Here the Welsh irruption is a Chevy Chase; next we have the countess for a disputed Helen.
The lady's lord is not a shining figure.

How can an undecided one be a dispenser of light?
Poetry could never allow him to say with her: 'Where'er I go I make a name, And leave a song to follow.' Yet he was the master of her fortunes at the time; all the material power was his.

Even doggerel verse (it is worth while to brood on the fact) denies a surviving pre-eminence to the potent moody, reverses the position between the driven and the driver.

Poetry, however erratic, is less a servant of the bully Present, or pomlious Past, than History.

The Muse of History has neither the same divination of the intrinsic nor the devotion to it, though truly, she has possession of all the positive matter and holds us faster by the crediting senses.
Nine English cavaliers, then, left London early on a January or February morning in a Southerly direction, bearing East; and they were the Earl of Fleetwood's intimates, of the half-dependent order; so we may suppose them to have gone at his bidding.