An Unsolicited Analysis of the Louvre Heist

In the late Sixteenth Century, King Henry IV wanted space at the Louvre to flaunt his sweet art collection. Got it, his builders said, and they added a long second-story hall atop the Petite Galerie wing. In 1661, a fire destroyed that gallery, as some fires do. By then, Louis XIV was in charge. Louis had the hall rebuilt to hype his Sun King persona. The lavish hall, dubbed the Galerie d'Apollon, included a grand balcony overlooking the Seine so that royal-type things could happen out there. It was below this balcony where, on Sunday, October 19^th, 2025, at 0930 local time, four guys parked a basket lift.

Seven minutes later, the guys made off with an estimated €88 million chunk of the French Crown Jewels. It could've been more, but mistakes were made.

THE SET-UP

A few days earlier, a few guys arrived at an equipment rental company north of Paris. Their construction gig required a basket lift, or so they said. Très bien, the rental company said, but this being France, the guys had to come by for training and paperwork. The crew jacked the lift right off the lot.

Only two guys rode up that lift and went inside the Louvre. By all reports, they knew what they were after, and they carried what was required. No guns were spotted throughout the crime. Rifles would've slowed them down, and there wasn't going to be a gunfight.

It bears repeating that this was the Louvre. That Louvre, the one that 8.7 million people visited in 2024, more than any other museum. On October 19^th, the Louvre opened at its standard 09h00. Thousands of people streamed inside. Outside, thousands more gawked and wandered. Cars and tour buses rumbled past. Down on the Seine, cruising bateaux would have phone cameras trained on the palace. Being this famous– this observed– lent the Louvre a sense of untouchability.

Which proved a vulnerability. 

THE BUDGET

The Louvre isn't just the most visited museum on Earth. It's also the world's largest museum. The Denon Wing, which includes the Galerie d'Apollon, runs along the river for over a half-kilometre. In all, the Louvre has hundreds of rooms with thousands of entry points to secure.

And the Louvre was already old when Henry IV sought his art collection flex. Today, repairs and refurbishments are never-ending. The Denon Wing façade, for example. Its slow restoration inured any onlookers to what was definitely not two construction guys rising toward that Galerie d'Apollon balcony.

The Louvre was on notice. Forget 1911's theft of the Mona Lisa. In September 2025 alone, robberies hit the Adrien Dubouche Museum in Limoges and Paris' National History Museum. The thing is, security upgrades aren't simple installations when the palace itself is part of the display. The rooms must be retrofitted, and upgrades can't impede visitor flow or buzzkill the palatial vibe. 

Audits showed that the Louvre's security had fallen behind and estimated the price tag to catch up at €800 million. You know, public audits. The shortfalls extended to operating budgets. The Louvre had trimmed security staff to balance the books. Rightly, those guards raised a stink about fewer staff watching mounting crowds. You know, a public stink.

A museum's risk calculus hinges on the bad guy's reality: Art theft doesn't pay. This kind of job costs seed money. If it comes off, and if the manhunt can be eluded, and if the pieces aren't ruined in the process, no viable market exists for one-of-a-kind paintings or sculptures. The only options are to offload the haul for a pittance--with deep, survival-based reasons to suspect any potential buyers--or ransom back the haul. 

The calculus flaw: The Louvre has more than art on display. 

THE LOOT

If you've been an imperial player nation long enough, you've banked coin on trade and accumulated your share of plunder. You've dug up prehistoric artifacts and developed ceremonial accoutrements. Such is France. Housed in the Galerie d'Apollon are Charlemagne's sword, blinged-out crowns, and some of the world's most famous mega-diamonds.

Now, you can't sell a 56-karat renowned diamond any easier than you could the Venus de Milo. But diamonds can be cut. Gold is quickly melted. The result is fast, untraceable currency.

THE STRATEGY

Sunday morning. Traffic is lighter. The world moves a little slower. Less of a museum crowd to complain, probably less security. The timing's brilliance is its understanding, thirty minutes after opening, where that crowd would be. The Louvre is sprawling. It takes a while to check a bag, to ooh and aah, to decide where to start. At 0930, the crowd is still clustered near the entrance. Security clusters accordingly. 

At 0934, the two guys used a disc cutter to defeat the Galerie window glass. An alarm sounded. Security on duty radioed in about the intrusion. Security retreated, correctly, when the guys flashed power tools. Museum security's priority is crowd safety, and this job started out looking like a terrorist attack. While the Louvre moved into evacuation mode, the guys had a free shot. 

THE MISTAKES

Early accounts of the heist were clouded in shock value. These guys had outdone a movie plot, so they must've been a real-life Ocean's Eleven. Brash opportunists, yes. Brilliant in their boldness, yes. Consummate professionals? Consider what went wrong.

Mistake 1: Thinking narrowly.

The guys weren't looking for large objects, so in the interest of speed, they cut small holes in the display glass, so small that they struggled to reach in and grab their targets. They scraped up Empress Eugénie's crown while wriggling it through the tight opening. The crown, it should be mentioned, contains a reputed 1,354 diamonds and 56 emeralds.

Again, this was the Louvre and the French Crown Jewels. There wouldn't be just a little heat after this job. You can't just lie low. Every asset the French had or any favor they could call in would be deployed out of national pride. Out of political imperative. In retrospect, big thinking by one lens is myopic by another.

Mistake 2: Taking too long. 

Seven minutes. Three inside the Galerie. In jewel heist terms, this is an eternity's eternity. The guys must've understood they had a longer time window with the Louvre's scale. The guys put those extra minutes to use. 

This failed to account for other moving parts. Security knew exactly where the guys entered. While the guys were cutting display cases, guards outside rallied toward the basket lift.

Mistake 3: Dropping stuff. 

Eugénie's crown hadn't suffered its last indignity. By when the guys rode back down, a situation was already developing on Quai du Louvre. In their haste to clean up and bug out, the crown fell onto the street, bedazzled jewelry and all. It lay damaged and abandoned for hours.

Mistake 4: Failing to torch the basket lift. 

What the hell to do with a stolen basket lift was always going to be troublesome. The guys couldn't hightail out anywhere in that thing. By then, this was the most recognizable truck in France. The solution? The guys poured accelerant on the truck and tried to torch it along with their discarded equipment.

Too late. Security was already engaged. Guards stopped the fire while the guys sped off with the eight pieces they hadn't dropped.

This is 2025. Closed-circuit TV is everywhere. Smartphone clips, traffic cameras. Recreating the approach and escape routes would be simple enough. And there is always trace evidence. French authorities found beaucoup at the scene for their forensics gurus, over 150 samples and even more in physical evidence, headgear, cutting tools, the works.

The French have been canny about how much they knew and how quickly. But they knew a lot quickly, enough to arrest suspects as they tried to flee the country.

THE CRIME OF THE CENTURIES

The stolen jewels haven't been recovered. It's a fair wager that the cutting started quickly. If the French do recover anything, that feels almost accidental at this point, another mistake in a crime born and unraveled from mistakes. 

No matter how this ends, a few things will remain clear. Fortune favors the bold, but history tends to even the score.

Quantum Criminals: Why Steely Dan Is The Most Noir Band Ever

steelydan.com

 A few years ago, I got a phone call from our own Brian Thornton. "Hey, man, I got something up your alley. I just agreed to do two anthologies for Down & Out Books based on Steely Dan, and I had two dropouts. Can you help?"

Could I? We went through the list of available songs, me avoiding the much maligned Everything Must Go. We came up with the standalone single "FM," which wasn't a very good story title. But a line from the chorus, "No Static at All," was. I had Brian his story in about a month. 

One of the anthologies, Die Behind the Wheel, is still available after Down & Out called it a run, mostly used copies and stray bookstore inventory. The other, A Beast Without a Name, which my story appears in, might turn up on Thriftbooks.com. Still, it was an obvious prompt, one I may take up myself if I can find an interested publisher, a couple of name writers, and enough stories based on the title. (Cornelia Read, inbox me. You live in Becker and Fagen's old stomping ground!)

More recently, I listened to Alex Papademas's Quantum Criminals on audio. Papademas, a writer for Pitchfork when it was a plucky independent music site run by a bunch of over-caffienated Millennials just pretentious enough to give me a run for my money writing about music. He once was a self-described Steely Dan hater because that's what that generation did back in the early 2000s. Now?

He played Aja one night and realized he actually loved Steely Dan. More importantly, he loved the characters, who are, to a person, noir as hell. A couple would be right at home in a Charles Bukowski story. And why not? Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were two of the grumpiest men in rock. And unlike the scowling Robert Fripp of King Crimson fame, they never aged into a phase where they poked fun at themselves for taking themselves too seriously. Fagen still gets a bit pompous talking about Dan's music. And yet we still love them and their rogues' gallery of gamblers, ramblers, perverts, and losers. 

Right off the bat, Steely Dan gives us Jack, who beats a man to death for stealing his water, but is saved because "the hangman isn't hanging." He then "loves a little wild but she brings you only sorrow." Then ends up in Vegas fighting the cards in a losing battle. Jack is the ultimate loser.

Then there's the poor guy, probably the generic character Papademas calls "Mr. Steely Dan," whom we meet on every album. On Can't Buy a Thrill, Mr. Dan is trapped in an affair with a married woman. He wants to walk away, but as "Dirty Work" tells us, he'll come running "like a thousand times before."

And then there's "Felonious," the "Midnight Cruiser," an obvious reference to Thelonius Monk and his wrongful arrest on heroin charges. Monk, a jazz musician Becker, Fagen, and longtime guitarist Denny Diaz admired, was notoriously surly, known for putting the famously hard-nosed Miles Davis in his place, and, as Papademas describes him, plays the piano like a weapon.

Mr.Steely Dan is the most common and morally ambiguous character in Steely Dan's catalog, showing up on every album -- a nostalgic time traveler with questionable racial views ("I would love to tour the Southland in a traveling minstrel show."), as the last man on Earth reading old newspapers and looking for survivors on an old ham radio, and a hedonistic LA denizen trying to have a drug-fueled threesome. He's even a failure-to-launch novelist on Steely Dan's return album Two Against Nature in "What a Shame About Me."

But there are others. There's Dr. Wu, either a drug dealer or a lover's other boyfriend whom the unknown narrator befriends. Depending on interpretation of "Doctor Wu," the Katy who lied is either a double-dealing woman (from a catalog full of double dealing lovers from "Rose Darling" to "Gaslighting Abby") or drugs. Yes, the Dan had issues "chasing the dragon," even explicitly stated in "Time Out of Mind."

There's Mr. LaPage, content to show "movies" in his den and likely would be in the Epstein Files today. There is "Deacon Blues," the doomed jazz musician prowling the suburbs for married lovers and drinking way too much. That's a James M. Cain novel in the making.

Then we have the real-life acid chef Owsley Stanley in "Kid Charlemagne." The line "Yes, there's gas in the car" is a cultural touchstone. But Stanley is not the only real-life character in Steely Dan's music.

Fagen himself is part of two autobiographical songs: "Rikki, Don't Lose My Number" and "My Old School," both referencing incidents at Becker and Fagen's alma mater, Bard College in Annandale, New York.  The former references a faculty wife named Rikki whom Fagen had grown close to. Papademas is cagey about how close, but he does relate how she went through a dark phase. The song is about how Fagen hoped she'd reach out before it was too late. The latter song involves a raid by that great moral crusader G. Gordon Liddy, then a prosecutor running for college. Liddy, seeking headlines, raided Bard College. Fagen and Becker got caught in the sweep, along with a female friend in for the weekend. Being students, the college got them released. There friend? Ended up "with the working girls in the county jail."

Walter Becker and Donald Fagen either lived enough noir (other than time travel and nuclear war) or knew enough of these characters to fill a dozen more albums had Becker lived long enough. Being perfectionists, they only did nine albums. That's enough darkness for anyone. And, like the great noir writers of old, they left us wanting more.

 

Critias: Leader of the Thirty Athenian Tyrants– Putting the Terror into Tyranny (436–403 B.C.)

Continuing to excerpt my book The Book of Ancient Bastards. This week: Critias the Athenian tyrant!

*    *    *

Let it not be in the power of Critias to strike off either me, or any one of you whom he will. But in my case, in what may be your case, if we are tried, let our trial be in accordance with the law they have made concerning those on the list… [Y]ou must see that the name of every one of you is as easily erased as mine.

 —Athenian politician Theramenes, quoted in Xenophon’s Hellenica 

Playwright, poet, scholar, great-uncle of the famous Athenian philosopher Plato (and contemporary of Plato’s even more famous teacher Socrates), Critias was renowned for much of his life as a writer whose work was in demand. He was even featured as the titular character in one of Plato’s dialogues, The Critias. 

Too bad he ended his life as a blood-soaked traitor to everything his city had once stood for, a classic example of conservative overreaction resulting in the loss of much life and property. 

By 404 B.C., Athens had lost its decades-long war with Sparta. As a result of the humiliating peace treaty, the Athenian city walls were leveled, its navy dismantled, and a collection of thirty oligarchs who favored Sparta were placed in charge of the government. Critias, a follower of fellow Athenian bastard Alcibiades during the war, was named one of these oligarchs (known afterward as “The Thirty Tyrants”). 

Critias, a strong personality with lots of scores to settle and bitterness eating away at his very soul, soon embarked on a vendetta against anyone who had ever wronged him. What followed was a bloodbath, one of the first recorded political purges in history.  

“Day after day,” writes Xenophon, “the list of persons put to death for no just reason grew longer.” For every person he denounced and had put to death, Critias received his confiscated property as a reward. When the Athenian statesman Theramenes protested that The Thirty ought to be careful about killing people so indiscriminately, noting that today’s butcher is tomorrow’s butchered, Critias famously responded with a statement that would be echoed for years afterward by politicians conducting similar purges: “If any member of this council, here seated, imagines that an undue amount of blood has been shed, let me remind him that with changes of constitution such things cannot be avoided.” One of the first times a politician used some variation of the notion, “You can’t make any omelet without breaking a few eggs!” 

Critias went on to denounce his former friend Theramenes, calling him a traitor and enemy of both The Thirty and the Spartan troops who had placed them in power. After heated debate, Theramenes was dragged from the meeting and executed on the spot. 

Emboldened by this silencing of their most vocal critic, The Thirty went on to denounce and execute thousands of Athenian citizens, seizing their property as they went. Within a year, the oligarchs had become such an object of fear and hatred that the people rose against them. Critias was killed in the fighting that followed, and his memory was justly damned in the minds of his countrymen for decades afterwards.

See you in two weeks!

Another Friday Afternoon

Today was beautiful so I went for a bike ride (to be honest I do that every day unless it is seriously nasty).  I was in one of my city's oldest neighborhoods, with most of the houses built a century ago.

I saw two people walking toward me in the middle of the street.  This wasn't a dangerous place to do that; it was a quiet residential area.  

It was a man and a woman, both in their thirties, approximately the same in height and weight. The man had a small dog on a leash.

The woman was screaming -- no, shrieking -- at the top of her lungs.

"Get in the freaking car!  I'm not kidding! Get in the freaking car!"

Except she didn't say freaking, of course.

The man said "I'm not going anywhere with you!"

This discussion continued as a I rode past. I stopped a block away and tried to decide whether this merited a 9-1-1 call. I hadn't seen any physical contact, or heard any true threats.

While I considered an auto drove past me and I realized it was the couple in question.  The man had entered the freaking car.  I knew it was them because the woman was still shrieking, although I couldn't hear what she was saying.

Okay, the man had made his decision.  I rode on. 

A block later I had another thought: What if the genders had been reversed?

People of similar  age, height, and weight, but it was a man demanding that a woman get into a car.  What would I have done then?

I had no doubt: I would have called 9-1-1 and then gone over and asked the woman if she was okay.

Why in that order? Because I haven't been in a fist fight in sixty years, and I lost the last one.  Police backup would have been very useful.

Would I really have done that?  I think so but it is very easy to be brave when the threat is gone.

Will this find its way into my fiction someday?  Probably.

Anyway, that was my afternoon.  How was yours? 

Oh, and you might want to watch this video.  What they show is real, and it has worked.   

 

Use of Memory in Fiction

Last June, USA Today and Amazon best-selling and multi-award-nominated author Connie Berry shared the following essay with her newsletter readers. I immediately wanted to share her thoughts about using memory in a mystery’s plot. (I waited until now because, as you’ll see, Connie talks about June being a nostalgic month, but I find the holiday season to be nostalgic too, with friends and family coming together, remembering times gone by. So as we approach the holiday season, it seems the perfect time to share Connie’s thoughts about memory.) Thank you, Connie, for graciously allowing me to reprint this essay. 

--Barb Goffman 

 

Use of Memory in Fiction

by Connie Berry 

June is a nostalgic month for most people, bringing memories of family gatherings and vacations, high school and college reunions, weddings and anniversaries, and holidays like Fathers’ Day, Flag Day, and Juneteenth.

Last week I had a long phone conversation with my best friend from college. Patty and I haven’t seen each other in more than twenty years—and then only briefly—but she and I were very close during those formative years between 18 and 21.

We knew each other’s high school crushes, and we made up code words no one else understood. We laughed at the same silly jokes, and we pondered some of life’s most important questions.

Once, she stayed up all night with me, typing while I frantically wrote the English paper I had learned about the day before it was due (I'd cut a lot of classes).

We spent almost a year in Europe together, attending classes in Germany and England and driving all over Europe between terms in her little baby blue Karmann Ghia. She taught me to drive a stick shift, and I introduced her to my relatives in Norway.

Long before there was such a thing as the internet, smartphones, or streaming music, we bought a small record player and several albums. We wore those albums out--literally.

It’s fun looking back. It’s also interesting because, as we were sharing our memories (many decades later), we realized that the things we recollected weren’t always the same.

For example, she reminded me of driving in the hills above Monaco. A crazy driver overtook us on a blind curve. If a car had been coming from the opposite direction, we all would have been killed. My response (as she remembered it) was to say, “I refuse to die in Monaco!” I don’t remember that at all.

Then I reminded her that we met an elderly woman in our Monte Carlo pensione who claimed to be of Russian nobility. We thought she was making it up until she escorted us into the inner, private rooms at the famous casino. The attendants bowed to her, and she pointed out other Russian ex-pats— “That’s Count So-and-So.” My friend has no memory of that elderly woman.

Time flies, and memories differ. Writers can use that fact to create complexity and obscure clues in a murder investigation. Police will tell you that eyewitness accounts of a crime differ, even immediately after an event. After years have passed, people may have completely different accounts of something they both witnessed.

Is one of them lying, or is it simply a matter of human psychology? What is it that cements a memory in one person’s mind but not another’s?

Right now, I’m playing with this concept in my WIP. Human brains don’t retain perfect recordings. Instead, they selectively encode information based on individual factors such as emotions, interests, past experiences, and biases.

So how does someone seeking the truth sort through these differences? My protagonist is trying to figure that out. So am I.

Do you have a memory that no one else shares—even those present at the time? I’d love to hear about it!

 ----- 

Connie Berry, unashamed Anglophile and self-confessed history nerd, is the author of the USA Today and Amazon best-selling and multi-award-nominated Kate Hamilton Mysteries, set in the UK and featuring an American antiques dealer with a gift for solving crimes. Like her protagonist, Connie was raised by antiques dealers who instilled in her a passion for history, fine art, and travel. Connie is a member of the Crime Writers Association (UK), the Authors’ Guild, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, Buckeye Crime Writers, Grand Canyon Writers, and Guppies, of which she is the immediate past president. Her fourth book, The Shadow of Memory, was nominated for the Lilian Jackson Braun Award, and her fifth, A Collection of Lies, was nominated for the Agatha Award for Best Contemporary Novel. Her latest novel, A Grave Deception, will be released in early December 2025. Connie lives in Ohio and northern Wisconsin with her husband and adorable Shih Tzu, Emmie. You can sign up for her very entertaining monthly newsletter at www.connieberry.com.

You can’t get there from here.

“Ambiguous” is another way of saying, just not sure. After puzzle solving, it’s the most abiding element of crime writing. Our protagonists spend about three quarters of the book or short story feeling very unsure. This isn’t only because the author herself is usually caught between the multiple poles of her story, and is undecided about how it should all turn out. It’s also, more importantly, in the nature of any pursuit of the truth, because truth itself is a very slippery thing.

Most assume there is only one truth, and I’m partial to that idea myself. But people tend to disagree about what constitutes That One Truth, and since there is no objective arbiter to pick among the favorites, the question gets hurled into philosophical tracts, legal briefs, rabbinical debates and mystery stories.

It appears there is an inverse correlation between a person’s general awareness of the world and confidence in their beliefs. That is, the more you know, the less sure you are. And vice versa. When you dive into any subject, you soon learn it’s filled with subtlety, nuance and conflicting conclusions. And ambiguity. It’s a lot easier not to bother with all that stuff, make up your mind and stick with it no matter what. But I think the opposite approach is worth the effort.

According to Zeno’s Dichotomy Paradox, reaching any destination is impossible if with every step you halve the distance. Numbers being what they are, the halves are infinite, and thus your goal unreachable. Mathematicians over the years have found ways to disprove Zeno's Paradox, but they shouldn't have bothered. Few were aware of how things work at the quantum level. When your halves start to interact with subatomic particles, they can end up being in a couple places at the same time, which Werner Heisenberg instructed means their location is ambiguous. Nothing in your common experience can fix this, nor can a clever mathematician, not even Albert Einstein. So if you follow Zeno’s methodology, he essentially had it right.

Heisenberg

The upshot is that at the most basic levels of reality, nature’s governing property is uncertainty. So why should a murder mystery be any different?

I spent a lot of my career working in and around public relations. As with most vilified professions, most of what PR people do is pretty mundane and entirely benign. They spend much of their day examining how a person or institution is being described in the media, and where possible, correct misrepresentations. Most people in the press like this, since they are tasked with delivering information to the public that is as close to the truth as they can manage. Assuming the PR person is able to prove their corrections, responsible journalists will be sure to get it right the next time, and will reward reliable sources with greater access and goodwill.

There’s plenty of room for abuse on both sides of this interaction, of course, but overall it works pretty well. Though one thing it taught me is that anything you learn from the media, no matter how honest and sincere everyone’s trying to be, is at best an approximation of the truth.

This frame of mind can engender a fair amount of cynicism, which is likely why hardened journalists, PR flacks and homicide detectives are often portrayed as a pretty jaded bunch. But more often, in my experience, they develop a healthy skepticism about nearly everything. Which I do think is healthy, since there is nothing more suspicious than assertions of absolute truth. Without skepticism, no crimes would be solved, no mysteries ever written.

You’ve probably heard the expression, “Close enough for jazz.” It’s a tired old saw that suggests imprecise tuning is okay if your goal is to perform a lot of improvisation. It’s a bit of a slander, since every self-respecting jazz musician cares deeply about their intonation. I think it works better as a broader lesson for truth seekers. Knowing that you’ll never get all the way there doesn’t mean you don’t try. But once you’ve exhausted yourself and every possibility, and arrived at some working hypothesis, it’s okay to say close enough.

Willie and the Poe Boy

Poe brings to my mind a thin dark, brooding figure, always struggling against the demons of poverty, drink and perhaps drugs, a dour depressive, infinitely sad. Yet no artist who touches hearts, minds, and souls remains forever isolated, not even Russian authors, not Greek tragedists, and certainly not Poe.

He suffered in his short life, but he ventured forth, he loved, he lived, and he toyed with ideas and words. In an era when Generations, X, Y, Z shred and shed a cascade of history and ‘old’ notions, Poe remains relevant. Even Generation α, bobbing isolated in a digital ocean, hasn’t discarded the dark poet.

The spark for today’s post began with a single-panel comic. Recently, I wrote about writerly humour and a dearth of actually funny jokes about authoring. Hardly had the ink dried and the essay reached the streets when a wonderful cartoon appeared. A wryly funny one, brilliant this, by Dave Coverly:

© Dave Coverly

Our beloved Dave Barry blurbed the award-winning creator: “Dave Coverly is young and really, really funny and he can draw. I hate him.” I’m not certain this particular cartoon is available for sale, but Mr Coverly’s books and prints can be purchased on his professional site, SpeedBump.com

The comic set me to wondering whether Poe readers realized he enjoyed word play, particularly anagrams, epigrams, puzzles, jokes, and occasionally scrambling names of real people to conjure new names for his works. He smoothly sprinkled French, Italian, Latin, and even Arabic in his poems.

One particularly stands out, the first of two poems titled Enigma (1833), a puzzle and anagram. Coded in sixteen lines are eleven poets. The initial letter of each poet spell out a very famous English author.

As much as I enjoy puzzles, I embarrassingly failed the inner riddle so badly I dare not reveal my score. Without a traditional classical education, a solver is greatly handicapped. The solution appears after the break.

Enigma

by Edgar Allan Poe

1. The noblest name in Allegory's page,
2. The hand that traced inexorable rage;
3. A pleasing moralist whose page refined,
   Displays the deepest knowledge of the mind;
4. A tender poet of a foreign tongue,
   Indited in the language that he sung.
5. A bard of brilliant but unlicensed page
   At once the shame and glory of our age,
6. The prince of harmony and stirling sense,
7. The ancient dramatist of eminence,
8. The bard that paints imagination's powers,
9. And him whose song revives departed hours,
10. Once more an ancient tragic bard recall,
    In boldness of design surpassing all.
11. These names when rightly read, a name make known
    Which gathers all their glories in its own.

Solution ➙