Notes

18] "dainty Ariel": see The Tempest, V, i, 95.

55] Shooter's Hill: on the Dover road, eight miles south of London, commanding a fine view of the city.

109] the moon's late minion: see Falstaff on thieves in I Henry IV, I, ii, 23-28.

123] max: gin (an example of the current underworld slang known as "flash").

133] kiddy ... real swell ... flash: more thieves' slang. A kiddy was a petty thief who showed off his success by a flashy ostentation of clothes and language.

139] "Crowner's 'quest": coroner's inquest. See the first gravedigger in Hamlet, V, i, 21.

145] With the help of a Regency slang dictionary the "flash" of this stanza has been translated as follows:
ken: a house that harbours thieves;
spellken: the playhouse;
queer a flat: confound a gull;
high toby-spice: robbery on horseback;
flash the muzzle: swagger openly;
blowing: pickpocket's trull;
nutty: pleased with the opposite sex.

162] lucus from no light: in Latin "lucus" can mean both a thick wood (or grove) and light, i.e., both darkness and light.

171] "purl": "a medicated malt liquor" (Moore).

198] Mansion House: official residence of the Lord Mayor.

207] new-found lantern. During the French Revolution the lantern or street lamp was used as an improvised gallows.

232] "Hells": gaming-houses.

236] Paphians: attendants of Venus (Paphos in Cyprus was the site of an ancient temple to Aphrodite).

239] Useful, like Malthus, in promoting marriage. The Essay on the Principle of Population (1798) of Thomas Robert Malthus was one of the most controversial works of the age. He saw war and famine as nature's means of preventing population from outrunning the supply of goods, but also advocated continence and fewer marriages as a means of birth control among the poor. Hence he was about as useful a supporter of marriage as a "Paphian" whore.

276] govern in the mood potential: i.e., govern as placemen or office-holders, not as Parliamentary members of the government ("mood potential" being a grammatical pun).

303] the good example of "Green Erin." George IV visited Ireland in 1820 and was given an extravagant welcome.

337] rather Attic: having the purity of classical Greek.

385] "drapery Misses." "It means a pretty, a highborn, a fashionable young female, well instructed by her friends, and furnished by her milliner with a wardrobe upon credit, to be repaid, when married, by the husband" (Byron's note).

402] Drawcansir: the name of a braggart in Villiers' The Rehearsal (1671).

407] Hippocrene: see note on I, ccv.

414] "Hercules Furens": a play by the Roman dramatist, Seneca.

427] Banquo's glass: see Macbeth, IV, i, 112-24.

441] Faliero. Byron's play Marino Faliero was not intended for the stage and failed when it was performed against his wish at Drury Lane in April and May, 1821.

442] Cain. Byron's Cain (1821), which he called a "mystery" play, was much criticized for its "blasphemies."
Leipsic ... Mont Saint Jean ... La Belle Alliance. Leipsig and Waterloo (a farmhouse called Mont St. Jean was on the battlefield) were two of Napoleon's most crucial defeats. "La Belle Alliance was the farmhouse in which Blücher and Wellington met and saluted each other as victors after the tide of battle had turned at Waterloo" (W. W. Pratt's note).

448] turncoat Southey: see note on Dedication, i.
turnkey Lowe. "Sir Hudson Lowe was governor of St. Helena during Napoleon's exile" (W. W. Pratt's note).

454] the very Reverend Rowley Powley: the Rev. George Croly (1780-1860), a minor but prolific poet, fond of imitating Byron's work and known as "Cambyses" Croly for his bombastic manner.

456] "by the hilts": see I Henry IV, iv, 233.

457] The victim of this attack is Henry Hart Milman (1791-1868), author of The Fall of Jerusalem (hence "the howling Hebrews") and a Quarterly reviewer disliked by Byron. Some of Byron's allusions are obscure, but for Sporus see Pope's Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, 305-33 and note, and for "Cambyses' roaring Romans" see note on stanza lvii above (Coly wrote a play called Catiline). The Asiatic and Athenian goddess "Cybele's priests" were eunuchs.

465] my gentle Euphues: Bryan Waller Procter, "Barry Comwall" (1787-1874), author of Diego de Montilla, a poem which Francis Jeffrey in the Edinburgh Review thought to resemble Don Juan, but with "no profligacy" and "no mocking of virtue and honour." Euphues is the hero of an Elizabethan prose romance by John Lyly and gave his name to the "Euphuistic" style. But Byron seems to be confusung his terms and thinking of Procter's poem as a sort of "euphemistic" Don Juan.

471] Boeotian. The Athenians thought the people of Boeotia boorish and dull.

473] Keats may have been deeply affected by the slashing review of Endymion in the Quarterly Review of April 1818, but that it was instrumental in his death is an exploded legend. Byron seems to have acquired the notion from Shelley, who used it in the Preface to Adonais as well as in the poem itself.

487-88] the thirty mock tyrants: the thirty pretenders to the throne in the reign of Gallienus in the third century.

490] praetorian bands: the Roman emperor's guard, whose political power in the days of the empire's decline gave them control over the succession to the throne, which might even be offered to the highest bidder.

495] Janizaries: the Turkish standing army and sultan's guard.

516] Centaur-Nessus garb. The blood-poisoned garment of Nessus the Centaur was sent to Hercules by his wife for its supposed power of winning back his love. Instead the agony of wearing it led to Hercules' death on a pyre.

533] Chalk mimics painting. Chalk drawings on the floor were characteristic of Regency ballrooms on special occasions.

536] "Or Molu": gilded bronze.

590] "rack and manger." The modern equivalent is "rack and ruin."

601] "Where is the World," cries Young, "at eighty?" Edward Young (1683-1765), author of the once famous Night Thoughts, wrote this phrase at eighty in a poem called Resignation.

611] Grattan, Curran, Sheridan. Henry Grattan, John Philpot Curran, and Richard Brinsley Sheridan (the dramatist) were Whig M.P.'s and Irishmen, who died in 1820, 1817, and 1816.

613-14] The unhappy Queen ... the Daughter. Queen Caroline, tried for unfidelity in 1820, died in 1821; her daughter, Princess Charlotte, had died in childbirth in 1817.

617] Brummell ... Long Pole Wellesley: George "Beau" Brummell, bankrupt Regency fashion-plate, now in exile from his creditors, and William Pole Tylney Long Wellesley (Wellington's nephew), fashionable wastrel on the verge of bankruptcy.

618] Whitbread? Romilly? Samuel Whitbread, Whig M.P., committed suicide in 1815 and Sir Samuel Romilly, who had earned Byron's enmity by being his wife's legal adviser, in 1818.

619] Where is his will? George III's unsigned will was the cause of much dispute.

620] "Fum" the Fourth, our "royal bird." George IV's popular nickname was "Hum," an apartment of the Brighton Pavilion contained an ornament called "Fum, the Chinese Bird of Royalty," and Moore had written a satire called "Fum and Hum, the Two Birds of Royalty."

621] to Scotland. George IV visited Scotland in 1822.

623] Caw: claw or scratch.

631] Where are the Grenvilles? Turned as usual. Byron saw William Wyndham, Baron Grenville (1759-1834) as an apostate from his early liberalism. Since Grenville's father had first supported and then broken with the elder Pitt, such changes seemed to run in the family.

633] Lady Carolines and Franceses. Lady Caroline Lamb and Lady Frances Webster, now estranged from their husbands, were two of the women in Byron's life between 1812 and 1814.

658] Duke: presumably the Duke of Wellington.

661] "blue Peter": the naval flag which signalizes immediate sailing.

666] Joanna Southcote: the ignorant founder of a fanatical sect, who (suffering from dropsy) announced that she was about to give birth to a second Shiloh (see Genesis 40:10).

668] sad affair of the late Queen: see note on stanza lxxvi above.

670] Congress doing all that's mean. The allied sovereigns, disturbed by the popular uprising in Spain, met in Verona in 1822.

675] the funds at war: the National Debt and the Sinking Fund which unsuccessfully attempted to reduce it.

677] I have seen the people ridden o'er. Byron apparently refers to the dispersal of a Reform gathering in St. Peter's Fields outside Manchester by troops on horseback on August 16, 1819 (the so-called Peterloo Massacre).

679] "thin potations": a means by which brewers might escape the malt tax; see II Henry IV, IV, iii, 133-36.

681] carpe diem: enjoy the present day (see Horace, Odes, I, xi, 8).

684] "Life's a poor player"--then "play out the play": see Macbeth, V, v, 24, and I Henry IV, II, iv, 539.

693] Atalantis: see Pope's Rape of the Lock, III, 165 and note.

Other poems by George Gordon Lord Byron