ODE TO NAPOLEON BUONAPARTE Expende Annibalem :- -quot libras in duce summo Invenies? JUVENAL, Sat. x. 'The Emperor Nepos was acknowledged by the Senate, by the Italians, and by the Provincials of Gaul; his moral virtues, and military talents, were loudly celebrated; and those who derived any private benefit from his government announced in prophetic strains the restoration of public felicity. By this shameful abdication, he protracted his life a few years, in a very ambiguous state, between an Emperor and an Exile, till GIBBON's Decline and Fall, vol. vi. p. 220. [Byron, when publishing The Corsair, in January, 1814, announced an apparently quite serious resolution to withdraw, for some years at least, from poetry. His letters, of the February and March following, abound in repetitions of the same determination. On the morning of the ninth of April, he writes: 'No more rhyme for- or rather from me. I have taken my leave of that stage, and henceforth will mountebank it no longer.' In the evening, a Gazette Extraordinary announced the abdication of Fontainebleau, and the poet violated his vows next morning, by composing this Ode, which he immediately published, though without his name. His diary says: 'April 10. To-day I have boxed one hourwritten an Ode to Napoleon Buonapartecopied it eaten six biscuits - drunk four bottles of soda water, and redde away the rest of my time.'] - A strict accountant of his beads, But thou-from thy reluctant hand Too late thou leav'st the high command It is enough to grieve the heart To see thine own unstrung; To think that God's fair world hath been The footstool of a thing so mean; And Earth hath spilt her blood for him, Thine evil deeds are writ in gore, If thou hadst died as honour dies, To shame the world again Weigh'd in the balance, hero dust Is vile as vulgar clay; Thy scales, Mortality! are just But yet methought the living great 70 81 90 100 Nor deem'd Contempt could thus make mirth Of these, the Conquerors of the earth. And she, proud Austria's mournful flower, Thy still imperial bride; 110 How bears her breast the torturing hour? Thou throneless Homicide? If still she loves thee, hoard that gem; 'Tis worth thy vanish'd diadem! |