[774] {575}The composition of the old Tyrian purple, whether from a shell-fish, or from cochineal, or from kermes, is still an article of dispute; and even its colour—some say purple, others scarlet: I say nothing.
[Kermes is cochineal, the Greek κόκκινον. The shell-fish (murex) is the Purpura patula. Both substances were used as dyes.]
[775] [See Ovid, Heroid, Epist. ix. line 161.]
[776] [Titus used to promise to "bear in mind," "to keep on his list," the petitions of all his supplicants, and once, at dinner-time, his conscience smote him, that he had let a day go by without a single grant, or pardon, or promotion. Hence his confession. "Amici, diem perdidi!" Vide Suetonius, De XII. Cæs., "Titus," lib. viii. cap. 8.]
[777] [Tuism is not in Johnson's Dictionary. Coleridge has a note dated 1800 (Literary Remains, i. 292), on "egotizing in tuism" but it was not included in Southey's Omniana of 1812, and must have been unknown to Byron.]
[778] {576}[Sc. toilette, a Gallicism.]
[779] [Byron loved to make fact and fancy walk together, but, here, his memory played him false, or his art kept him true. The Black Friar walked and walks in the Guests' Refectory (or Banqueting Hall, or "Gallery" of this stanza), which adjoins the Prior's Parlour, but the room where Byron slept (in a four-post bed—a coronet, at each corner, atop) is on the floor above the Prior's Parlour, and can only be approached by a spiral staircase. Both rooms look west, and command a view of the "lake's billow" and the "cascade." Moreover, the Guests' Refectory was never hung with "old pictures." It would seem that Don Juan (perhaps Byron on an emergency) slept in the Prior's Parlour, and that in the visionary Newstead the pictures forsook the Grand Drawing-Room for the Hall. Hence the scene! El Libertado steps out of the Gothic Chamber "forth" into the "gallery," and lo! "a monk in cowl and beads." But, Quien sabe? The Psalmist's caution with regard to princes is not inapplicable to poets.]
[780] {577}[Compare Mariner's description of the cave in Hoonga Island (Poetical Works, 1901, v. 629, note 1).]
[781] {578}["The place," wrote Byron to Moore, August 13, 1814, "is worth seeing as a ruin, and I can assure you there was some fun there, even in my time; but that is past. The ghosts, however, and the Gothics, and the waters, and the desolation, make it very lively still." "It was," comments Moore (Life, p. 262, note 1), "if I mistake not, during his recent visit to Newstead, that he himself actually fancied he saw the ghost of the Black Friar, which was supposed to have haunted the Abbey from the time of the dissolution of the monasteries, and which he thus describes from the recollection, perhaps, of his own fantasy, in Don Juan.... It is said that the Newstead ghost appeared, also, to Lord Byron's cousin, Miss Fanny Parkins, and that she made a sketch of him from memory." The legend of the Black Friar may, it is believed at Newstead (et vide post, ["Song," stanza ii]. line 5, p. 583), be traced to the alarm and suspicion of the country-folk, who, on visiting the Abbey, would now and then catch sight of an aged lay-brother, or monkish domestic, who had been retained in the service of the Byrons long after the Canons had been "turned adrift." He would naturally keep out of sight of a generation who knew not monks, and, when surprised in the cloisters or ruins of the church, would glide back to his own quarters in the dormitories.]