Specimen of a Commentary on an Abandoned Sonnet
1. The author is discovered in a chapel dedicated to the memory of his vaunted ancestors.2. He is surrounded by marble busts. There is also a knight’s helmet and a carved upraised hand clutching an amputated bird’s leg, claws pointing to the ground.
3. There is nowhere he can look without seeing his name.
4. Here is Ethelbert and here is Henshaw.
5. One went to the New World and came back. The names of those who did not return go unmentioned.
6. One was an unbiased and uncorrupt Senator, indeed a Virtuous Citizen. He recommended his Soul to his Maker without a Sigh or Groan, Aged Fifty seven Years.
7. The author is also 57 years old.
8. A cherub is turning the pages of a marble book, displaying the text Blessed Are The Dead Which Die In The Lord. Flaxman Fecit.
9. They were all swallowed up in the great deep in one instant on their passage from Genoa to Marseilles in the Errolano steam packet which was sunk with almost all the passengers by a dreadful collision with another vessel off Antibes, on the night of April 24th 1854.
10. They were lovely and pleasant in their lives and in their death they were not divided.
11. Lector, ab Sinc æternitatem cogita.
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