[221] [In his "Essay, Supplementary to the Preface," to his "Poems" of 1815, Wordsworth, commenting on a passage on Night in Dryden's _Indian Emperor_, says, "Dryden's lines are vague, bombastic, and senseless.... The verses of Dryden once celebrated are forgotten." He is not passing any general criticism on "him who drew _Achitophel_." In a letter to Sir Walter Scott (November 7, 1805), then engaged on his great edition of Dryden's _Works_, he admits that Dryden is not "as a poet any great favourite of mine. I admire his talents and genius highly, but he is not a poetical genius. The only qualities I can find in Dryden that are _essentially_ poetical, are a certain ardour and impetuosity of mind, with an excellent ear" (_Life of Wordsworth_, by W. Knight, 1889, ii. 26-29). Scott may have remarked on Wordsworth's estimate of Dryden in conversation with Byron.] {178}[de] _While swung the signal from the sacred tower._--[MS.] {179}[df] _Are not these pretty stanzas?--some folks say--_ _Downright in print_--.--[MS.] [222] [Compare Coleridge's _Lines to Nature_, which were published in the _Morning Herald_, in 1815, but must have been unknown to Byron-- "So will I build my altar in the fields, And the blue sky my fretted dome shall be."] [223] ["As early as the fifth or sixth century of the Christian era, the port of Augustus was converted into pleasant orchards, and a lovely grove of pines covered the ground where the Roman fleet once rode at anchor.... This advantageous situation was fortified by art and _labour_, and in the twentieth year of his age, the Emperor of the West ... retired to ... the walls and morasses of Ravenna."--Gibbon's _Decline and Fall_, 1825, ii. 244, 245.] [224] ["The first time I had a conversation with Lord Byron on the subject of religion was at Ravenna, my native country, in 1820, while we were riding on horseback in an extensive solitary wood of pines. The scene invited to religious meditation. It was a fine day in spring. 'How,' he said, 'raising our eyes to heaven, or directing them to the earth, can we doubt of the existence of God?--or how, turning them to what is within us, can we doubt that there is something more noble and durable than the clay of which we are formed?'"--Count Gamba.] {180}[225] [If the _Pineta_ of Ravenna, _bois funèbre_, invited Byron "to religious meditation," the mental picture of the "spectre huntsman" pursuing his eternal vengeance on "the inexorable dame"--"that fatal she," who had mocked his woes--must have set in motion another train of thought. Such lines as these would "speak comfortably" to him-- "Because she deem'd I well deserved to die, And _made a merit_ of her cruelty, ... Mine is the ungrateful maid by heaven design'd: Mercy she would not give, nor mercy shall she find."