{132}[161] [The MS. and the editions of 1819, 1823, 1828, read "woman." The edition of 1833 reads "women." The text follows the MS. and the earlier editions.] [162] [Compare stanza prefixed to Dedication, _vide ante_, p. 2.] [163] [Compare-- "Yes! thy Sherbet to-night will sweetly flow, See how it sparkles in its vase of snow!" _Corsair_, Canto I. lines 427, 428, _Poetical Works_, 1900, iii. 242.] [by] _A pleasure naught but drunkenness can bring:_ _For not the blest sherbet all chilled with snow._ _Nor the full sparkle of the desert-spring,_ _Nor wine in all the purple of its glow_.--[MS.] {134}[bz] _Spread like an Ocean, varied, vast, and bright._--[MS.] [ca] _---- I'm sure they never reckoned;_ _And being joined--like swarming bees they clung,_ _And mixed until the very pleasure stung._ or, _And one was innocent, but both too young,_ _Their hearts the flowers, etc_.--[MS.] {135}[cb] _In all the burning tongues the Passions teach_ _They had no further feeling, hope, nor care_ _Save one, and that was Love_.--[MS. erased.] {136}[cc] _Pillowed upon her beating heart--which panted With the sweet memory of all it granted_.--[MS.] {138}[cd] _Some drown themselves, some in the vices grovel_.--[MS.] [164] [Lady Caroline Lamb's _Glenarvon_ was published in 1816. For Byron's farewell letter of dismissal, which Lady Caroline embodied in her novel (vol. iii. chap. ix.), see _Letters_, 1898, ii. 135, note 1. According to Medwin (_Conversations_, 1824, p. 274), Madame de Staël catechized Byron with regard to the relation of the story to fact.] {139}[ce] _In their sweet feelings holily united,_ _By Solitude (soft parson) they were wed_.--[MS.] [165] [Titus forebore to marry "Incesta" Berenice (see Juv., _Sat_. vi. 158), the daughter of Agrippa I., and wife of Herod, King of Chalcis, out of regard to the national prejudice against intermarriage with an alien.] [166] [Cæsar's third wife, Pompeia, was suspected of infidelity with Clodius (see Langhorne's _Plutarch_, 1838, p. 498); Pompey's third wife, Mucia, intrigued with Cæsar (_vide ibid_., p. 447); Mahomet's favourite wife, Ayesha, on one occasion incurred suspicion; Antonina, the wife of Belisarius, was notoriously profligate (see Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_, 1825, iii. 432, 102).] {140}[167] [Compare _Sardanapalus_, act i. sc. 2, line 252, _Poetical Works_, 1901, v. 23, note 1.] {141}[cf] _--of ticklish dust_.--[MS. Alternative reading.] {142}[168] ["Mr. Hobhouse is at it again about indelicacy. There is _no indelicacy_. If he wants _that_, let him read Swift, his great idol; but his imagination must be a dunghill, with a viper's nest in the middle, to engender such a supposition about this poem."--Letter to Murray, May 15, 1819, _Letters_, 1900, iv. 295.] [cg] _Two hundred stanzas reckoned as before._--[MS.] CANTO THE THIRD.[169] I.