1898

March 24.  LETTER ON PRISON REFORM.  Daily Chronicle, No. 11,249, page 5.

Footnotes.

{0a} See Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime and other Prose Pieces in this edition, page 223.

{3} Reverently some well-meaning persons have placed a marble slab on the wall of the cemetery with a medallion-profile of Keats on it and some mediocre lines of poetry.  The face is ugly, and rather hatchet-shaped, with thick sensual lips, and is utterly unlike the poet himself, who was very beautiful to look upon.  ‘His countenance,’ says a lady who saw him at one of Hazlitt’s lectures, ’lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and brightness; it had the expression as if he had been looking on some glorious sight.’  And this is the idea which Severn’s picture of him gives.  Even Haydon’s rough pen-and-ink sketch of him is better than this ‘marble libel,’ which I hope will soon be taken down.  I think the best representation of the poet would be a coloured bust, like that of the young Rajah of Koolapoor at Florence, which is a lovely and lifelike work of art.

{19} It is perhaps not generally known that there is another and older peacock ceiling in the world besides the one Mr. Whistler has done at Kensington.  I was surprised lately at Ravenna to come across a mosaic ceiling done in the keynote of a peacock’s tail—­blue, green, purple, and gold—­and with four peacocks in the four spandrils.  Mr. Whistler was unaware of the existence of this ceiling at the time he did his own.

{43} An Unequal Match, by Tom Taylor, at Wallack’s Theatre, New York, November 6, 1882.

{74} ‘Make’ is of course a mere printer’s error for ‘mock,’ and was subsequently corrected by Lord Houghton.  The sonnet as given in The Garden of Florence reads ‘orbs’ for ‘those.’

{158} September 1890.  See Intentions, page 214.

{163} November 30, 1891.

{164} February 12, 1892.

{170} February 23, 1893.

{172} The verses called ‘The Shamrock’ were printed in the Sunday Sun, August 5, 1894, and the charge of plagiarism was made in the issue dated September 16, 1894.

{188} Cousin errs a good deal in this respect.  To say, as he did, ’Give me the latitude and the longitude of a country, its rivers and its mountains, and I will deduce the race,’ is surely a glaring exaggeration.

{190} The monarchical, aristocratical, and democratic elements of the Roman constitution are referred to.

{193a} Polybius, vi. 9. [Greek].

{193b} [Greek].

{193c} The various stages are [Greek].

{197a} Polybius, xii. 24.

{197b} Polybius, i. 4, viii. 4, specially; and really passim.

{198a} He makes one exception.

{198b} Polybius, viii. 4.

{199} Polybius, xvi. 12.

{200a} Polybius, viii. 4:  [Greek].

{200b} Polybius resembled Gibbon in many respects.  Like him he held that all religions were to the philosopher equally false, to the vulgar equally true, to the statesman equally useful.