“And of his train there was a henchman page,
      A peasant boy, who serv’d his master well;
      And often would his pranksome prate engage
      Childe Burun’s[40] ear, when his proud heart did swell
      With sullen thoughts that he disdain’d to tell. 
      Then would he smile on him, and Alwin[41] smiled,
      When aught that from his young lips archly fell,
      The gloomy film from Harold’s eye beguiled....

      “Him and one yeoman only did he take
      To travel eastward to a far countrie;
      And, though the boy was grieved to leave the lake,
      On whose fair banks he grew from infancy,
      Eftsoons his little heart beat merrily,
      With hope of foreign nations to behold,
      And many things right marvellous to see,
      Of which our vaunting travellers oft have told,
    From Mandeville....[42]”

In place of that mournful song “To Ines,” in the first Canto, which contains some of the dreariest touches of sadness that even his pen ever let fall, he had, in the original construction of the poem, been so little fastidious as to content himself with such ordinary sing-song as the following:—­

    “Oh never tell again to me
      Of Northern climes and British ladies,
    It has not been your lot to see,
      Like me, the lovely girl of Cadiz,
    Although her eye be not of blue,
      Nor fair her locks, like English lasses,” &c. &c.

There were also, originally, several stanzas full of direct personality, and some that degenerated into a style still more familiar and ludicrous than that of the description of a London Sunday, which still disfigures the poem.  In thus mixing up the light with the solemn, it was the intention of the poet to imitate Ariosto.  But it is far easier to rise, with grace, from the level of a strain generally familiar, into an occasional short burst of pathos or splendour, than to interrupt thus a prolonged tone of solemnity by any descent into the ludicrous or burlesque.[43] In the former case, the transition may have the effect of softening or elevating, while, in the latter, it almost invariably shocks;—­for the same reason, perhaps, that a trait of pathos or high feeling, in comedy, has a peculiar charm; while the intrusion of comic scenes into tragedy, however sanctioned among us by habit and authority, rarely fails to offend.  The noble poet was, himself, convinced of the failure of the experiment, and in none of the succeeding Cantos of Childe Harold repeated it.

Of the satiric parts, some verses on the well-known traveller, Sir John Carr, may supply us with, at least, a harmless specimen:—­

      “Ye, who would more of Spain and Spaniards know,
      Sights, saints, antiques, arts, anecdotes, and war,
      Go, hie ye hence to Paternoster Row,—­
      Are they not written in the boke of Carr? 
      Green Erin’s Knight, and Europe’s wandering star. 
      Then listen, readers, to the Man of Ink,
      Hear what he did, and sought, and wrote afar: 
      All these are coop’d within one Quarto’s brink,
    This borrow, steal (don’t buy), and tell us what you think.”