58
JEUX D'ESPRIT AND MINOR POEMS, 1798-1824.
6.
And Heaven forbid I should conclude,
Without "the Board of Longitude,"[1]
Although this narrow paper would,
My Murray.
Venice, April 11, 1818.
[First published, Letters and Journals, 1830, ii. 171.]
[First published, Letters and Journals, 1830, ii. 171.]
BALLAD.
TO THE TUNE OF "SALLEY IN OUR ALLEY."
1.
Of all the twice ten thousand bards
That ever penned a canto,
Whom Pudding or whom Praise rewards
For lining a portmanteau;
Of all the poets ever known,
From Grub-street to Fop's Alley,[2]
The Muse may boast—the World must own
There 's none like pretty Gally![3]
2.
He writes as well as any Miss,
- ↑ [The sixth edition of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1813) was "printed by T. Davison, Whitefriars, for John Murray, Bookseller to the Admiralty, and the Board of Longitude." Medwin (Conversations, 1824, p. 259) attributes to Byron a statement that Murray had to choose between continuing to be his publisher and printing the "Navy Lists," and "that there was no hesitation which way he should decide: the Admiralty carried the day." In his "Notes" to the Conversations (November 2, 1824) Murray characterized "the passage about the Admiralty" as "unfounded in fact, and no otherwise deserving of notice than to mark its absurdity."]
- ↑ [For Fop's Alley, see Poetical Works, 1898, i. 410, note 2.]
- ↑ [H. Gally Knight (1786-1846) was at Cambridge with Byron.]
