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90. meek usurper. "Henry the Sixth very near being canonized. The line of Lancaster had no right of inheritance to the crown " (G.). Cp. Eton Ode (No. 48. 4), "Her Henry's holy

shade.

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91. 'The white and red roses, devices of York and Lancaster" (G.).

Above, below, i.e. on the loom.

92. Twined. "If there is here a reference to marriage (as I incline to think) rather than the grapple of foes, it is probably to the marriage of Edward IV. with the Lancastrian Elizabeth Woodville, Lady Grey, of which union the murdered princes were the issue" (Tovey).

93. "The silver boar was the badge of Richard the Third; whence he was usually known in his own time by the name of the Boar" (G.).

infant gore, the murder of the two young princes in the Tower, 1483.

99. Half of thy heart. Cp. Horace's animae dimidium meae, Odes, I. iii. 8. "Eleanor of Castile died a few years after the conquest of Wales. The heroic proof she gave of her affection for her lord is well known. The monuments of his regret and sorrow for the loss of her are still to be seen at Northampton, Geddington, Waltham, and other places" (G.). Tennyson commemorates Eleanor's devotion in his Dream of Fair Women :

"Or her who knew that Love can vanquish Death,
Who kneeling, with one arm about her king,
Drew forth the poison with her balmy breath,
Sweet as new buds in spring."

101. The ghosts vanish, and the Bard speaks alone. forlorn agrees with me.

106. skirts. A skirt is properly 'the edge of a garment.' It is a favourite word with Milton: "Dark with excessive bright thy skirts appear" (Paradise Lost, III. 380). "Gladly behold though but his utmost skirts Of glory" (ib. XI. 332).

109. "It was the common belief of the Welsh nation that King Arthur was still alive in Fairy-Land, and should return again to reign over Britain "

(G.).

110. "Accession of the line of Tudor. Both Merlin and Taliessin had prophesied that the Welsh should regain their sovereignty over this island; which seemed to be accomplished in the House of Tudor" (G.). Henry VII.'s paternal grandfather was Sir Owen Tudor, a descendant of the ancient princes of Wales.

genuine, native.

111. The Tudor kings before Elizabeth.

112. Sublime, in the literal sense, 'lifted up,'' aloft.' Cp. No. 26. 95, "that rode sublime."

113. Elizabeth's Court.

66

116. Her eye. Micheli, the Venetian, described Elizabeth in 1557 (the year before her accession) as having fine eyes; a testimony more trustworthy than the praise of her courtiers. This eye Gray makes characteristic of the Tudors: cp. Installation Ode, 1. 70, 'Pleased in thy lineaments we trace A Tudor's fire.' And his Bard refers it to their Celtic origin (Tovey).

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117. Her lion-port. Speed, relating an audience given by Queen Elizabeth to Paul Dzialinski, Ambassador of Poland, says, And then she, lion-like rising, daunted the malapert Orator, no less with her stately port and majestical deporture, than with the tartnesse of her princelie checkes'" (G.).

118. Attemper'd to. Cp. No. 26. 26, "Temper'd to thy warbled lay."

119. symphonious, sounding in concert. Cp. Paradise Lost, VII. 559, "the sound Symphonious of ten thousand harps that tuned Angelic harmonies.'

119-20. The burst of lyric poetry in the reign of Elizabeth is meant. "It is, fittingly, the sound of lyric poetry, the music of the harp, that the Bard's ear first catches, to tell him that his art, spite of the tyrant's barbarity, will not be lost. This is faintly indicated in 'strings symphonious,' and it is certainly not till after 'The verse adorn again' that allusion is made to the greater poems of Spenser and Shakespeare" (Tovey).

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121. "Taliessin, Chief of the Bards, flourished in the sixth century. His works are still preserved, and his memory held in high veneration among his countrymen' (G.). But the prophecies attributed to Taliessin have since been shown not to be earlier than the twelfth century.

123. Cp. Shelley's Ode to the Skylark (G. T., CCLXXXVII. 10): "And singing still dost soar, and soaring ever singest." 124. many-colour'd, to express the variety of Elizabethan song.

125-127. war, love, and truth are the subjects of adorn.

125-144. On the unfavourable criticisms passed by Walpole, Johnson, and others upon the last stanza of The Bard, see Mr. Tovey's edition of Gray.

126. "Fierce wars and faithful loves shall moralise my song. Spenser, Proeme to the Fairy Queen" (G.).

127. An admirable description of Spenser's design in the Faerie Queen. Mr. Tovey quotes Milton, Areopagitica, § 23, "Our sage and serious poet Spenser, whom I dare be known to think a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas"; and notes that Una, whose fortunes are told in Book I. of the Faerie Queen, is in Spenser another name for Truth.

128. buskin'd measures, the verse of tragedy. Cp. Milton, Il Penseroso (G. T., CXLV. 101, 102), "Or what (though rare) of later age Ennobled hath the buskin'd stage." The buskin is the cothurnus (x60opvos) or high boot worn by Greek and Roman actors in tragedy to increase their stature and dignity. It therefore became emblematic of tragedy, as the soccus, or low shoe, of comedy.

128-130, " Shakespear." 131-132, "Milton." succession of poets after Milton's time" (G.).

133-134,

"The

129. pleasing pain. Spenser applies this expression to Love, Faerie Queen, IX. x. 3. But Gray more probably had in his mind Aristotle's attribution to tragedy of the pleasure that arises from pity and fear, τὴν ἀπὸ ἐλέου καὶ φόβου ἡδονήν, Poetics,

XXVII.

133. warblings. Milton.

The verb, to warble, is a favourite with

135. sanguine (Lat. sanguineus), red, as if with bloodshed. Addressing the King, the Bard points to a dark red cloud that has passed in front of the sun, and takes it to symbolise the cloud with which the massacre of the bards has covered the country. 137. A reminiscence of Milton, Lycidas (G.T., LXXXIX. 168171):

"So sinks the day-star in the ocean-bed,

And yet anon repairs his drooping head

And tricks his beams, and with new-spangled ore
Flames in the forehead of the morning sky."

repairs, 'recovers' or 'renews,' the primary meaning of the Latin reparare.

9. How sleep the brave, who sink to rest

THIS exquisite Ode was written, as its author tells us, "in the beginning of the year 1746." Collins had already commemorated, in his "Ode on the Death of Col. Charles Ross," the loss of one gallant Englishman in the disastrous battle of Fontenoy in Flanders. Here, on the 31st of May, 1745, the Duke of Cumberland "found the French covered by a line of fortified villages and redoubts with but a single narrow gap. Into this gap, however, the English troops, formed in a dense column, doggedly thrust

themselves in spite of a terrible fire; but at the moment when the day seemed won the French guns, rapidly concentrated in their front, tore the column in pieces and drove it back in a slow and orderly retreat" (J. R. Green). Defeat abroad was followed by defeat in Scotland, where the Young Pretender won the battle of Falkirk in January, 1746. It may have been the news of this fresh reverse that occasioned this Ode. In any case we may assume it to have been written before the victory of Culloden on April 16 of this year relieved the anxiety of England.

6. Than Fancy's feet, etc., than any ground that men have even pictured to themselves in imagination.

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7. Cp. the Sea Dirge in Shakespeare's Tempest (G.T., LXV.). So Campbell, but not very happily, introduced the mermaid's song' into his Battle of the Baltic (G. T., CCLI.).

9. Honour. Collins' personifications are more real than some of Gray's. Fancy, perhaps, is scarcely distinct, but each of the other three-Spring, Honour, Freedom - though so lightly touched on, is a figure for a sculptor. The epithet gray,' given to Honour, though it may be only a conventional epithet, appropriate to a pilgrim's dress, seems to recall Virgil's cana Fides (Aeneid, 1. 292) the 'hoary Honour' of the Roman people, worshipped by them from remote antiquity. Cp. also Horace, Carmen Saeculare 57, Fides et Pax et Honos Pudorque Priscus.

10. The lovely lass o' Inverness

ACCORDING to Cromek, Burns took the idea from the first half verse, which is all that remains of an old song; but nothing is known of this half verse. At Culloden 'Prince Charlie,' the Young Pretender, was defeated by the Duke of Cumberland. "On the 16th of April [1746] the two armies faced one another on Culloden Moor, a few miles eastward of Inverness. The Highlanders still numbered six thousand men, but they were starving and dispirited. Cumberland's force was nearly double that of the Prince. Torn by the Duke's guns, the clansmen flung themselves in their old fashion on the English front; but they were received with a terrible fire of musketry, and the few that broke through the first line found themselves fronted by a second. In a few moments all was over, and the Highlanders a mass of hunted fugitives. Charles himself after strange adventures escaped to France" (J. R. Green).

4. And ever the salt tear blinds her eye.

5. Drumossie, the Highland name for Culloden. Observe the pathetic effect of the repetition.

13. thou, the Duke of Cumberland.

11.

I've heard them lilting at our ewe-milking

JANE ELLIOTT, 1727-1805, third daughter of Sir Gilbert Elliott, second baronet of Minto. Her father and her brother, like herself, had literary tastes. It was her brother who suggested to her the subject of this ballad, the only poem she is known to have written. "The story goes that, as they were driving home in the family coach one evening in 1756, they talked of Flodden, and Gilbert wagered a pair of gloves or a set of ribbons against his sister's chances as a writer of a successful ballad on the subject. After this there was silence, and by the time the journey was ended the rough draft of the song was ready. When presently it was published anonymously, and with the most sacred silence on the part of the writer herself and of her friends as to authorship, it won instant success. Readers

were at first inclined to believe that Miss Elliott's Flowers of the Forest was a genuine relic of the past suddenly and in some miraculous way restored in its perfection. Nor is this to be wondered at, for no ballad in this language is more remarkable for its dramatic propriety and its exhaustive delineation of its theme. Burns was one of the first to insist that this ballad was a modern composition, and when Sir Walter Scott wrote his Border Minstrelsy he inserted it (in 1803) as by a lady of family in Roxburghshire'" (T. Bayne in Dictionary of National Biography).

At Flodden Field in Northumberland James IV., King of Scotland, was defeated by the Earl of Surrey, Sept. 9, 1513. An unhewn pillar of granite marks the spot where the King fell.

The refrain-"The Flowers of the Forest are a' wede away' -appears to be ancient, perhaps even contemporary with the battle of Flodden; but nothing more survives of the old lament.

Metre.-Dactylic. Three dactyls and a trochee in the first line of the couplet, three dactyls and an accented syllable in the second line. Variations are allowed, as is usual, with English dactylic metres : an extra unaccented syllable often begins the line -in 1. 17 there are even two extra syllables-and a dactyl is occasionally shortened to a trochee. There is a rhyme or assonance in the middle of the first line of the couplet, so that in this line there is always a caesura after the second syllable of the second dactyl. It is quite possible that this poem, especially if it is the only one its authoress wrote, was composed without any knowledge of metre. Such a possibility does not interfere with the correctness of this analysis.

3. loaning, S., an opening between fields of corn, for driving the cattle homewards or milking cows. It is connected with the English word lane.

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