushing the Revolution.

XVIII. 1. place of skulls. "Golgotha, that is to say, a place of a skull" (Matt. xxvii. 33), so called from the formation of the rock.

5. "pride of place." "Pride of place' is a term of falconry, and means the highest pitch of flight. (See Macbeth, etc.)

'An eagle towering in his pride of place (B.).

The reference is to II. iv. 12, and it should be

"A falcon towering in her pride of place,"

on which passage Clark and Wright say, "place is a technical term in falconry for the pitch attained by a falcon before swooping down on its prey."

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Byron has put Eagle' for France, and especially for Napoleon. 6. Byron wrote these stanzas in an album in Brussels on his return from the field of Waterloo, but this line ran

"Then tore with bloody beak the fatal plain."

Mr. Reinagle, an artist, having seen the lines, "sketched a spirited chained eagle, grasping the earth with his talons. Byron, hearing of this, wrote to a friend at Brussels: 'Reinagle