ABSTRACT
Text and publication First publ. M & W, 10 Nov. 1855; repr. 1863 (when it was placed in ‘Romances’: see Appendix D, p. 747), 18652, 1868, 1872, 1888. Our text is 1855. B.’s fair copy of ll. 137-48 (the last twelve lines of the poem) is in Berg. It is written on the first leaf of a four-sided sheet of notepaper, with B.’s crest; to the right of the crest is the heading ‘In memoriam | Johannis Conington’; at the bottom is a note: ‘(From “A Grammarian’s Funeral.”)’, followed by B.’s signature and the date, 1 Nov. 1869 (shortly after Conington’s funeral, according to the Berg catalogue entry). Conington (1825-1869) was an Oxford classical scholar whom B. may have met through his friendship with Benjamin Jowett, the Master of Balliol College; B. received an honorary degree from Oxford in 1868. Collections (E153) mistakenly records the extract as beginning at l. 135. B. probably copied the lines from 1863, not its revised reissue 1865: see ll. 137n., 143n.
