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Updated: May 3, 2025
In 1726, La Fontaine, at the instance of a lady who owed her life to it, the countess of Bouillon, composed a poem in two cantos to celebrate its virtues; but the remarkable beauty of the leaves of the cinchona and the delicious fragrance of its flowers, with allusions to which he might have adorned his verses, were still unknown in Europe.
Wherefore since a great piece of the night still remained, they departed together and went to the place indicated, and there found a mat fixed to the wall, which they lightly raised and found a recess in the wall which neither of them had ever seen, nor knew that it was there; and there they found certain writings all mouldy with the damp of the wall and ready to rot had they stayed there much longer; and when they had carefully removed the mould and read, they saw that they contained the thirteen cantos so long sought by them.
The third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold, published in 1816 and 1818, respectively, are far superior to the first two. These later cantos continue the travels of Harold, and contain some of Byron's most splendid descriptions of nature, cities, and works of art. Rome, Venice, the Rhine, the Alps, and the sea inspired the finest lines. He wrote of Venice as she
Pope's masterpiece is, perhaps, the Rape of the Lock, a mock heroic poem, a "dwarf Iliad" recounting, in five cantos, a society quarrel, which arose from Lord Petre's cutting a lock of hair from the head of Mrs. Arabella Fermor. Boileau, in his Lutrin, had treated with the same epic dignity a dispute over the placing of the reading-desk in a parish church.
Here the souls of men were to be cleansed of their sins that they might be pure in their final ecstasy. A revolt against his patron led the poet to follow him to Verona, where they both dwelt in friendship with the young prince, Cane della Scala. The later cantos of the great poem, the Divine Comedy, were sent to this ruler as they were written.
No one with any tincture of literary knowledge is ignorant of the fame at least of the great Malatesta family the house of the Wrongheads, as they were rightly called by some prevision of their future part in Lombard history. The readers of the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth cantos of the 'Inferno' have all heard of
"Yes; but look out for the booksellers when you publish anything, if you have not yet begun; they are greater robbers than Barabbas." "I shall not have anything to do with these gentlemen till I am an old man." "Then they will be the scourge of your old age." Thereupon I quoted a Macaronic verse by Merlin Coccaeus. "Where's that from?" "It's a line from a celebrated poem in twenty-four cantos."
The Poem of Coeur-de-Lion has been already mentioned, and the wider form and aim it had got since he first took it in hand. It was above a year before the date of these tragedies and changes, that he had sent me a Canto, or couple of Cantos, of Coeur-de-Lion; loyally again demanding my opinion, harsh as it had often been on that side.
I did; but my work is more extensive than his, and my imagination has taken in it a greater scope. Boileau. Some critics may doubt whether the length of your poem was so properly suited to the meanness of the subject as the brevity of his. Three cantos to expose a dunce crowned with laurel! I have not given above three lines to the author of the "Pucelle." Pope.
Scarcely have they learned by heart the rudiments, without in the least understanding them, before they are taught to utter a French discourse in Latin words; and, when further advanced, to string together in prose, phrases from Cicero and cantos from Virgil. Then they imagine they are speaking Latin, and who is there to contradict them?
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