Note (return) — LITERATURE OF THE DAY.

We fail to get any light from these quotations, and we should be glad to have been spared the doubt as to Mr. Lowell's accuracy and authority as a verbal critic suggested by his off-hand emendation of a phrase which he has remembered for its alliterative sweetness while he has missed its sense and forgotten the context. In the line "Fayre Venice," etc., which occurs not at the beginning, but near the end, of the sonnet, "lost" would be so contradictory to the sense that any editor who had found the word thus printed and had failed to substitute "last" would have betrayed inexcusable negligence. Spenser, writing while Venice, though declined from the height of her greatness, was still flourishing as well as fair, considers her as the marvel of his own age—the "last," i.e., latest, world—as Babylon and Rome, with which he compares her, had been the marvels of antiquity, of worlds that were indeed lost.6 Slips of this kind are probably rare, but a prevailing tendency to put forward loose or fanciful conjectures as ex-cathedrâ rulings detracts from the pleasure and instruction to be derived from these essays.