A prodigal son—and a pregnant nun, nun,
And a widow re-wedded within the year—
And a calf at grass—and a priest at mass.
Are things which every day appear.—[MS. erased.]
[155] {123}[A supplementary MS. supplies the text for the remainder of the scene.]
[156] {124}[For the death of Nero, "Rome's sixth Emperor," vide C. Suet. Tranq., lib. vi. cap. xlix.]
To shun { not loss of life, but the torments of a } public death—[MS. M.]
[157] [A reminiscence of the clouds of spray from the Fall of the Staubbach, which, in certain aspects, appear to be springing upwards from the bed of the waterfall.]
[158] {125}[Compare The Giaour, lines 282-284. Compare, too, Don Juan, Canto IV. stanza lvii. line 8.]
[159] [Here, as in so many other passages of Manfred, Byron is recording his own feelings and forebodings. The same note is struck in the melancholy letters of the autumn of 1811. See, for example, the letter to Dallas, October 11, "It seems as though I were to experience in my youth the greatest misery of age," etc. (Letters, 1898, ii. 52).]
[160] {126}["Pray, was Manfred's speech to the Sun still retained in Act third? I hope so: it was one of the best in the thing, and better than the Colosseum."—Letter to Murray, July 9, 1817, Letters, 1900, iv. 147. Compare Byron's early rendering of "Ossian's Address to the Sun 'in Carthon.'"—Poetical Works, 1898, i. 229.]
[161] {127} "And it came to pass, that the Sons of God saw the daughters of men, that they were fair," etc.—"There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the Sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children to them, the same became mighty men which were of old, men of renown."—Genesis, ch. vi. verses 2 and 4.