And Afric's coast and Calpe's adverse height,[1]
And Stamboul's minarets must greet my sight:1020
Thence shall I stray through Beauty's native clime,[2]
Where Kaff[3] is clad in rocks, and crowned with snows sublime
But should I back return, no tempting press[4]
Shall drag my Journal from the desk's recess;
Let coxcombs, printing as they come from far,
Snatch his own wreath of Ridicule from Carr;
Let Aberdeen and Elgin[5] still pursue
- ↑ "Saw it August, 1809."—B., 1816.
[The following notes were omitted from the Fifth Edition:—
"Calpe is the ancient name of Gibraltar. Saw it August, 1809.—B., 1816.
"Stamboul is the Turkish word for Constantinople. Was there the summer 1810."
To "Mount Caucasus," he adds, "Saw the distant ridge of,—1810, 1811."]
- ↑ Georgia.
- ↑ Mount Caucasus.
- ↑
But should I back return, no lettered rage
Shall drag my common-place book on the stage:
Let vain Valentia[i] rival luckless Carr,
And equal him whose work he sought to mar.—[Second to Fourth Editions.]
↑ i. Lord Valentia (whose tremendous travels are forthcoming with due decorations, graphical, topographical, typographical) deposed, on Sir John Carr's unlucky suit, that Mr. Dubois's satire prevented his purchase of The Stranger in Ireland.—Oh, fie, my lord! has your lordship no more feeling for a fellow-tourist?—but "two of a trade," they say, etc. [George Annesley, Viscount Valentia (1769 -1844), published, in 1809, Voyages and Travels to India, Ceylon, the Red Sea, Abyssinia, and Egypt in the Years 1802-6. Byron calls him "vain" Valentia, because his "accounts of ceremonies attending his lordship's interviews with several of the petty princes" suggest the thought "that his principal errand to India was to measure certain rank in the British peerage against the gradations of Asiatic royalty."—Eclectic Review, August, 1809. In August, 1808, Sir John Carr, author of numerous Travels, brought an unsuccessful action for damages against Messrs. Hood and Sharpe, the publishers of the parody of his works by Edward Dubois,—My Pocket Book: or Hints for a Ryghte Merrie and Conceitede Tour, in 4to, to be called "The Stranger in Ireland in 1805," By a Knight Errant, and dedicated to the papermakers. (See Letter to Hodgson, August 6, 1809, and suppressed stanza (stanza lxxxvii.) of the first canto of Childe Harold.)]
- ↑ Lord Elgin would fain persuade us that all the figures, with and without noses, in his stoneshop, are the work of Phidias! "Credat Judæus!" [R. Payne Knight, in his introduction to Specimens of Ancient Sculpture, published 1809, by the Dilettanti Society, throws a doubt on the Phidian workmanship of the "Elgin" marbles. See the Introduction to The Curse of Minerva.]
