[408] I believe I have taken a poetical licence to transplant the jackal from Asia. In Greece I never saw nor heard these animals; but among the ruins of Ephesus I have heard them by hundreds. They haunt ruins, and follow armies. [Compare Childe Harold, Canto IV. stanza cliii. line 6; and Don Juan, Canto IX. stanza xxvii. line 2.]
[qx] Mixed and mournful as the sound.—[MS. G.]
[409] [Leave out this couplet.—Gifford.]
[410] [With lines 1058-1079, compare Southey's Roderick (Canto XVIII., ed. 1838, ix. 169)—
"Far and wide the thundering shout,
Rolling among reduplicating rocks,
Pealed o'er the hills, and up the mountain vales.
The wild ass starting in the forest glade
Ran to the covert; the affrighted wolf
Skulked through the thicket to a closer brake;
The sluggish bear, awakened in his den,
Roused up and answered with a sullen growl,
Low-breathed and long; and at the uproar scared,
The brooding eagle from her nest took wing."
A sentence in a letter to Moore, dated January 10, 1815 (Letters, 1899, iii. 168), "I have tried the rascals (i.e. the public) with my Harrys and Larrys, Pilgrims and Pirates. Nobody but S....y has done any thing worth a slice of bookseller's pudding, and he has not luck enough to be found out in doing a good thing," implies that Byron had read and admired Southey's Roderick—an inference which is curiously confirmed by a memorandum in Murray's handwriting: "When Southey's poem, Don Roderick (sic), was published, Lord Byron sent in the middle of the night to ask John Murray if he had heard any opinion of it, for he thought it one of the finest poems he had ever read." The resemblance between the two passages, which is pointed out by Professor Kölbing, is too close to be wholly unconscious, but Byron's expansion of Southey's lines hardly amounts to a plagiarism.]