Butler, Samuel, 1835-1902 -- Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.
I reckon Gadshill and Trapani as perhaps the two most classic grounds
that I frequent familiarly, and at each I have seemed to hear echoes of
the scenes that have made them famous. Not that what I heard at Gadshill
is like any particular passage in Shakespeare.
Waiting to be Hired
At Castelvetrano (about thirty miles from Trapani) I had to start the
next morning at 4 a.m. to see the ruins of Selinunte, and slept lightly
with my window open. About two o’clock I began to hear a buzz of
conversation in the piazza outside and it kept me awake, so I got up to
shut the window and see what it was. I found it came from a long knot of
men standing about, two deep, but not strictly marshalled. When I got up
at half-past three, it was still dark and the men were still there,
though perhaps not so many. I enquired and found they were standing to
be hired for the day, any one wanting labourers would come there, engage
as many as he wanted and go off with them, others would come up, and so
on till about four o’clock, after which no one would hire, the day being
regarded as short in weight after that hour. Being so collected the men
gossip over their own and other people’s affairs—wonder who was that
fine-looking stranger going about yesterday with Nausicaa, and so on.
[_Od. VI_. 273.] This, in fact, is their club and the place where the
public opinion of the district is formed.
Ilium and Padua
The story of the Trojan horse is more nearly within possibility than we
should readily suppose. In 1848, during the rebellion of the North
Italians against the Austrians, eight or nine young men, for whom the
authorities were hunting, hid themselves inside Donatello’s wooden horse
in the Salone at Padua and lay there for five days, being fed through the
trap door on the back of the horse with the connivance of the custode of
the Salone. No doubt they were let out for a time at night. When
pursuit had become less hot, their friends smuggled them away. One of
those who had been shut up was still living in 1898 and, on the occasion
of the jubilee festivities, was carried round the town in triumph.
Eumaeus and Lord Burleigh
The inference which Arthur Platt (_Journal of Philology_, Vol. 24, No.
47) wishes to draw from Eumaeus being told to bring Ulysses’ bow ἀνὰ
δώματα (_Od._ XXI. 234) suggests to met to me the difference which some
people in future ages may wish to draw between the character of Lord
Burleigh’s steps in Tennyson’s poem, according as he was walking up or
pacing down. Wherefrom also the critic will argue that the scene of Lord
Burleigh’s weeping _must_ have been on an inclined plane.
Weeping, weeping late and early,
Walking up and pacing down,
Deeply mourned the Lord of Burleigh,
Burleigh-house by Stamford-town.
My Reviewers’ Sense of Need
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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