No More Learning

The popular notions of Christianity are represented in this chorus as
true in their relation to the worship they superseded, and that which
in all probability they will supersede, without considering their
merits in a relation more universal. The first stanza contrasts the
immortality of the living and thinking beings which inhabit the
planets, and to use a common and inadequate phrase, "clothe themselves
in matter", with the transience of the noblest manifestations of the
external world.

The concluding verses indicate a progressive state of more or loss
exalted existence, according to the degree of perfection which every
distinct intelligence may have attained. Let it not be supposed that I
mean to dogmatise upon a subject, concerning which all men are equally
ignorant, or that I think the Gordian knot of the origin of evil can
be disentangled by that or any similar assertions. The received
hypothesis of a Being resembling men in the moral attributes of His
nature, having called us out of non-existence, and after inflicting on
us the misery of the commission of error, should superadd that of the
punishment and the privations consequent upon it, still would remain
inexplicable and incredible. That there is a true solution of the
riddle, and that in our present state that solution is unattainable by
us, are propositions which may be regarded as equally certain:
meanwhile, as it is the province of the poet to attach himself to
those ideas which exalt and ennoble humanity, let him be permitted to
have conjectured the condition of that futurity towards which we are
all impelled by an inextinguishable thirst for immortality. Until
better arguments can be produced than sophisms which disgrace the
cause, this desire itself must remain the strongest and the only
presumption that eternity is the inheritance of every thinking being.

(3) NO HOARY PRIESTS AFTER THAT PATRIARCH [L. 245].

The Greek Patriarch, after haying been compelled to fulminate an
anathema against the insurgents, was put to death by the Turks.

Fortunately the Greeks have been taught that they cannot buy security
by degradation, and the Turks, though equally cruel, are less cunning
than the smooth-faced tyrants of Europe. As to the anathema, his
Holiness might as well have thrown his mitre at Mount Athos for any
effect that it produced. The chiefs of the Greeks are almost all men
of comprehension and enlightened views on religion and politics.

(4) THE FREEDMAN OF A WESTERN POET-CHIEF [L. 563].
A Greek who had been Lord Byron's servant commands the insurgents in
Attica. This Greek, Lord Byron informs me, though a poet and an
enthusiastic patriot, gave him rather the idea of a timid and
unenterprising person. It appears that circumstances make men what
they are, and that we all contain the germ of a degree of degradation
or of greatness whose connection with our character is determined by
events.

(5) THE GREEKS EXPECT A SAVIOUR FROM THE WEST [L. 598].

It is reported that this Messiah had arrived at a seaport near
Lacedaemon in an American brig. The association of names and ideas is
irresistibly ludicrous, but the prevalence of such a rumour strongly
marks the state of popular enthusiasm in Greece.

(6) THE SOUND AS OF THE ASSAULT OF AN IMPERIAL CITY [LL. 814-15].

For the vision of Mahmud of the taking of Constantinople in 1453, see
Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire", volume 12 page 223.

The manner of the invocation of the spirit of Mahomet the Second will
be censured as over subtle. I could easily have made the Jew a regular
conjuror, and the Phantom an ordinary ghost. I have preferred to
represent the Jew as disclaiming all pretension, or even belief, in
supernatural agency, and as tempting Mahmud to that state of mind in
which ideas may be supposed to assume the force of sensations through
the confusion of thought with the objects of thought, and the excess
of passion animating the creations of imagination.

It is a sort of natural magic, susceptible of being exercised in a
degree by any one who should have made himself master of the secret
associations of another's thoughts.

(7) THE CHORUS [L. 1060].