[LXXXIII]
This magnificent sonnet, On First Reading Chapman's Homer, was printed in 1817. The ‘Cortez’ of the eleventh verse is a mistake; the discoverer of the Pacific being Nuñez de Balboa.
[LXXXIV–LXXXVII]
The Lays are dated 1824; they have passed through edition after edition; and if Matthew Arnold disliked and contemned them (see Sir F. H. Doyle, Reminiscences and Opinions, pp. 178–87), the general is wise enough to know them by heart. But a book that is ‘a catechism to fight’ (in Jonson's phrase) would have sinned against itself had it taken no account of them, and I have given Horatius in its integrity: if only, as Landor puts it,
To show the British youth, who ne'er Will lag behind, what Romans were, When all the Tuscans and their Lars Shouted, and shook the towers of Mars.
As for The Armada, I have preferred it to The Battle of Naseby, first, because it is neither vicious nor ugly, and the other is both; and, second, because it is so brilliant an outcome of that capacity for dealing with proper names which Macaulay, whether poet or not, possesses in common with none but certain among the greater poets. For The Last Buccaneer (a curious anticipation of some effects of Mr. Rudyard Kipling), and that noble thing, the Jacobite's Epitaph, they are dated 1839 and 1845 respectively.
[LXXXVIII]
The Poetical Works of Robert Stephen Hawker (Kegan Paul, 1879). By permission of Mrs. R. S. Hawker. ‘With the exception of the choral lines—
And shall Trelawney die? There's twenty thousand Cornishmen Will know the reason why!—
and which have been, ever since the imprisonment by James II. of the Seven Bishops—one of them Sir Jonathan Trelawney—a popular proverb throughout Cornwall, the whole of this song was composed by me in the year 1825. I wrote it under a stag-horned oak in Sir Beville's Walk in Stowe Wood. It was sent by me anonymously to a Plymouth paper, and there it attracted the notice of Mr. Davies Gilbert, who reprinted it at his private press at Eastbourne under the avowed impression that it was the original ballad. It had the good fortune to win the eulogy of Sir Walter Scott, who also deemed it to be the ancient song. It was praised under the same persuasion by Lord Macaulay and Mr. Dickens.’—Author's Note.