Note 4 — Front matter (continued 3)

By a curious lapsus in Keat's otherwise perfect poem, On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, Cortés, conqueror of Mexico, is substituted for Balboa, discoverer of the Pacific—

"Then felt I like some watcher of the skies,

When a new planet swims into his ken,

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes

He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

Silent, upon a peak in Darien."

Cortés was never at Darien, nor nearer to it than Honduras, or Santo Domingo.