[f]
[15] [Compare "With the aid of Suleiman's ataghan and my own sabre, we scooped a shallow grave upon the spot which Darvell had indicated" (A fragment of a Novel by Byron, Letters, 1899, iii. Appendix IX. p. 452).]
[15]
[16] [Compare—
[16]
"And to be wroth with one we love
Doth work like madness in the brain."
Christabel, by S. T. Coleridge, part ii. lines 412, 413.]
[17] [It is said that his parents handed him over to the care of his uncle, Jean-Aimé Bonivard, when he was still an infant, and it is denied that his father was "literally put to death."]
[17]
[18] {21} [Kölbing quotes parallel uses of the same expression in Werner, act iv. sc. 1; Churchill's The Times, line 341, etc.; but does not give the original—
[18]
"But earthlier happy is the rose distill'd,
Than that which, withering on the virgin-thorn," etc.
Midsummer Night's Dream, act i. sc. i, lines 76, 77.]
[19] [Compare—
[19]
"The first, last look of Death revealed."
The Giaour, line 89, note 2.
Byron was a connoisseur of the incidents and by-play of "sudden death," so much so that Goethe was under the impression that he had been guilty of a venial murder (see his review of Manfred in his paper Kunst and Alterthum, Letters, 1901, v. 506, 507). A year after these lines were written, when he was at Rome (Letter to Murray, May 30, 1817), he saw three robbers guillotined, and observed himself and them from a
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