Norman Douglas:
"I should apologise for inserting this well-known lyric but for the fact that so perfect a specimen of the Golden Period cannot be excluded from a collection like this. The smoothness of the versification: the glamour that hangs about mysterious regions like Tierra del Fuego: the wistfulness of the opening lines and the anticlimax of the last one – they all testify to the genius of the Unknown Poet.

"It is not surprising that the young man in question should have suffered from melancholia. Travellers concur in stating that this is one of the gloomiest landscapes on earth; a desolation of fog, drizzle, and snow. Charles Darwin, in his Voyage of the Beagle, tells us that "Death, instead of Life, seems the predominant spirit" of those parts, and a more recent writer, Metcalfe, reports that the natives are letting themselves die out, apparently, from "sheer weariness of living."

"I cannot say how that rubber came to reach Cape Horn; maybe it was bartered by the mate of a passing whaler for a dozen sea-otter skins. These appliances are supposed to be of French origin, but they must have been already known at the Byzantine Court, if what Gibbon calls "the most detestable precautions" of Theodora were of this kind. And some curious material has now come to light (Prof. O. Schwanzerl, Kondonsgebrauch im frühesten Mittelalter, Budapesht, 1903) showing that they were in use under the Merovingians. They were made of deerskin – gegerbtes Hirschleder – and smeared with tallow – Unschlick – to facilitate penetration. (For an analogous use of leather see Mime VI and VII of Herodas). The invention was attributed to the Queen who, while fond of lovers, insisted, and rightly, on the legitimacy of her offspring.