Byron, Don Juan, canto iii, stanza 86, 3.
[5] John Robinson, 1575-1625, an influential English Independent (or Congregational) minister, who left the Church of England and joined the “Separatists” in 1604, and was their pastor at Scrooby, England, removing to Amsterdam, Holland, in 1608, and continuing his leadership of Independents there and in Leyden.
[6] Smithfield is a section of London, north of St. Paul’s Cathedral, where alleged heretics were burned at the stake during the reign of Queen Mary, in 1555 and subsequent years.
[7] The monument, erected by an association which aroused national as well as local interest and support, is a granite obelisk, two hundred and twenty-one feet high, actually standing on Breed’s, not Bunker Hill. The two eminences are seven hundred yards apart, and both were scenes of conflict, the American redoubt being on Breed’s; but general use has long sanctioned the expression “the battle of Bunker Hill.” The monument was finished in 1842.
[8] Jamestown, Virginia, on the James River, where the first permanent English settlement in the United States was made May 13, 1607.
[9] It is no part of the purpose of the present edition to undertake to criticise the rhetoric of Webster. But the use of “him” in the objective case, in the present paragraph, followed by “thy,” is so uncommon as to call for mention. Most rhetoricians would employ “he,” followed by “his;” or “thou,” followed by “thy.” A use of cases identical with Webster’s is found in the well-known second stanza of S.F. Smith’s “America”:—
“My native country, thee,
Land of the noble free,—
Thy name I love.”
[10] The Marquis de la Fayette (1757-1834), a member of a rich and noble French family, equipped a vessel at his own cost, and came to America in 1777, to aid the Revolutionists. At once brave and judicious, he became the friend of Washington, and was made major-general, distinguishing himself as a fighter or strategist at Brandywine, Monmouth, and Yorktown. Returning to France after the war, he took a middle course in the French Revolution, for which he later was subjected to the unwarranted sneers of Carlyle. Imprisoned for years in Austria, he was released by request of Napoleon in 1797. In 1824 he again visited the United States, being everywhere greeted with enthusiasm, and receiving from Congress $200,000 and a township of land. Four years before his death he was made head of the French National Guard by the party which dethroned the Bourbon, Charles X., and transferred the crown to Louis Philippe.
[11] Late may you return to the sky.
[12] The people of Greece, long restive against Turkish oppression, rose under Alexander Ypsilanti in 1820, promulgated a new constitution in 1822, and began a war of revolution. After bloody atrocities on both sides, in 1824 the Greeks began to receive some outside help, including that of Lord Byron, who died at Missolonghi, in that year, from exposure in the field. The jealousies and intrigues of Mahmoud, Sultan of Turkey, and Mehemet Ali, Turkish Viceroy of Egypt, with fears of Russian preponderance in a divided Turkey, led the Great Powers of Europe to interfere in behalf of Greece, as the Turks and Egyptians were working together against her. The Treaty of London (July 6, 1827) founded the new Kingdom of Greece; England, France, and Russia overwhelmed the fleets of Turkey and Egypt at Navarino, October 26 of the same year; and the independent career of the resuscitated Greek nation began.