Page:The Works of Lord Byron (ed. Coleridge, Prothero) - Volume 2.djvu/361

sono una prova." Without subscribing to the latter part of his proposition, a dangerous doctrine, the truth of which may be disputed on better grounds, namely, that the Italians are in no respect more ferocious than their neighbours, that man must be wilfully blind, or ignorantly heedless, who is not struck with the extraordinary capacity of this people, or, if such a word be admissible, their capabilities,^[1] the facility of their acquisitions, the rapidity of their conceptions, the fire of their genius, their sense of beauty, and, amidst all the disadvantages of repeated revolutions, the desolation of battles, and the despair of ages, their still unquenched "longing after immortality,"^[2]—the immortality of independence. And when we ourselves, in riding round the walls of Rome, heard the simple lament of the labourers' chorus, "Roma! Roma! Roma! Roma non è più come era prima!"^[3] it was difficult not to contrast this melancholy dirge with the bacchanal roar of the songs of exultation still yelled from the London taverns, over the carnage of Mont St. Jean,^[4] and the betrayal of Genoa, of Italy, of France, and of the world,

1. [Shelley (notes M. Darmesteter), in his preface to the Prometheus Unbound, "emploie le mot sans demander pardon." "The mass of capabilities remains at every period materially the same; the circumstances which awaken it to action perpetually change." "Capability" in the sense of "undeveloped faculty or property; a condition physical or otherwise, capable of being converted or turned to use" (N. Eng. Dict.), appertains rather to material objects. To apply the term figuratively to the forces inherent in national character savoured of a literary indecorum. Hence the apology.]
2. [Addison, Cato, act v. sc. 1, line 3—

   "It must be so—Plato, thou reason'st well!—
   Else whence this pleasing hope, this fond desire,
   This longing after immortality?"]

3. [Shelley chose this refrain as the motto to his unfinished lines addressed to his infant son—

   "My lost William, thou in whom
   ⁠Some bright spirit lived——"]

4. [Scott commented severely on this opprobrious designation of "the great and glorious victory of Waterloo," in his critique on the Fourth Canto, Q. R., No. xxxvii., April, 1818.]