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 Nunez 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._

LXXXIX-XCII

From _The Sea Side and the Fire Side_, 1851; _Birds of Passage_,
_Flight the First_, and _Flight the Second_; and _Flo