["Scarcely a soul of them can read. Pacchierotti was one of the best informed of the _castrati_ ... Marchesi is so grossly ignorant that he wrote the word opera, _opperra_, but Nature has been so bountiful to the animal, that his ignorance and insolence were forgotten the moment he sang."--_Venice, etc._, by a Lady of Rank, 1824, ii. 86.] {208}[255] [The N. Engl. Dict. cites Bunyan, Walpole, Fielding, Miss Austen, and Dickens as authorities for the plural "was." See art. "be." Here, as elsewhere, Byron wrote as he spoke.] [eg] _He never shows his feelings, but his teeth_.--[MS. Alternative reading.] [256] ["Our firman arrived from Constantinople on the 30th of April (1810)."--Travels in Albania, 1858, ii. 186.] {209}[eh] _That each pulled, different ways--and waxing rough_, _Had cuffed each other, only for the cuff_.--[MS.] {210}[257] ["O, who can hold a fire in his hand, By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?" _Richard II.,_ act i. sc. 3, lines 294, 295.] [ei] _Having had some experience in my youth_.--[MS. erased.] [258] ["_Don Juan_ will be known, _by and by_, for what it is intended--a Satire on abuses in the present states of society, and not an eulogy of vice. It may be now and then voluptuous:--I can't help that. Ariosto is worse. Smollett (see Lord Strutwell in vol. 2^nd^ of _R_[_oderick_] _R_[_andom_][1793, pp. 119-127]) ten times worse; and Fielding no better."--Letter to Murray, December 25, 1822, _Letters_, 1901, vi. 155, 156.] {211}[259] [_Vide ante_, p. 204, note 1. "It seems hardly to admit of doubt, that the plain of Anatolia, watered by the Mender, and backed by a mountainous ridge, of which Kazdaghy is the summit, offers the precise territory alluded to by Homer. The long controversy, excited by Mr. Bryant's publication, and since so vehemently agitated, would probably never have existed, had it not been for the erroneous maps of the country which, even to this hour, disgrace our geographical knowledge of that part of Asia."--_Travels, etc._, by E.D. Clarke, 1812, Part II. sect, i. p. 78.] {212}[260] The pillar which records the battle of Ravenna is about two miles from the city, on the opposite side of the river to the road towards Forli. Gaston de Foix [(1489-1512) Duc de Nemours, nephew of Louis XII.], who gained the battle, was killed in it: there fell on both sides twenty thousand men. The present state of the pillar and its site is described in the text. [Beyond the Porta Sisi, about two miles from Ravenna, on the banks of the Ronco, is a square pillar (_La Colonna de Francesi_), erected in 1557 by Pietro Cesi, president of Romagna, as a memorial of the battle gained by the combined army of Louis XII. and the Duke of Ferrara over the troops of Julius II. and the King of Spain, April 11 1512.--_Handbook of Northern Italy_, p. 548.]