How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix [(Page 154)]
Browning wrote concerning this poem: "There is no sort of historical foundation about Good News from Ghent. I wrote it under the bulwark of a vessel off the African coast, after I had been at sea long enough to appreciate even the fancy of a gallop on the back of a certain good horse 'York' then in my stable at home. It was written in pencil on the fly-leaf of Bartoli's Simboli, I remember." Such an incident might, of course, have happened at the "Pacification of Ghent," a treaty of union between Holland, Zealand, and southern Netherlands under William of Orange, against Philip II of Spain. The distance between Ghent and Aix as mapped out in this poem is something more than ninety miles. Do you think a horse could gallop that distance? Notice that the verse gives the effect of galloping.
[ [234] 10. Pique; seems to be the pommel.
[ [235] 14 ff. Lokeren, Boom, Düffeld, Mecheln, Aerschot, Hasselt, Looz, Tongres, Dalhem; towns varying from seven to twenty-five miles apart on the route taken from Ghent to Aix.
[ [236] See Note 235 above.
[ [237] See Note 235 above.
[ [238] See Note 235 above.
[ [239] See Note 235 above.
[ [240] See Note 235 above.
[ [241] See Note 235 above.