Note 49 — THE ROUND TABLE (continued 2)

The following version, communicated by a classical friend, is exact and elegant:

‘He said; and strait the herald Argicide

Beneath his feet his winged sandals tied,

Immortal, golden, that his flight could bear

O’er seas and lands, like waftage of the air.

His rod too, that can close the eyes of men

In balmy sleep, and open them again,

He took, and holding it in hand, went flying:

Till, from Pieria’s top the sea descrying,

Down to it sheer he dropp’d; and scour’d away

Like the wild gull, that, fishing o’er the bay,

Flaps on, with pinions dipping in the brine;—

So went on the far sea the shape divine.’

Odyssey, book v.

——‘That was Arion crown’d:—

So went he playing on the wat’ry plain.’

Faerie Queen.

There is a striking description in Mr. Burke’s Reflections of the late Queen of France, whose charms had left their poison in the heart of this Irish orator and patriot, and set the world in a ferment sixteen years afterwards. ‘And surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision.’ The idea is in Don Quixote, where the Duenna speaks of the air with which the Duchess ‘treads, or rather seems to disdain the ground she walks on.’ We have heard the same account of the gracefulness of Marie Antoinette from an artist, who saw her at Versailles much about the same time that Mr. Burke did. He stood in one corner of a little antechamber, and as the doors were narrow, she was obliged to pass sideways with her hoop. She glided by him in an instant, as if borne on a cloud.