[242] ["I send you ... an additional motto from Gibbon, which you will find _singularly appropriate_."--Letter to Murray, April 12, 1814, _ibid._, p. 68.] [243] {305} ["I don't know--but I think _I_, even _I_ (an insect compared with this creature), have set my life on casts not a millionth part of this man's. But, after all, a crown may not be worth dying for. Yet, to outlive _Lodi_ for this!!! Oh that Juvenal or Johnson could rise from the dead! 'Expende--quot libras in duce summo invenies?' I knew they were light in the balance of mortality; but I thought their living dust weighed more _carats_. Alas! this imperial diamond hath a flaw in it, and is now hardly fit to stick in a glazier's pencil;--the pen of the historian won't rate it worth a ducat. Psha! 'something too much of this.' But I won't give him up even now; though all his admirers have, 'like the thanes, fallen from him.'"--_Journal_, April 9, 1814, _Letters_, 1898, ii. 409.] [244] [Compare "How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!"--_Isaiah_ xiv. 12.] [245] {306} [Stanzas ii. and iii. were added in Proof iv.] [246] [A "spell" may be broken, but it is difficult to understand how, like the two halves of a seal or amulet, a broken spell can "unite again."] [247] "Certaminis _gaudia_"--the expression of Attila in his harangue to his army, previous to the battle of Chalons, given in Cassiodorus. ["Nisi ad certaminis hujus gaudia præparasset."--_Attilæ Oratio ad Hunnos_, caput xxxix., _Appendix ad Opera Cassiodori_, Migne, lxix. 1279.] [248] {307} [Added in Proof v.] [249] [The first four lines of stanza v. were quoted by "Mr. Miller in the House of Representatives of the United States," in a debate on the Militia Draft Bill (_Weekly Messenger_, Boston, February 10, 1815). "Take warning," he went on to say, "by this example. Bonaparte split on this rock of conscription," etc. This would have pleased Byron, who confided to his _Journal_, December 3, 1813 (_Letters_, 1898, ii. 360), that the statement that "my rhymes are very popular in the United States," was "the first tidings that have ever sounded like _Fame_ to my ears."] [250] ["Like Milo, he would rend the oak; but it closed again, wedged his hands, and now the beasts--lion, bear, down to the dirtiest jackal--may all tear him."--_Journal_, April 8, 1814, _Letters_, 1898, ii. 408. For the story of Milo and the Oak, see Valerius Maximus, _Factorum, Dictorumque Memorabilium_, lib. ix. cap. xii. Part II. example 9.]