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528. 312. Villatic. Of the village; the quotation is from Samson Agonistes.

378. Intenerating and dulcifying. Making tender and sweet. The use of such long, highsounding words of Latin derivation, with reference to a subject so commonplace, has much to do with the flavor of the essay.

387. St. Omer's. A French Jesuit college, where, of course, Lamb never attended school.

529. 404. Shalot. A kind of onion.

THE SUPERANNUATED MAN

One of the most autobiographically exact of Lamb's essays. Lamb was a clerk in the service of the East India Company for thirty-three years, resigning his post in March, 1825, on a pension of twothirds his regular salary.

Sera tamen, etc. Quoted from Virgil's first eclogue: Liberty, though late, yet looked upon, or visited, me. Fictitious

530. 162. Boldero... Lacy.

names under which Lamb conceals the directors of the East India Company. 164. Esto perpetua. Be thou eternal. 531. 241. A Tragedy by Sir Robert Howard.

The Vestal Virgin, or the Roman Ladies; Howard was brother-in-law of Dryden, and did some dramatic work in collaboration with him.

286. Gresham. Sir Thomas Gresham (d. 1579), a wealthy London merchant who founded the Royal Exchange and became Lord Mayor. Whittington. Sir Richard, better known as Dick, Whittington, whose rise from poverty to the Lord Mayorship is familiar from nursery rhymes.

298. Aquinas. St. Thomas Aquinas, Italian philosopher of the thirteenth century; his writings filled seventeen volumes.

532. 310. Carthusian. The Carthusian order

of monks was founded by St. Bruno
c. 1084, at La Grande Chartreuse (Latin
Carthusia); the Carthusian rule was strict.
333. Elgin marbles. Parts of the pedi-
ments and frieze of the Parthenon,
brought to England by Lord Elgin and
placed in the British Museum.
361. Cantle. Slice.

392. Cum dignitate. From Cicero's
phrase, otium cum dignitate-ease with
dignity.

397. Opus operatum est. The work has been done.

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my condition overwhelmed me. It was like passing from life into eternity. Every year to be as long as three, i. e., to have three times as much real time-time that is my own, in it! I wandered about thinking I was happy, but feeling I was not. But that tumultuousness is passing off, and I begin to understand the nature of the gift. Holidays, even the annual month, were always uneasy joys; their conscious fugitiveness; the craving after making the most of them. Now, when all is holiday, there are no holidays. I can sit at home, in rain or shine, without a restless impulse for walkings. I am daily steadying, and shall soon find it as natural to me to be my own master, as it has been irksome to have had a master.

"I eat, drink, and sleep sound as ever. I lay no anxious schemes for going hither and thither, but take things as they occur. Yesterday I excursioned twenty miles; to-day I write a few letters. Pleasuring was for fugitive playdays; mine are fugitive only in the sense that life is fugitive. Freedom and life coexistent!"

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411. Oaken towel. Staff or club. 415. A firebrand like Bardolph's. Bardolph is one of the characters in Henry IV whom Falstaff is forever twitting about his red nose; e. g.: "O thou art a perpetual triumph, an everlasting bonfirelight. Thou hast saved me a thousand marks in links and torches, walking in the night betwixt tavern and tavern." (III. iii.)

537. 437. Hogarth. See note on The Praise of Chimney Sweepers, p. 523, l. 181. 443. Cobbett. William Cobbett (17661835), an English radical journalist, editor of Cobbett's Weekly Political Register, whose attacks on the government resulted from time to time in his being imprisoned and fined.

520. Alas! the Bristol man, etc. See Cowper's The Task, II. 322:

"Alas, Leviathan is not so tamed." 538. 551. The Game Chicken. The nom de guerre of Henry Pearce, a well-known English pugilist.

585. Stone. An English weight, legally fourteen pounds.

540. 826. Sir Fopling Flutter.

A fashionable

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176. Here be woods as green, etc.
Fletcher's Faithful Shepherdess, I. iii.
238. Sancho. Sancho Panza, Don
Quixote's esquire and servant in Cer-
vantes' burlesque romance Don Quixote.
244. Procul este profani. See The Fight,
note on 1. 889.

545. 312. Gribelin's engravings. Simon Gri

belin (1661-1733), an engraver of some
ability, published in 1707 seven plates
of the cartoons of Raphael.
325. Paul and Virginia,

Camilla.

The former a pastoral novel by Bernadin de St. Pierre, published 1788; the latter, a novel by Madame D'Arblay (Fanny Burney), published 1796, much inferior to her masterpiece Evelina.

331. New Eloise. See The Fight, note on 1. 906.

546. 381. Where is he now? In 1822, when this essay was first published, Coleridge's creative power was in eclipse, and his whole constitution broken by ill health and the use of laudanum.

547. 472. Stonehenge. A prehistoric monument in the shape of a roughly circular group of huge monoliths, on Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire.

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ON FAMILIAR STYLE

549. 112. Cum grano salis.
salt.

176. Mr. Cobbett.
Fight, 1. 443.

With a grain of See note on The

550. 247. A well of native English undefiled. Adapted from Spenser's "Dan Chaucer, well of English undefyled," Faerie Queene, IV. ii. 32.

251. Erasmus's Colloquies. The Colloquia of Erasmus (1466-1536), appeared in 1519.

261. What do you read? etc. See Hamlet, II. ii.

272. Florilegium. Anthology; here rather a collection of big words. Tulippomania. Craze for tulips.

289. Sermo humi obrepens. Talk that creeps on the ground.

551. 314. Fantoccini beings. Puppets. 315. That strut and fret, etc.

V. v.

Macbeth,

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554. 293. Lustrum. Period of five years. 315. νυχθήμερον. A day of twentyfour hours.

320. That moveth altogether, etc. From Wordsworth's Resolution and Independ ence, 1. 77.

555. 414. Anastasius.

A novel, published 1819, the hero of which was an opiumeating Greek.

416. Mithridates. The title of a dictionary of all languages, published by Johann Christoph Adelung in 1806. Mithridates was renowned as a linguist; hence the title.

557. 582. The Scriptures speak of. Revelation, xx: 12.

558. 646. A certain day in August. The Civil War may be said to have begun when Charles I raised the royal standard at Nottingham, August 22, 1642.

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she became priestess. Compare with Landor's treatment, stanzas 26-29 of Tennyson's Dream of Fair Women.

TENNYSON

CENONE

570. Enone was a nymph of Mt. Ida near Troy, beloved by Paris, but deserted by him after Venus, as a reward for his decision that she was most beautiful of the goddesses, had promised him the fairest woman in the world, Helen, for his wife. 571. 39, 40. As yonder walls, etc. According to one form of the story Apollo raised the walls of Troy by playing on his lyre. 79. Peleus. It was at the marriage feast of Peleus and Thetis that the golden apple was thrown which caused the strife among the goddesses.

81. Iris. Messenger of the gods. 572. 102. Peacock. Juno's bird.

170, 171. Idalian, Paphian.

At Idalia

and Paphos, in Crete, were special shrines to Venus.

573. 220. The Abominable. Eris, goddess of strife.

574. 257. The Greek woman. Helen.

259. Cassandra. Daughter of Priam, gifted with a power of prophecy, but doomed never to be believed. She foretold the fall of Troy.

THE LOTOS-EATERS

Based on Homer's account of how Ulysses and his mariners touched at the land of the lotos, the eating of whose flower produced forgetfulness of home.

A DREAM OF FAIR WOMEN

575. 5. Dan. Don, Master, from Latin dominus.

27. Tortoise. Latin testudo; the name applied to the mode of defence used by the Roman legionaries in attacking a walled city, the holding and interlocking of their shields over their heads to form a solid protection against missiles hurled from the walls.

576. 85. A lady. Helen of Troy.

100. One that stood beside. Iphigeneia,
daughter of Agamemnon, sacrificed to
Artemis before the Greek fleet sailed for
Troy. Cf. Landor's poem, p. 567.
127. A queen. Cleopatra.

577. 146. Canopus. One of the brightest stars of the southern sky.

155. The other. Octavius Cæsar.

578. 195. Her that died. Jephtha's daughter; cf. Judges, xi.

251. Rosamond.

Rosamond Clifford, called Fair Rosamond, paramour of Henry II.

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255. Eleanor. Wife of Henry II. 579. 259. To Fulvia's waist. Cleopatra puts the name of the wife of her paramour

Antony for that of Eleanor, wife of Rosamond's paramour." (Rolfe.) 579. 263. Captain of my dreams. Venus, the morning star.

266. Her who clasped. Margaret Roper, daughter of Sir Thomas More; after he was beheaded she took his head down from London Bridge where it was exposed, and when she died had it buried in her arms. 269. Her who knew. Eleanor, wife of Edward I, who accompanied her husband on the First Crusade, and when he was stabbed with a poisoned dagger, sucked out the poison with her lips.

MORTE D'ARTHUR

Written in 1835, first published in 1842;
afterwards incorporated, with additions,
in The Passing of Arthur in Idylls of the
King. Cf. Malory's account, pp. 47 ƒƒ.
4. Lyonnesse. A legendary country, in-
cluding part of Cornwall, now supposed
to be submerged beneath the sea.

580. 21. Camelot. Arthur's capital.

23. Merlin. Arthur's magician and chief adviser.

31. Samite. A heavy silk, sometimes interwoven with gold thread.

581. 139. Northern morn.

Aurora Borealis. 140. Moving isles. Icebergs.

147. Cf. the metrical effect of this line with that of 1. 65 and l. 112.

582. 186-192. The contrast between the first five lines of this passage and the last two is one of the best examples in English verse of the fitting of sound to sense; for a similar effect cf. ll. 49-51.

583. 242. One good custom should corrupt the world. "E. g., chivalry, by formation of habit or by any other means." (Tennyson's note.)

259. Avilion. See Malory, p. 48.

ULYSSES

"The poem was written soon after Arthur Hallam's death, and it gives the feeling about the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life perhaps more simply than anything in In Memoriam." (Tennyson's note.)

10. Rainy Hyades. The constellation Hyades was associated by the ancients with stormy weather.

584. 26. Every hour is saved. Every hour that is saved is something more.

IN MEMORIAM

590. Composed in memory of Arthur Henry Hallam, whose acquaintance Tennyson made at Cambridge, and who was later engaged to Tennyson's sister. He died at Vienna in 1833, and the lyrics composing the poem were written at various times between then and 1850, the date of their final arrangement and publication. 5. Orbs of light and shade. Sun and

moon, not eyes, as has sometimes been suggested.

591. 1. Wild bird. The nightingale, whose song has always been celebrated for passionate mingling of joy and pain.

2. Quicks. Quickset; slips, especially of hawthorn, set to form a hedge.

THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE 594. Written to commemorate a fatal charge at Balaclava in the Crimean War, 1854; the poem was based on a phrase in the London Times's account of the battle: "Some one had blundered."

NORTHERN FARMER

Written in the Lincolnshire dialect. "It is a vivid piece out of the great comedy of man, not of its mere mirth, but of that elemental humorousness of things which belongs to the lives of the brutes as well as to ourselves, that steady quaintness of the ancient earth and all who are born of her... continually met in the peasant and farmer class." (Stopford Brooke: Tennyson, His Art and Relation to Modern Life).

THE REVENGE

597. Tennyson found the story in Raleigh's spirited account; see p. 103.

RIZPAH

599. Based on an incident read by Tennyson in a magazine. For significance of title see 2 Samuel, xxi.

600. 73. Election and Reprobation. Calvinistic doctrines; all men were supposed to be damned for original sin, except a chosen few whom God elected for salvation.

MERLIN AND THE GLEAM

601. An allegory of Tennyson's literary life. For commentary see the preface to the present Lord Tennyson's Memoir of his father.

CROSSING THE BAR

603. Tennyson directed that this poem should be placed at the end of all collected editions of his works.

BROWNING

CAVALIER TUNES

In these three dashing lyrics Browning reflects the spirit of reckless loyalty to the King, and contempt for the Puritans, which animated the supporters of Charles I.

MARCHING ALONG

2. Crop-headed. The Puritans wore their hair cut short in contrast with the

Cavaliers, whose long curls fell upon their shoulders. "Roundheads," the name frequently applied to the Puritans, has the same implication. Parliament. The Long Parliament, controlled by the Puritan party.

603. 7. Pym. One of the Puritan leaders in the Long Parliament, as were Hampden, Hazelrig, Fiennes, and Sir Henry Vane the Younger (ll. 13-14).

15. Rupert. Prince Rupert, nephew of Charles I, and leader of the Royalist cavalry.

22. Nottingham. Where Charles raised his standard at the opening of the Civil War in 1642.

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MEMORABILIA

615. The speaker, in contrast with the person he addresses, is so intense an admirer of Shelley that it seems to him that if he could once have seen and spoken with the poet the meeting would have dwarfed in importance all the other events of his life. Browning in his youth admired Shelley greatly.

MY LAST DUCHESS

The dramatic monologue, Browning's favorite poetic form, and one which he uses with the utmost skill, presents some difficulty to the reader on account of its directness and compression. It differs from the soliloquy, e. g., of Shakespeare, in that the presence of a second person, a listener, is to be inferred; oftentimes the speaker responds to a question or gesture, implied only in the answer, on the part of this silent listener. Cf. My Last Duchess, 11. 53-54. It is a good plan for the student to read the poem through once or twice in an effort to get the situation and some conception of the speaker's character before trying to discover the meaning of each line. The poem may then be studied in detail; it should be noted that no break in the thought, no interjection, is without its significance.

The speaker is Duke of Ferrara, one of the oldest and proudest of the Italian communes. There could be no greater contrast in character than that between the Duke of impeccable manners and exquisite artistic taste, but selfish to the core and absolutely heartless-and the young Duchess-naïve, filled with the joy of life, whose graciousness springs from a heart pure and generous.

3. Frà. Brother. Pandolf, an imaginary character, is a monk, like so many of the painters of the Italian Renaissance. 616. 9. Since none puts by, etc. The parenthesis gives a hint of the Duke's esteem for the picture: he values it not at all as a reminder of his Duchess, but simply as a work of art, and as such, is careful to protect it from possible harm.

45, 6. I gave commands; Then all smiles stopped together. Generally interpreted to mean that the Duke gave orders for the lady's death. In reply to a question by Corson, Browning himself said, “ Yes, I meant that the commands were that she be put to death," adding after a pause, "Or he might have had her shut up in a convent."

53, 4. Nay, we'll go Together down, sir. The envoy, in deference to the Duke's birth, has dropped back, but the Duke, with perfect condescension, calls him forward to a position of equality.

56. Claus of Innsbruck. Another imaginary artist.

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