This passage is especially worthy of attention, as having been written half a century before the supposed invention of the mariner's compass by Flavius Gioias at Amalfi; and, as Southey
remarks, "it must have been well known and in general use before it would thus be referred to as a familiar illustration."
I do not think that any of your correspondents have quoted the halting lines with which Byron mars the pathos of the Rousseau-like letter of Donna Julia (Don Juan, canto I. stanza cxcvi.):
"My heart is feminine, nor can forget—
To all, except one image, madly blind;
So shakes the needle, and so stands the pole,
As vibrates my fond heart to my fix'd soul."
William Bates.
Birmingham.
Gibbon's Library (Vol. vii., pp. 407. 455. 535.).—The following quotation from Cyrus Redding's "Recollections of the Author of Vathek" (New Monthly Magazine, vol. lxxi. p. 308.) may interest J. H. M. and your other correspondents under this head: