, his debt to Coleridge or the author of
_Omegarus and Syderia_ is neither more nor less legitimate than the debt
to Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Joel, which a writer in the _Imperial
Magazine_ (1828, x. 699), with solemn upbraidings, lays to his charge.

The duty of acknowledging such debts is, indeed, "a duty of imperfect
obligation." The well-known lines in Tennyson's _Locksley Hall_--

"Heard the heavens fill with shouting, and there rained a ghastly dew
From the nations' airy navies grappling in the central blue!"

is surely an echo of an earlier prophecy from the pen of the author of
_Omegarus and Syderia_: "In the center the heavens were seen darkened by
legions of armed vessels, making war on each other!... The soldiers fell
in frightful numbers.... Their blood stained the soft verdure of the
trees, and their scattered bleeding limbs covered the fields and the
roofs of the labourers' cottages" (i. 68). But such "conveyings" are
honourable to the purloiner. See, too, the story of the battle between
the Vulture-cavalry and the Sky-gnats, in Lucian's _Verae Historiae_, i.
16.]

[57] {44}

["If thou speak'st false,
Upon the next tree shalt thou hang alive,
Till famine cling thee."

_Macbeth_, act V. sc. 5, lines 38-40.

Fruit is said to be "clung" when the skin shrivels, and a corpse when
the face becomes wasted and gaunt.]

[58] {45}[So, too, Vathek and Nouronihar, in the Hall of Eblis, waited
"in direful suspense the moment which should render them to each other
... objects of terror."--_Vathek_, by W. Beckford, 1887, p. 185.]

[59] [Charles Churchill was born in February, 1731, and died at
Boulogne, November 4, 1764. The body was brought to Dover and buried in
the churchyard attached to the demolished church of St. Martin-le-Grand
("a small deserted cemetery in an obscure lane behind [i.e. above] the
market"). See note by Charles De la Pryme, _Notes and Queries_, 1854,
Series I. vol. x. p. 378. There is a tablet to his memory on the south
wall of St. Mary's Church, and the present headstone in the graveyard
(it was a "plain headstone" in 1816) bears the following inscription:--

"1764.
Here lie the remains of the celebrated
C. Churchill.
'Life to the last enjoy'd, here Churchill lies.'"

Churchill had been one of Byron's earlier models, and the fo