[218] [Compare the lines enclosed in a letter to Murray, dated November 25, 1816--
"In this belovéd marble view, Above the works and thoughts of man, What Nature _could_ but _would not_ do, And Beauty and Canova can."]
["(In talking thus, the writer, more especially Of women, would be understood to say, He speaks as a Spectator, not officially, And always, Reader, in a modest way; Perhaps, too, in no very great degree shall he Appear to have offended in this lay, Since, as all know, without the Sex, our Sonnets Would seem unfinished, like their untrimmed bonnets.) "(Signed) Printer's Devil."]
[220] [_The Task_, by William Cowper, ii. 206. Compare _The Farewell_, line 27, by Charles Churchill--
"Be England what she will, With all her faults, she is my Country still."]
[221] { 175}[The allusion is to Gally Knight's _Ilderim,_ a Syrian Tale. See, too, Letter to Moore, March 25, 1817, _Letters,_ 1900, iv. 78: "Talking of tail, I wish you had not called it [_Lalla Rookh_] a '_Persian Tale_.' Say a 'Poem,' or 'Romance,' but not 'Tale.' I am very sorry that I called some of my own things 'Tales.' ... Besides, we have had Arabian, and Hindoo, and Turkish, and Assyrian Tales." _Beppo_, it must be remembered, was published anonymously, and in the concluding lines of the stanza the satire is probably directed against his own "Tales."]
[222] { 176}["The expressions '_blue-stocking_' and '_dandy_' may furnish matter for the learning of a commentator at some future period. At this moment every English reader will understand them. Our present ephemeral dandy is akin to the maccaroni of my earlier days. The first of these expressions has become classical, by Mrs. Hannah More's poem of '_Bas-Bleu_' and the other by the use of it in one of Lord Byron's poems. Though now become familiar and rather trite, their day may not be long.
' ... Cadentque Quæ nunc sunt in honore vocabula.'"
--Translation of Forteguerri's _Ricciardetto_, by Lord Glenbervie, 1822 (note to stanza v.).
Compare, too, a memorandum of 1820. "I liked the Dandies; they were always very civil to _me_, though in general they disliked literary people ... The truth is, that, though I gave up the business early, I had a tinge of Dandyism in my minority, and probably retained enough of it to conciliate the great ones at four-and-twenty."--_Letters_, 1901, v. 423.]