No More Learning

_1072 Argo]Argos edition 1822.
_1091-_1093 See Editor's note.
_1091 bright editions 1839; wise edition 1829 (ed. Galignani).
_1093 unsubdued editions 1839; unwithstood edition 1829 (ed. Galignani).


NOTES.

(1) THE QUENCHLESS ASHES OF MILAN [L. 60].

Milan was the centre of the resistance of the Lombard league against
the Austrian tyrant. Frederic Barbarossa burnt the city to the ground,
but liberty lived in its ashes, and it rose like an exhalation from
its ruin. See Sismondi's "Histoire des Republiques Italiennes", a book
which has done much towards awakening the Italians to an imitation of
their great ancestors.

(2) THE CHORUS [L. 197].

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true in their relation to the worship they superseded, and that which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.