English Men of Letters Volume 2 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1894 Excerpt: ...a number of incidents of the poet's life at this period, of his fanciful dress, blazing in scarlet and gold, and of his sometimes absurd contentions for the privileges of rank--as when he demanded precedence of the English ambassador in an interview with the Sultan, and, on its refusal, could only be pacified by the assurances of the Austrian internuncio. In converse with indifferent persons he displayed a curious alternation of frankness and hauteur, and indulged a habit of letting people up and down, by which he frequently gave offence. More interesting are narratives of the suggestion of some of his verses, as the slave-market in Don Juan, and the spectacle of the dead criminal tossed on the waves, revived in the Bride of Abydos. One example is, if we except Dante's Ugolino, the most remarkable instance in literature of the expansion, without the weakening, of the horrible. Take first Mr. Hobhouse's plain prose: "The sensations produced by the state of the weather"--it was wretched and stormy when they left the "Salsette" for the city--" and leaving a comfortable cabin, were in unison with the impressions which we felt when, passing under the palace of the Sultans, and gazing at the gloomy cypress which rises above the walls, we saw two dogs gnawing a dead body." After this we may measure the almost fiendish force of a morbid imagination brooding over the incident--"And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall Hold o'er the dead their carnival: Gorging and growling o'er carcass and limb, They were too busy to bark at him. From a Tartar's skull they had stripp'd the flesh, As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh; And their white tusks crunched on the whiter skull, As it slipp'd through their jaws when their edge grew dul...