[399] {341} [The story is told in Plutarch's _Life of Nicias_, cap. xxix. (_Plut. Vit_., Lipsiæ, 1813, v. 154). "The dramas of Euripides were so popular throughout all Sicily, that those Athenian prisoners who knew ... portions of them, won the affections of their masters.... I cannot refrain from mentioning this story, though I fear its trustworthiness ... is much inferior to its pathos and interest."--Grote's _History of Greece_, 1869, vii. 186.] [lr] _And won her hopeless children from afar_.--[MS. M., D. erased.] [ls] _And sends him ransomeless to bless his poet's strains_.--[MS. M.] or, _And sends him home to bless the poet for his strains_.-- [MS. D. erased.] [lt] {342} _Thy love of Tassa's verse should cut the knot_.--[MS. M.] [400] [By the Treaty of Paris, May 3, 1814, Lombardy and Venice, which since the battle of Austerlitz had formed part of the French kingdom of Naples, were once more handed over to Austria. Great Britain was represented by "a bungler even in its disgusting trade" (_Don Juan_, Dedication, stanza xiv.), Lord Castlereagh.] [lu] ----_for come it will and shall_.--[MS. M., D. erased.] [lv] _And Otway's--Radcliffe's--Schiller's--Shakspeare's art_.--[MS. M., D.] [401] Venice Preserved; Mysteries of Udolpho; The Ghost-Seer, or Armenian; The Merchant of Venice; Othello. [For _Venice Preserved, vide ante_, stanza iv. line 7, note. To the _Mysteries of Udolpho_ Byron was indebted for more than one suggestion, _vide ante_, stanza i. line 4, note, and _Mysteries, etc._, London, 1794, 2. 39: "The air bore no sounds, but those of sweetness echoing along each margin of the canal and from gondolas on its surface, while groups of masks were seen dancing on the moonlit terraces, and seemed almost to realize the romance of fairy-land." The scene of Schiller's _Der Geisterseher_ (_Werke_, 1819, x. 97, _sq._) is laid at Venice. "This [the Doge's palace] was the thing that most struck my imagination in Venice--more than the Rialto, which I visited for the sake of Shylock; and more, too, than Schiller's _Armenian_, a novel which took a great hold of me when a boy. It is also called the _Ghost Seer_, and I never walked down St. Mark's by moonlight without thinking of it, and 'at nine o'clock he died!' [For allusion to the same incident, see Rogers's _Italy_ (_Poems_, 1852, ii. 73).] But I hate things _all fiction_; and therefore the _Merchant_ and _Othello_ have no great associations for me: but _Pierre_ has."--Letter to Murray, Venice, April 2, 1817. (For an earlier reference to the _Ghost-seer_, see _Oscar of Alva: Poetical Works_, 1898, i. 131, note.)] [lw] {344} _Though I have found her thus we will not part_.--[MS. M.] [402] [Shelley, in his _Lines written among the Euganean Hills_, allows to Venice one lingering glory "one remembrance more sublime"--