I stand, no wiser than before:
I’m Magister—yea, Doctor—hight,
And straight or cross-wise, wrong or right,
These ten years long, with many woes,
I’ve led my scholars by the nose,—
And see, that nothing can be known!
In The Last Days of Pompeii (ch. v.) Glaucus, the Athenian, is made to say:—
“I am as one who is left alone at a banquet, the lights dead, and the flowers faded.”
Of course, Bulwer Lytton was familiar with Oft in the Stilly Night, which Moore had written twenty years before:—