Page:Lyra heroica.djvu/377

 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.

��From Snarleyow, or the Doff 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.

��This magnificent sonnet, On First Reading 1 Chapman's Homer, was printed in 1817. The ' Cortez' of the eleventh verse is a mis- take; the discoverer of the Pacific being Nunez 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. 17887), the gen- eral 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 lac behind, what Romnns were, When all the Tuscans ami their Lars Shouted, and shook the towers of Mars.

As for The slrmada. I have preferred it to The Hallle of Naseby, first, because it is neither vicious nor ugly, and the other is both ; and, second, l>ccause 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 liuccaneer (a curious anticipation of some effects of Mr. Kudyard Kipling), and that noble thing, the Jacobite's Epitaph, they arc dated 1839 and 1845 respectively.

�� �