In Lieu of an Introduction

. . . he recommended to all those who might be impressed with a sense of their importance to bury a copy or copies of each work properly secured from damp, &c. at a depth of seven or eight feet below the surface of the earth; and on their death-beds to communicate the knowledge of this fact to some confidential friends, who in their turn were to send down the tradition to some discreet persons of the next generation; and thus . . . the knowledge that here and there the truth lay buried . . . and was to rise again in some distant age . . . —this knowledge at least was to be whispered down from generation to generation.

—Thomas De Quincey, “Walking Stewart”

Livius Andronicus: An Odyssey is peregrinatory, and an Iliad, no doubt, genocidal, but an Idyssey is gestational as regards idiosyncrasy--or oddness.

Dr Johnson: Nothing odd will do long. Tristram Shandy did not last.

Mrs Thatcher: There is no such thing as a womb with a view.

Ben Jonson: By G—, ’tis good, and if you like’t, you may!

—Petrus Tornarius, Imaginary Conversations

Snatched from the great gulf, like oysters by bibliomaniac pearl divers, . . . they first rot, then what was pearl . . . may be seen as such, and continue as such.

—Thomas Carlyle, The French Revolution, ch. 5, “The Fourth Estate”

Bellerophon

A Full, True, and Particular Account of the Execution of Robert Hartley, Who Was Hanged on Penenden Heath, Near Maidstone, in Kent, on Thursday Last, the 2d January, 1823, for Wilfully Stabbing Captain Owen, of the Bellerophon Convict Ship, at Sheerness, on the 29th of August Last, Where the Prisoner Was Confined as a Convict : Together With His Behaviour After Condemnation, and at the Place of Execution . . .

Some tales,—no, all!—are just too rich to tell,

Among them that of HMS Bellerophon

A third-rate warship in Britain's Royal Navy,

Whose sailors called her Billy Ruffian,

Pretending themselves too proud to pronounce Greek,

Which fought in the three great battles

Of the War at sea, and from the last of them,

Trafalgar, brought home the corpse of Admiral Nelson

Pickled in brandy in a cask, like peaches in a jar.

They fought in those days for Glory, la gloire.

If that were not enough for fame, ten years later,

Defeated Napoleon surrendered to her captain after Waterloo.

Then in the long sniveling years of peace,

renamed Captivity in 1824,

She carried convicts to Australia.

They broke her up I read in ’36.

To build a ship like that took four thousand trees,*

For hearts of oak must pay a price like these!

*Building an eighteenth-century ship of the line typically required between 2,000 and 6,000 mature trees, mostly oak. Smaller ships of the line used around 2,000 to 4,000 trees, while massive first-rate flagships like HMS Victory took up to 6,000 trees.—Gemini AI

Saturday, October 17, 2026

The Cat of the Revenge

I am a Spanish cat of noble birth.

Saved from the sinkingTrinidad

at Trafalgar, on HMS Revenge I met

a naked lady named Jeanette

who’d leapt down from the burning deck

when French Achille went to heck.*

They dressed her in a shirt and trews.

We snuggled, never mind the news.

She took me with her to Toulon,

a city eastward on the Gulf of Lion.

I'm quite at home in Occitane—

Where no one cares from whence I came.

As things turned out, I live in state—

with such fine wine, the cat food's great!

*This part of the story is, or may be, true. See Noël Mostert,The Line upon a Wind: The Great War at Sea, 1793–1815 (New York: Norton, 2008), 506: "The woman's name was Jeanette and she was eventually reunited with her sailor husband." But the tale about being taken to France is wishful thinking on the part of the cat, which had grown old as the beloved mascot of the Revenge and was sick and tired of eating ship's biscuit (kibbles not yet having been invented).

Friday, October 16, 2026