Page:Lyra heroica.djvu/380

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356 NOTES

CIV, CV

By permission of Messrs. Macmillan. Dated severally 1857 and 1859.

CVI

Edinburgh Courant, 1852. Compare The Loss of the 'Birkenhead' in The Return of the Guards, and other Poems (Macmillan, 1883), pp. 256-58. Of the troopship Birkenhead I note that she sailed from Queenstown on the yth January 1852, with close on seven hundred souls on board; that the most of these were soldiers of the Twelfth Lancers, the Sixtieth Rifles, the Second, Sixth, Forty- third, Forty-filth, Seventy-third, Seventy-fourth, and Ninety-first Regiments; that she struck on a rock (26th February 1852) off Simon's Bay, South Africa; that the boats would hold no more than a hundred and thirty-eight, and that, the women and children being safe, the men that were left four hundred and fifty-four, all told were formed on deck by their officers, and went down with the ship, true to colours and discipline till the end.

��By permission of Messrs. Macmillan. From Empedocles on Etna (1853). As regards the second number, it may be noted that Soh- rab, being in quest of his father Rustum, to whom he is unknown, offers battle as one of the host of the Tartar King Afrasiab, to any champion of the Persian Kai Khosroo. The challenge is accepted by Rustum, who fights as a nameless knight (like Wilfrid of Ivan- hoe at the Gentle and Joyous Passage of Ashby), and so becomes the unwitting slayer of his son. For the story of the pair the poet refers his readers to Sir John Malcom's History of Persia. See Poems, by Matthew Arnold (Macmillan), i. 268, 269.

cx, cxi

lonica (Allen, 1891). By permission of the Author. School Fencibles (1861) was 'printed, not published, in 1877.' The Ballad for a Boy, Mr. Cory writes, ' was never printed till this year.'

��By permission of the Author. This ballad, which was suggested, Mr. Meredith tells me, by the story of Bendigeid Vran, the son of Llyr, in the Mabinogion (iii. 121-9) . ' s reprinted from Modern Love (1862), but it originally appeared (circ. 1860) in Once a Week, a forgotten print the source of not a little unforgotten stuff as Evan Harrington and the first part of The Cloister and the Hearth.

��From the fourth and last book of Sigurd the Volsung, 1877. By permission of the Author. Hogni and Gunnar, being the

�� �