Note 64 — CANTO II. CONJURATIONS!

To make above ground one d—d flurry!

I earnestly request that the learned college will not do me the injustice to suppose that a man of my delicacy and refined feelings would myself utter any phrase like the above, which has so much the semblance of profanity. But as this personage, before he passed that fatal “bourne” (from which one “traveller” has “returned”) had ever been accustomed, like most of our profession, to rhetorical flourishes of this kind, it must be expected that, on such an important occasion, he would express himself with all his wonted energy; and my veracity as a historian obliges me to give verbatim the speech which the sprite did in fact deliver.