[386] [In another mood he wrote to Murray (June 7, 1819), "I trust they won't think of 'pickling, and bringing me home to Clod or Blunderbuss Hall' [see _The Rivals_, act v. sc. 3]. I am sure my bones would not rest in an English grave, or my clay mix with the earth of that country." In this half-humorous outburst he deprecates, or pretends to deprecate, the fate which actually awaited his remains--burial in the family vault at Hucknall Torkard. There is, of course, no reference to a public funeral and a grave in Westminster Abbey. In the next stanza (x. line 1) he assumes the possibility of his being excluded from the Temple of Fame; but there is, perhaps, a tacit reference to burial in the Abbey. If the thought, as is probable, occurred to him, he veils it in a metaphor.] [387] {335} The answer of the mother of Brasidas, the Lacedæmonian general, to the strangers who praised the memory of her son. [Βρασίδας γὰρ ἦν μὲν ἀνὴρ ἀγαθὸς [Brasi/das ga\r ê~)n me\n a)nê\r a)gatho\s], ῇῃπολλοὶ δ' ἐκείνου κρείσσονες ἐν τῇ Σπάρτῃ [polloi\ d' e)kei/nou krei/ssones e)n tê~| Spa/rtê|]. Plutarchi _Moralia, Apophthegmata Laconica_ (Tauchnitz, 1820), ii. 127.] [lm] _The widowed Adriatic mourns her Doge_.--[MS. M erased.] [388] [The Bucentaur, "the state barge in which, on Ascension Day, the Doge of Venice used to wed the Adriatic by dropping a ring into it," was broken up and rifled by the French in 1797 (note, by Rev. E. C. Owen, _Childe Harold_, 1897, p. 197). Compare Goethe's "Letters from Italy," October 5, 1786: "To give a notion of the Bucentaur in one word, I should say that it is a state-galley. The older one, of which we still have drawings, justified this appellation still more than the present one, which, by its splendour, makes us forget the original.... "The vessel is all ornament; we ought to say, it is overladen with ornament; it is altogether one piece of gilt carving, for no other use.... This state-galley is a good index to show what the Venetians were, and what they considered themselves."--_Travels in Italy_, 1883, p. 68. Compare, too, Wordsworth's sonnet "On the Extinction of the Venetian Republic"-- "She was a maiden City, bright and free; No guile seduced, no force could violate; And when she took unto herself a Mate, She must espouse the everlasting Sea." _Works_, 1888, p. 180.]