"Dull Dorus" is obscure, but compare Propertius, Eleg. III. vii. 44, where Callimachus is addressed as "Dore poeta." He is the "ox of verse," because he had been recently appointed to the Professorship of Poetry at Oxford. The "roaring Romans" are "The soldiery" who shout "All, All," in Croly's Catiline, act v. sc. 2.]
[LA] Then there's my gentle Barry—who they say.—[MS.]
[590] [Jeffrey, in his review of A Sicilian Story, etc., Bryan Waller Procter (Barry Cornwall), 1787-1874 (Edinburgh Review, January, 1820, vol. 33, pp. 144-155), compares Diego de Montilla, a poem in ottava rima, with Don Juan, favourably and unfavourably: "There is no profligacy and no horror ... no mocking of virtue and honour, and no strong mixtures of buffoonery and grandeur." But it may fairly match with Byron and his Italian models "as to the better qualities of elegance, delicacy, and tenderness." See, too, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, March, 1820, vol. vi. pp. 153, 647.]
[591] [See Preface to the Vision of Judgment, Poetical Works, 1901, iv. 484, note 3.]
[592] [Croker's article in the Quarterly (April, 1818 [pub. September], vol. xix. pp. 204-208) did not "kill John Keats." See letter to George and Georgiana Keats, October, 1818 (Letters, etc., 1895, p. 215). Byron adopts Shelley's belief that the Reviewer, "miserable man," "one of the meanest," had "wantonly defaced one of the noblest specimens of the workmanship of God." See Preface to Adonais, and stanzas xxxvi., xxxvii.]
[LB] {446}
And weakly mind, to let that all celestial Particle.—[MS. erased.]
or, 'T is strange the mind should let such phrases quell its
Chief Impulse with a few, frail, paper pellets.—[MS. erased.]
[593] "Divinæ particulam auræ" [Hor., Sat. ii. 2. 79]