y and
unconnected language are his lordship's own, and nothing short of a
complete recast could improve it materially: however, to make the verses
such as Byron most probably wrote them, an alteration of little more than
_one letter_ is required. For "wasted," read "washed;" to supply the
deficient syllable, insert "yet" or "still" after "they," and remove the
semicolon in the next line from the middle to the end of the verse. Then
the stanza runs thus:

"Thy shores are empires, changed in all save thee;
Assyria, Greece, Rome, Carthage, where are they?
Thy waters wash'd them while they yet were free,
And many a tyrant since their shores obey,
The stranger, slave, or savage--their decay
Has dried up realms to deserts," &c.

The sentiment is clear enough, although not well expressed; and the use of
the present tense, "obey," for "have obeyed," is not at all warranted by
the usage of our language. In plain prose, it means--

"Thy waters washed their shores while they were independent, and do so
still, although many a race of tyrants has successively reigned over
them since then: their decay has converted many fertile regions to
wildernesses, but thou art still unchanged."

Not having your earlier volumes at hand, I cannot be sure that these
conjectures of mine are original (the correction in the punctuation of the
fourth line certainly is not), and have only to request the {482}
forbearance of any of your correspondents whose "thunder" I may have
unwittingly appropriated.

J. S. WARDEN.

_Errors in Punctuation_ (Vol. viii., p. 217.).--Every one must agree with
R. H. C. as to the importance of correct punctuation; and it may easily be
supposed how it must puzzle readers of works whose language is in great
part obsolete, to meet with mistakes of this kind, when we find modern
writers frequently rendered almost unintelligible by similar errors. To
take those whose works have, perhaps, been oftener reprinted than any
others of this century, Byron and Scott, the foregoing passage in _Childe
Harold_ is a signal instance; and as another, the Sonnet translated by
Byron from Vittorelli, has only had corrected in the very latest editions,
an error in the punctuation of the first two lines which rendered them a
mystery to those who did not understand the original, as printed on the
opposite page. In note 12 to the 5th Canto of _Marmion_, every edition,
British or foreign, down to the present d