E la cetera mia rivolta in pianto.’
Literally as follows. ‘Those eyes of which I spoke so warmly, and the arms, and the hands, and the feet, and the face, which have robbed me of myself, and made me different from others; those crisped locks of pure shining gold, and the lightning of that angelical smile, which used to make a heaven upon earth, are now a little dust which feels nothing!—And I still remain! whence I lament and disdain myself, left without the light which I loved so much, in a troubled sea, and with dismantled bark. Here then must end all my amorous songs. Dry is the vein of my exhausted genius, and my lyre answers only in lamentations!’
[5]. The universality of Shakespear’s genius has, perhaps, been a disadvantage to his single works: the variety of his resources has prevented him from giving that intense concentration of interest to some of them which they might have had. He is in earnest only in Lear and Timon. He combined the powers of Æschylus and Aristophanes, of Dante and Rabelais, in his own mind. If he had been only half what he was, he might have seemed greater.
[6]. Do not publications generally find their way there, without a direction? R.
[7]. Why to Great Britain alone? R.
[8]. ‘Multiscience (or a variety and quantity of acquired knowledge) does not teach intelligence. But the Sibyll with wild enthusiastic mouth shrilling forth unmirthful, inornate, and unperfumed truths, reaches to a thousand years with her voice through the power of God.’
[9]. With all proper allowances for the effects of the Mundungus, we must say that this answer appears to us very curiously characteristic of the exaggerated and canting tone of this poet and his associates. A man may or may not think time misemployed in reading newspapers:—but we believe no man, out of the Pantisocratic or Lake school, ever dreamed of denouncing it as unchristian and impious—even if he had not himself begun and ended his career as an Editor of newspapers. The same absurd exaggeration is visible in his magnificent eulogium on the conversational talents of his Birmingham Unitarians.
[10]. See his criticisms on Bertram, vol. II., reprinted from the Courier.
[11]. We are aware that time conquers even nature, and that the characters of nations change with a total change of circumstances. The modern Italians are a very different race of people from the ancient Romans. This gives us some chance. In the decomposition and degeneracy of the sturdy old English character, which seems fast approaching, the mind and muscles of the country may be sufficiently relaxed and softened to imbibe a taste for all the refinements of luxury and show; and a century of slavery may yield us a crop of the Fine Arts, to be soon buried in sloth and barbarism again.
[12]. This name, for some reason or other, does not once occur in these Memoirs.