By other rule
Than man’s coarse glory-test does God bestow
His crowns:  exalting oft the fool,
So deem’d, and the world-hero levelling low. 
—­And he, who from the palace pass’d obscure,
And honourably poor,

Spurning a throne
Held by blood-tenure, ’gainst a nation’s will;
Lived on his narrow fields alone,
Content life’s common service to fulfil;
Not careful of a carnage-bought renown,
Or that precarious crown:—­

Him count we wise,
Him also! though the chorus of the throng
Be silent:  though no pillar rise
In slavish adulation of the strong:—­
But here, from blame of tongues and fame aloof,
’Neath a low chancel roof,

—­The peace of God,—­
He sleeps:  unconscious hero!  Lowly grave
By village-footsteps daily trod
Unconscious:  or while silence holds the nave,
And the bold robin comes, when day is dim,
And pipes his heedless hymn.

Timoleon; was invited from Corinth by the Syracusans (B.C. 344) to be their leader in throwing off the tyranny of the second Dionysius.  Having effected this, defeated the Carthaginian invaders, and reduced all the minor despotisms within Sicily, he voluntarily resigned his paramount power and died in honoured retirement.

He also; In 1556 the Emperor Charles V gave up all his dominions, withdrawing in 1557 to Yuste;—­a monastery situated in a region of singular natural beauty, between Xarandilla and Plasencia in Estremadura.  He died there, Sep. 21, 1558.

Loosens the stars; So Vergil, Georg.  I., 365: 

   Saepe etiam stellas vento inpendente videbis
   Praecipites caelo labi . . .

The phantom king; Richard Cromwell was Protector from Sep. 3, 1658 to May 25, 1659.  After 1660 his life was that of a simple country gentleman, till his death in 1712, when he was buried at Hursley near Winchester.

Unheirlike heir; See Appendix E.

CHARLES EDWARD AT ROME

1785

1

      O sunset, of the rise
   Unworthy!—­that, so brave, so clear, so gay;
   This, prison’d in low-hanging earth-mists gray,
      And ever-darken’d skies:—­
   Sad sunset of a royal race in gloom,
Accomplishing to the end the dolorous Stuart doom!

2

      Ghost of a king, he sate
   In Rome, the city of ghosts and thrones outworn,
   Drowsing his thoughts in wine;—­a life forlorn;
      Pageant of faded state;
   Aged before old age, and all that Past,
Like a forgotten thing of shame, behind him cast.

3

      Yet if by chance the cry
   Of the sharp pibroch through the palace thrill’d,
   He felt the pang of high hope unfulfill’d:—­
      And once, when one came by
   With the dear name of Scotland on his lips,
The heart broke forth behind that forty-years’ eclipse,