Fair Venice, flower of the last world's delight.
We fail to get any light from these quotations, and we should be glad to have been spared the doubt as to Mr. Lowell's accuracy and authority as a verbal critic suggested by his off-hand emendation of a phrase which he has remembered for its alliterative sweetness while he has missed its sense and forgotten the context. In the line "Fayre Venice," etc., which occurs not at the beginning, but near the end, of the sonnet, "lost" would be so contradictory to the sense that any editor who had found the word thus printed and had failed to substitute "last" would have betrayed inexcusable negligence. Spenser, writing while Venice, though declined from the height of her greatness, was still flourishing as well as fair, considers her as the marvel of his own age--the "last," i.e., latest, world--as Babylon and Rome, with which he compares her, had been the marvels of antiquity, of worlds that were indeed lost.[6] Slips of this kind are probably rare, but a prevailing tendency to put forward loose or fanciful conjectures as _ex-cathedrâ_ rulings detracts from the pleasure and instruction to be derived from these essays.
[Footnote 6: Here is the sonnet, that the reader may judge for himself:
"The antique Babel, Empresse of the East, Upreard her buildinges to the threatned skie; And second Babell, Tyrant of the West, Her ayry towers upraised much more high. But, with the weight of their own surquedry, They both are fallen, that all the earth did feare, And buried now in their own ashes ly: Yet shewing, by their heapes, how great they were. But in their place doth now a third appeare, Fayre Venice, flower of the last world's delight; And next to them in beauty draweth neare, But far exceedes in policie of right. Yet not so fayre her buildinges to behold As Lewkenor's stile that hath her beautie told."]
The Excavation of Olympia, by Ernst Curtius; and Ernst Curtius, by Prof. Robert P. Keep, Ph. D. Republished from _International Review_. New York: A.S. Barnes & Co.
History of the United States. By J.A. Doyle, with Maps by Francis A. Walker. (Freeman's Historical Course for Schools.) New York: Henry Holt & Co.
Our National Currency and the Money Problem. By Hon. Amasa Walker, LL.D. New York: A.S. Barnes & Co.