Mr Melancholy Slow!

• The Traveller, or A Prospect of Society: A philosophical poem by Oliver Goldsmith. The opening lines are:

Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,
Or by the lazy Scheld, or wandering Po

• Stephen Dedalus: Joyce's description of his maundering pote owes much to Wyndham Lewis's description of Stephen Dedalus in Time and Western Man (1927):

But if they are clichés, Stephan Dedalus is a worse or a far more glaring one. He is the really wooden figure. He is ‛the poet’ to an uncomfortable, a dismal, a ridiculous, even a pulverizing degree. His movements in the Martello-tower, his theatrical ‘bitterness,’ his cheerless, priggish stateliness, his gazings into the blue distance, his Irish Accent, his exquisite sensitiveness, his ‘pride’ that is so crude as to be almost indecent, the incredible slowness with which he gets about from place to place, up the stairs, down the stairs, like a funereal stage-king; the time required for him to move his neck, how he raises his hand, passes it over his aching eyes, or his damp brow, even more wearily drops it, closes his dismal little shutters against his rollicking irish-type of a friend (in his capacity of a type-poet), and remains sententiously secluded, shut up in his own personal Martello-tower. (Lewis 113-114)