place.' Authentic or not, I have preferred the story to Hohenlinden, as less hackneyed, for one thing, and, for another, less pretentious and rhetorical. The second (Gertrude of Wyoming, 1809) is truly one of 'the glories of our birth and state.' The third (idem) I have ventured to shorten by three stanzas: a proceeding which, however culpable it seem, at least gets rid of the chief who gave a country's wounds relief by stopping a battle, eliminates the mermaid and her song (the song that 'condoles'), and ends the lyric on as sonorous and romantic a word as even Shakespeare ever used.
LXVIII
Corn Law Rhymes, 1831.
LXIX
From that famous and successful forgery, Cromek's Remains of Nithsdale and Galloway Song (1810), written when Allan was a working mason in Dumfriesshire. I have omitted a stanza as inferior to the rest.
LXXI
English Songs and other Small Poems, 1834.
LXXII—LXXVIII
The first is from the Hebrew Melodies (1815); the next is selected from The Siege of Corinth (1816), 22-33; Alhama (idem) is a spirited yet faithful rendering of the Romance muy Doloroso del Sitio y Toma de Alhama, which existed both in Spanish and in Arabic, and whose effect was such that 'it was forbidden to be sung by the Moors on the pain of death in Granada' (Byron); No. LXXV., surely one of the bravest songs in the language, was addressed (idem) to Thomas Moore; the tremendous Race with Death is lifted out of the Ode in Venice (1819); for the next number see Don Juan, III. (1821); the last of all, 'Stanzas inscribed On this day I completed my Thirty-sixth year' (1824), is the last verse that Byron wrote.
LXXIX
Napier has described the terrific effect of Napoleon's pursuit; but in the operations before Corunna he was distanced, if not out-generalled, by Sir John Moore, and ere the first days of 1809 he gave his command to Soult, who pressed us vainly through the hill-country between Leon and Gallicia, and got beaten at Corunna for his pains. Wolfe, who was an Irish parson and died of consumption, wrote some spirited verses on the flight of Busaco, but this admirable elegy—'I will show you,' said
