Than Montezuma did of yore

When stretch’d on burning coals.

FOOTNOTES:

[1]

I once stood high on Fortune’s ladder.

Although Dame Fortuna was, by ancient mythologists, represented as a whimsical being, cutting her capers on the periphery of a large wheel, I am justified in accommodating her goddesship with a ladder, by virtue of a figure in rhetoric called Poetica Licentia (anglice) poets’ licentiousness.

[2]

My tintinabulum of rhyming.

“The clock-work tintinabulum of rhyme.”—Cowper.

[3]