Rokeby (1813), III. 16; the Pibroch was published in 1816; The Omnipotent and The Red Harlaw are from The Antiquary (1816), and the Farewell from The Pirate (1821). As for Bonny Dundee, that incomparable ditty, it was written as late as 1825. The air of Bonny Dundee running in my head to-day,' he writes under date of 22d December (Diary, 1890, i. 61), I wrote a few verses to it before dinner, taking the key-note from the story of Clavers leaving the Scottish Convention of Estates in 1688-9. I wonder if they are good. See The Doom of Devorgoil (1830), Note A, Act II. sc. 2.

LXIII

This unsurpassed piece of art, in which a music the most exquisite is used to body forth a set of suggestions that seem dictated by the very Spirit of Romance, was produced, under the influence of 'an anodyne,' as early as 1797. Coleridge, who calls it Kubla Khan: A Vision within a Dream, avers that, having fallen asleep in his chair over a sentence from Purchas's Pilgrimage-'Here the Khan Kubla commanded a palace to be built and a stately garden thereto; and thus ten miles of ground were enclosed with a wall,' he remained unconscious for about three hours, 'during which time he had the most vivid confidence that he could not have composed less than three hundred lines'; 'if that,' he adds, 'can be called composition, in which all the images rose up before him as things, with a parallel production of the correspondent expressions, without any sensation or consciousness of effort.' On awakening, he proceeded to write out his 'composition,' and had set down as much of it as is printed here, when he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock,' whose departure, an hour after, left him wellnigh oblivious of the rest. This confession, which is dated 1816, has been generally accepted as true; but Coleridge had a trick of dreaming dreams about himself which makes doubt permissible.

LXIV

From the Hellenics (written in Latin, 1814-20, and translated into English at the instance of Lady Blessington), 1846. See Colvin, Landor (English Men of Letters '), pp. 189, 190.

LXV-LXVII

Of the first, Napoleon and the British Sailor' (The Pilgrim of Glencoe, 1842), Campbell writes that the 'anecdote has been published in several public journals, both French and English.' My belief,' he continues, ' in its authenticity was confirmed by an Englishman, long resident in Boulogne, lately telling me that he remembered the circumstance to have been generally talked of in the

place. Authentic or not, I have preferred the story to Hohenlinden, as less hackneyed, for one thing, and, for another, less pretentious and rhetorical. The second (Gertrude of Wyoming, 1809) is truly one of the glories of our birth and state.' The third (idem) I have ventured to shorten by three stanzas: a proceeding which, however culpable it seem, at least gets rid of the chief who gave a country's wounds relief by stopping a battle, eliminates the mermaid and her song (the song that condoles '), and ends the lyric on as sonorous and romantic a word as even Shakespeare ever used.

Corn Law Rhymes, 1831.

LXVIII

LXIX

From that famous and successful forgery, Cromek's Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song (1810), written when Allan was a working mason in Dumfriesshire. I have omitted a stanza as inferior to the rest.

LXXI

English Songs and other Small Poems, 1834.

LXXII-LXXVIII

The first is from the Hebrew Melodies (1815); the next is selected from The Siege of Corinth (1816), 22-33; Alhama (idem) is a spirited yet faithful rendering of the Romance muy Doloroso del Sitio y Toma de Alhama, which existed both in Spanish and in Arabic, and whose effect was such that 'it was forbidden to be sung by the Moors on the pain of death in Granada' (Byron); No. LXXV., surely one of the bravest songs in the language, was addressed (idem) to Thomas Moore; the tremendous Race with Death is lifted out of the Ode in Venice (1819); for the next number see Don Juan, III. (1821); the last of all, Stanzas inscribed on this day I completed my Thirty-sixth year' (1824), is the last verse that Byron wrote.

LXXIX

Napier has described the terrific effect of Napoleon's pursuit ; but in the operations before Corunna he was distanced, if not outgeneralled, by Sir John Moore, and ere the first days of 1809 he gave his command to Soult, who pressed us vainly through the hill-country between Leon and Gallicia, and got beaten at Corunna for his pains. Wolfe, who was an Irish parson and died of consumption, wrote some spirited verses on the flight of Busaco, but this admirable elegy-'I will show you,' said

Byron to Shelley (Medwin, ii. 154) 'one you have never seen, that I consider little if at all inferior to the best, the present prolific age has brought forth '-remains his passport to immortality. It was printed, not by the author, in an Irish newspaper; was copied all over Britain; was claimed by liar after liar in succession; and has been reprinted more often, perhaps, than any poem of the century.

LXXX

From Snarleyow, or the Dog Fiend (1837). Compare Nelson to Collingwood: Victory, 25th June, 1805,-May God bless you and send you alongside the Santissima Trinidad.

LXXXI, LXXXII

The story of Casabianca is, I believe, untrue; but the intention of the singer, alike in this number and in the next, is excellent. Each indeed is, in its way, a classic. The Mayflower sailed from Southampton in 1626.

LXXXIII

This magnificent sonnet, On First Reading Chapman's Homer, was printed in 1817. The Cortez' of the eleventh verse is a mistake; the discoverer of the Pacific being Nuñez de Balboa.

LXXXIV-LXXXVII

The Lays are dated 1824; they have passed through edition after edition; and if Matthew Arnold disliked and contemned them (see Sir F. H. Doyle, Reminiscences and Opinions, pp. 178-87), the general is wise enough to know them by heart. But a book that is 'a catechism to fight' (in Jonson's phrase) would have sinned against itself had it taken no account of them, and I have given Horatius in its integrity: if only, as Landor puts it,

To show the British youth, who ne'er
Will lag behind, what Romans were,
When all the Tuscans and their Lars

Shouted, and shook the towers of Mars.

As for The Armada, I have preferred it to The Battle of Naschy, first, because it is neither vicious nor ugly, and the other is both; and, second, because it is so brilliant an outcome of that capacity for dealing with proper names which Macaulay, whether poet or not, possesses in common with none but certain among the greater poets. For The Last Buccaneer (a curious anticipation of some effects of Mr. Rudyard Kipling), and that noble thing, the Jacobite's Epitaph, they are dated 1839 and 1845 respectively.

LXXXVIII

The Poetical Works of Robert Stephen Hawker (Kegan Paul, 1879). By permission of Mrs. R. S. Hawker. 'With the exception

of the choral lines

and which have been, ever since the imprisonment by James II. of the Seven Bishops-one of them Sir Jonathan Trelawney-a popular proverb throughout Cornwall, the whole of this song was composed by me in the year 1825. I wrote it under a stag-horned oak in Sir Beville's Walk in Stowe Wood. It was sent by me anonymously to a Plymouth paper, and there it attracted the notice of Mr. Davies Gilbert, who reprinted it at his private press at Eastbourne under the avowed impression that it was the original ballad. It had the good fortune to win the eulogy of Sir Walter Scott, who also deemed it to be the ancient song. It was praised under the same persuasion by Lord Macaulay and Mr. Dickens.'-Author's Note.

LXXXIX-XCII

From The Sea Side and the Fire Side, 1851; Birds of Passage, Flight the First, and Flight the Second; and Flower de Luce, 1866. Of these four examples of the picturesque and taking art of Longfellow, I need say no more than that all are printed in their integrity, with the exception of the first. This I leave the lighter by a moral and an application, both of which, superfluous or not, are remote from the general purpose of this book: a confession in which I may include the following number, Mr. Whittier's Barbara Frietchie (In War-Time, 1863).

XCIV

Nineteenth Century, March 1878; Ballads and other Poems, 1880. By permission of Messrs. Macmillan, to whom I am indebted for some of my choicest numbers. For the story of Sir Richard Grenville's heroic death, 'in the last of August,' 1591-after the Revenge had endured the onset of 'fifteen several armadas,' and received some 'eight hundred shot of great artillerie,'-see Hakluyt (15981600), ii. 169-176, where you will find it told with singular animation and directness by Sir Walter Raleigh, who held a brief against the Spaniards in Sir Richard's case as always. To Sir Richard's proposal to blow up the ship the master gunner 'readily condescended,' as did divers others'; but the captain was of another opinion,' and in the end Sir Richard was taken aboard the ship of the Spanish admiral, Don Alfonso de Bazan, who used him well and honourably until he died: leaving to his friends the 'comfort that being dead he hath not outlived his own honour,' and that he had nobly

shown how false and vain, and therefore how contrary to God's will, the 'ambitious and bloudie practices of the Spaniards' were.

XCV

Tiresias and Other Poems, 1885. By permission of Messrs. Macmillan. Included at Lord Tennyson's own suggestion. For the noble feat of arms (25th October 1854) thus nobly commemorated, see Kinglake (v. i. 102-66). The three hundred

of the Heavy Brigade who made this famous charge were the Scots Greys and the second squadron of Enniskillings, the remainder of the 'Heavy Brigade" subsequently dashing up to their support. The "three were Scarlett's aide-de-camp, Elliot, and the trumpeter, and Shegog the orderly, who had been close behind him.'-Author's Note.

XCVI, XCVII

The Return of the Guards, and other Poems, 1866. By permission of Messrs. Macmillan. As to the first, which deals with an incident of the war with China, and is presumably referred to in 1860, 'Some Seiks and a private of the Buffs (or East Kent Regiment) having remained behind with the grog-carts, fell into the hands of the Chinese. On the next morning they were brought before the authorities and commanded to perform the Ko tou. The Seiks obeyed; but Moyse, the English soldier, declaring that he would not prostrate himself before any Chinaman alive, was immediately knocked upon the head and his body thrown upon a dunghill.'— Quoted by the author from The Times. The Elgin of line 6 is Henry Bruce, eighth Lord Elgin (1811-1863), then Ambassador to China, and afterwards Governor-General of India. Compare Theology in Extremis (post, p. 309). Of the second, which Mr. Saintsbury describes as one of the most lofty, insolent, and passionate things concerning this matter that our time has produced,' Sir Francis notes that the incident-no doubt a part of the conquest of Sindh-was told him by Sir Charles Napier, and that 'Truckee (line 12)= 'a stronghold in the Desert, supposed to be unassailable and impregnable.'

XCVIII, XCIX

By permission of Messrs. Smith, Elder, and Co. Dramatic Lyrics, 1845; Cornhill Magazine, June 1871, and Pacchiarotto, 1876, Works, iv. and xiv. I can find nothing about Hervé Riel.

C-CIII

The two first are from the 'Song of Myself,' Leaves of Grass (1855); the others from Drum Taps (1865). See Leaves of Grass (Philadelphia, 1884), pp. 60, 62–63, 222, and 246.