"Alas! they had been friends in youth;
But whispering tongues can poison truth.">[
[417] {513} [Compare the famous eulogy of Marie Antoinette, in Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, in a Letter intended to have been sent to a Gentleman in Paris, London, 1790, pp. 112, 113—
"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the Queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles.... Little did I dream ... that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.">[
[rb] {514} As tear by tear rose gathering still.—[Revise.]
[418] [Lines 175-182, which are in Byron's handwriting, were added to the Copy.]
[419] {516} [The meaning is plain, but the construction is involved. The contrast is between the blood of foes, which Hugo has shed for Azo, and Hugo's own blood, which Azo is about to shed on the scaffold. But this is one of Byron's incurious infelicities.]
[420] {517} Haught—haughty. "Away, haught man, thou art insulting me."—Shakespeare [Richard II., act iv. sc. i, line 254—"No lord of thine, thou haught insulting man.">[
[421] {518} [Lines 304, 305, and lines 310-317 are not in the Copy. They were inserted by Byron in the Revise.]
[422] [A writer in the Critical Review (February, 1816, vol. iii. p. 151) holds this couplet up to derision. "Too" is a weak ending, and, orally at least, ambiguous.]
[423] ["I sent for Marmion, ... because it occurred to me there might be a resemblance between part of Parisina and a similar scene in Canto 2d. of Marmion. I fear there is, though I never thought of it before, and could hardly wish to imitate that which is inimitable.... I had completed the story on the passage from Gibbon, which, in fact, leads to a like scene naturally, without a thought of the kind; but it comes upon me not very comfortably."—Letter to Murray, February 3, 1816 (Letters, 1899, iii. 260). The scene in Marmion is the one where Constance de Beverley appears before the conclave—