More interesting are narratives of
the suggestion of some of his verses, as the slave-market in _Don Juan_,
and the spectacle of the dead criminal tossed on the waves, revived in the
_Bride of Abydos_. One example is, if we except Dante's _Ugolino_, the
most remarkable instance in literature of the expansion, without the
weakening, of the horrible. Take first Mr. Hobhouse's plain prose: "The
sensations produced by the state of the weather"--it was wretched and
stormy when they left the "Salsette" for the city--"and leaving a
comfortable cabin, were in unison with the impressions which we felt when,
passing under the palace of the Sultans, and gazing at the gloomy cypress
which rises above the walls, we saw two dogs gnawing a dead body." After
this we may measure the almost fiendish force of a morbid imagination
brooding over the incident,--
And he saw the lean dogs beneath the wall
Hold o'er the dead their carnival:
Gorging and growling o'er carcass and limb,
They were too busy to bark at him.
From a Tartar's skull they had stripp'd the flesh,
As ye peel the fig when its fruit is fresh;
And their white tusks crunch'd on the whiter skull,
As it slipp'd through their jaws when their edge grow dull.
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