WILEY AND PUTNAM'S 
 
 LIBRARY OF 
 
 CHOICE READING, 
 STORIES FROM THE ITALIAN POETS,
 
 Lately Published. 
 
 In Two Parts, IGmo., and bound in extra cloth by Bradley. 
 
 AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF BENVENUTO CELLINI. 
 
 THE COMPLETE AND ANNOTATED EDITION OF ROSCOE. 
 
 Notices of the Work. 
 
 " Cellini was one of the most extraordinary men in an extraordinary age ; 
 his life, written by himself, is more amusing than any novel I know." 
 
 Horace Walpolc. 
 
 [F^rom the Retrospective Review.] 
 
 "This is, perhaps, the most perfect piece of autobiography that ever was 
 written, whether considered with reference to the candour and veracity of the 
 author, the spirit of the incidents, or the breathing vitality of the narrative. It 
 has also the recommendation of having been written at a very interesting pe- 
 riod of literary history, and of recording some curious particulars relative to 
 the private character of the great men of the time. * * We never, in the 
 whole course of our life, read a book of a more engaging description. * * * , 
 
 " Benvenuto Cellini, a man of great genius, and uncommon versatility of tal- 
 ents ; caressed alike by kings, popes, and dignitaries of the Church of Rome ; 
 esteemed by men of learning ; lauded by the most eminent artists of his time ; 
 and beloved by all his acquaintance. Admitted into the privacy of the most 
 elevated in rank and station, he never forgot what was due to himself as a man : 
 he was neither servile to kings nor their mistresses; he neither flattered 
 popes nor their favourites ; he neither worshipped a cardinal's hat nor the tiara ; 
 he was bold for the right^ and thought not that St. Peter's chair could sanctify 
 wrong, or hallow injustice he dared to speak the truth ; an audacity fatal to 
 the hopes of the followers of courts, and the aspirers to place. 
 
 " Quick, bold, ardent and enterprising, he was eminently gifted by nature 
 with those talents which are essential to achieve excellence ; and although con- 
 fined for a great portion of his life to the humble walk of the goldsmith's busi- 
 ness, it is evident, from his extraordinary success in bronze-casting and in 
 sculpture, that he was equally calculated to excel in the higher departments of 
 art. Of this, his statue of Perseus and the piece of sculpture which he executed, 
 after his vision, of a Christ upon the cross, described by Vasari as an exquisite 
 and wonderful performance, afford sufficient proofs. His merits as an artist, 
 indeed, are allowed by those who were best able to appreciate them by his 
 friends Michael Angelo and Julio Romano. Uniting the different branches of 
 the fine arts, at the same time a musician, a poet, and a soldier, he seems to 
 have been exceeded by few in the capability of his intellect, and in its various 
 and successful application."
 
 STORIES 
 
 FROM THE 
 
 ITALIAN POETS: 
 
 BEING A SUMMARY IN PROSE 
 
 POEMS OF DANTE, PULCI, BOLARDO, ARIOSTO AND TASSO; 
 
 WITH COMMENTS THROUGHOUT, 
 
 OCCASIONAL PASSAGES VERSIFIED, 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICES OF THE LIVES AND GENIUS OF THE AUTHORS. 
 
 BY LEIGH HUNT. 
 
 IN THREE PARTS. 
 PART I. 
 
 NEW YORK : 
 WILEY AND PUTNAM, 161 BROADWAY. 
 
 1846.
 
 R CRitoHZiD's Power Prest T. B. SMITH, Stereotype 
 
 113 Fulton Street 810 William Street. 

 
 TQ 
 
 v.i-3 
 
 COP,^ 
 
 'TO 
 
 SIR PERCY SHELLEY, BART 
 
 3 MY DEAR SIR PERCY. 
 
 W As I know no man who surpasses yourself in combining a love 
 
 of the most romantic fiction with the coolest good sense, and, in passing 
 from the driest metaphysical questions to the heartiest enjoyment of 
 JJhumour, I trust that even a modesty so true as yours will not grudge 
 o me the satisfaction of inscribing these volumes with your name. 
 i 
 
 ^ That you should possess such varieties of taste is no wonder, consid- 
 
 "* ering what an abundance of intellectual honours you inherit ; nor might 
 
 the world have been the better for it, had they been tastes, and nothing 
 
 more. But that you should inherit also that zeal for justice to mankind, 
 ^^ 
 which has become so Christian a feature in the character of the age, and 
 
 that you should include hi that zeal a special regard for the welfare of 
 your Father's Friend, is a subject of constant pleasurable reflection to 
 
 Your obliged and affectionate 
 
 LEIGH HUNT. 
 
 298930
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THE purpose of these volumes is, to add to the stock of 
 tales from the Italian writers ; to retain at the same time 
 as much of the poetry of the originals as it is in the power 
 of the writer's prose to compass ; and to furnish careful bi- 
 ographical notices of the authors. There have been several 
 collections of stories from the novelists of Italy, but none 
 from the poets ; and it struck me that prose versions from 
 these, of the kind here offered to the public, might not be 
 unwillingly received. The stories are selected from the five 
 principal narrative poets, Dante, Pulci, Boiardo, Ariosto, and 
 Tasso ; they comprise the most popular of such as are fit for 
 translation ; are reduced into one continuous narrative, when 
 diffused and interrupted, as in the instances of those of An- 
 gelica, and Armida ; are accompanied with critical and ex- 
 planatory notes ; and, in the case of Dante, consist of an 
 abstract of the poet's whole work. The volumes are fur- 
 thermore interspersed with the most favourite niorceaux of 
 the originals, followed sometimes with attempts to versify 
 them ; and in the Appendix, for the better satisfaction of 
 the student, are given entire stories, also in the original, and 
 occasionally rendered in like manner. The book is partic- 
 ularly intended for such students or other lovers of the lan- 
 guage as are pleased with any fresh endeavours to recom-
 
 viii PREFACE. 
 
 mend it ; and, at the same time, for such purely English 
 readers as wish to know something about Italian poetry, 
 without having leisure to cultivate its acquaintance. 
 
 I did not intend in the first instance to depart from the 
 plan of selection in the case of Dante \ but when I consid- 
 ered what an extraordinary person he was, how intense is 
 every thing which he says, how widely he has re-attracted 
 of late the attention of the world, how willingly perhaps his 
 poem might be regarded by the reader as being itself one 
 continued story (which, in fact, it is), related personally of 
 the writer, and lastly, what a combination of difficulties 
 have prevented his best translators in verse from giving the 
 public a just idea of his almost Scriptural simplicity I be- 
 gan to think that an abstract of his entire work might pos- 
 sibly be looked upon as supplying something of a desidera- 
 tum. I am aware that nothing but verse can do perfect jus- 
 tice to verse ; but besides the imperfections which are par- 
 donable, because inevitable, in all such metrical endeavours, 
 the desire to impress a grand and worshipful idea of Dante 
 has been too apt to lead his translators into a tone and man- 
 ner the reverse of his passionate, practical, and creative style 
 a style which may be said to -write things instead of 
 words ; and thus to render every word that is put out of its 
 place, or brought in for help and filling up, a misrepresenta- 
 tion. I do not mean to say, that he himself never does any 
 thing of the sort, or does not occasionally assume too much 
 of the oracle and the schoolmaster, in manner as w r ell as 
 matter ; but passion, and the absence of the superfluous, are 
 the chief characteristics of his poetry. Fortunately, this sin- 
 cerity of purpose and utterance in Dante, render him the 
 least pervertible of poets in a sincere prose translation ; and, 
 since I ventured on attempting one, I have had the pleasure
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 of meeting with an express recommendation of such a ver- 
 sion 1 in an early number of the Edinburgh Review. 
 
 The abstract of Dante, therefore, in these volumes (with 
 every deprecation that becomes me of being supposed to pre- 
 tend to give a thorough idea of any poetry whatsoever, es- 
 pecially without its metrical form) aspires to be regarded as, 
 at all events, not exhibiting a false idea of the Dantesque 
 spirit in point of feeling and expression. It is true, I have 
 omitted long tedious lectures of scholastic divinity, and other 
 learned absurdities of the time, which are among the bars to 
 the poem's being read through, even in Italy (which Foscolo 
 tells us is never the case) ; and I have compressed the work 
 in other passages not essentially necessary to the formation 
 of a just idea of the author. But quite enough remains to 
 do so in every respect ; and in no part of it have I made ad- 
 ditions or alterations. There is warrant I hope I may say 
 letter for every thing put down. Dante is the greatest poet 
 for intensity that ever lived ; and he excites a correspond- 
 ing emotion in his reader I wish I could say, always on 
 the poet's side ; but his ferocious hates and bigotries too often 
 tempt us to hate the bigot, and always compel us to take 
 part with the fellow-creatures whom he outrages. At least, 
 such is their effect on myself. Such a man, however, is the 
 last whom a reporter is inclined to misrepresent. We re- 
 spect his sincerity too much, ferocious though it be ; and we 
 like to give him the full benefit of the recoil of his curses 
 and maledictions. I hope I have not omitted one. On the 
 other hand, as little have I closed my feelings against the 
 lovely and enchanting sweetness which this great semi-bar- 
 barian sometimes so aflfectingly utters. On those occasions 
 
 1 " It is probable that a prose translation would give a better idea of the ge- 
 nius and manner of this poet than any metrical one." Vol. i. p. 310. 
 
 2
 
 i PREFACE. 
 
 he is like an angel enclosed for penance in some furious gi- 
 ant, and permitted to weep through the creature's eyes. 
 
 The stories from goodnatured Pulci I have been obliged 
 to compress for other reasons chiefly their excessive diffuse- 
 ness. A paragraph of the version will sometimes comprise 
 many pages. Those of Boiardo and Ariosto are more exact ; 
 and the reader will be good enough to bear in mind, that no- 
 thing is added to any of the poets, different as the case might 
 seem here and there, on comparison with the originals. An 
 equivalent for whatever is said is to be found in some part of 
 the context generally in letter, always in spirit. The least 
 characteristically exact passages are, some in the love-scenes 
 of Tasso ; for I have omitted the plays upon words and oth- 
 er corruptions in style, in which that poet permitted himself 
 to indulge. But I have noticed the circumstance in the com- 
 ment. In other respects, I have endeavoured to make my 
 version convey some idea of the different styles and genius 
 of the writers, of the severe passion of Dante, the overflow- 
 ing gaiety and affecting sympathies of Pulci, several of whose 
 passages in the Battle of Roncesvalles are masterpieces of 
 pathos ; the romantic and inventive elegance of Boiardo ; the 
 great cheerful universality of Ariosto, like a healthy anima 
 mundi ; and the ambitious irritability, the fairy imagination, 
 and tender but somewhat effeminate voluptuousness of the 
 poet of Armida and Rinaldo. I do not pretend that prose 
 versions of passages from these writers can supersede the ne- 
 cessity of metrical ones, supposing proper metrical ones at- 
 tainable. They demand them more than Dante, the tone 
 and manner in their case being of more importance to the 
 effect. But with all due respect to such translators as Har- 
 rington, Rose, and Wiffen, their books are not Ariosto and 
 Tasso, even in manner. Harrington, the gay "godson" of
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 Queen Elizabeth, is not always unlike Ariosto ; but when 
 not in good spirits he becomes as dull as if her majesty had 
 frowned on him. Rose was a man of wit, and a scholar ; 
 yet he has undoubtedly turned the ease and animation of 
 his original into inversion and insipidity. And Wiffen, 
 though elegant and even poetical, did an unfortunate thing 
 for Tasso, when he gave an additional line and a number 
 of paraphrastic thoughts to a stanza already tending to the 
 superfluous. Fairfax himself, who upon the whole, and with 
 regard to a work of any length, is the best metrical translator 
 our language has seen, and, like Chapman, a genuine poet, 
 strangely aggravated the sins of prettiness and conceit in 
 his original, and added to them a love of tautology amount- 
 ing to that of a lawyer. As to Hoole, he is below criticism ; 
 and other versions I have not happened to see. Now if I 
 had no acquaintance with the Italian language, I confess I 
 would rather get any friend who had to read to me a passage 
 out of Dante, Tasso, or Ariosto, into the first simple prose 
 that offered itself, than go to any of the above translators for 
 a taste of it, Fairfax excepted ; and we have seen with how 
 much allowance his sample would have to be taken. I have 
 therefore, with some restrictions, only ventured to do for the 
 public what I would have had a friend do for myself. 
 
 The Critical and Biographical Notices I did not intend 
 to make so long at first ; but the interest grew upon me ; 
 and I hope the reader will regard some of them Dante's 
 and Tasso's in particular as being "stories" themselves, 
 after their kind, " stories, alas, too true ;" " romances of 
 real life." The extraordinary character of Dante, which is 
 personally mixed up with his writings beyond that of any 
 other poet, has led me into references to his church and creed, 
 unavoidable at any time in the endeavour to give a thorough
 
 xii PREFACE. 
 
 estimate of his genius, and singularly demanded by certain 
 phenomena of the present day. I hold those phenomena to 
 be alike absurd and fugitive ; but only so by reason of their 
 being openly so proclaimed ; for mankind have a tendency 
 to the absurd, if their imaginations are not properly directed ; 
 and one of the uses of poetry is, to keep the faculty in a 
 healthy state, and cause it to know its boundaries. Dante, 
 in the fierce egotism of his passions, and the strange identi- 
 fication of his knowledge with all that was knowable, would 
 fain have made his poetry both a sword against individuals, 
 and a prop for the support of the superstition that corrupted 
 them. This was reversing the duty of a Christian and a 
 great man ; and there happen to be existing reasons why it 
 is salutary to shew that he had no right to do so, and must 
 not have his barbarism confounded with his strength. Mach- 
 iavelli was of opinion, that if Christianity had not reverted 
 to its first principles, by means of the poverty and pious lives 
 of St. Francis and St. Dominic,* the faith would have been 
 lost. It may have been ; but such .are not the secrets of its 
 preservation in times of science and progression, when the 
 spirit of inquiry has established itself among all classes, and 
 nothing is taken for granted, as it used to be. A few per- 
 sons here and there, who confound a religious reaction in a 
 corner with the reverse of the fact all over the rest of Eu- 
 rope, may persuade themselves, if they please, that the world 
 
 * Discern sopra la Prima Deca di Tito Livio, lib. iii. cap. i. At p. 136 of 
 the present volume I have too hastily called St. Dominic " the founder of the 
 Inquisition." It is generally conceded, I believe, by candid Protestant in- 
 quirers, that he was not, whatever zeal in the foundation and support of the 
 tribunal may have been manifested by his order. But this does not acquit him 
 of the cruelty for which he has been praised by Dante : he joined in the san- 
 guinary persecution of the Albigenses.
 
 PREFACE. xiii 
 
 has not advanced in knowledge for the last three centuries, 
 and so get up and cry aloud to us out of obsolete horn-books ; 
 but the community laugh at them. Every body else is in- 
 quiring into first principles, while they are dogmatising on 
 a forty-ninth proposition. The Irish themselves, as they 
 ought to do, care more for their pastors than for the pope ; 
 and if any body wishes to know what is thought of his holi- 
 ness at head-quarters, let him consult the remarkable and 
 admirable pamphlet which has lately issued from the pen 
 of Mr. Mazzini.* I have the pleasure of knowing excellent 
 Roman Catholics ; I have suffered in behalf of their eman- 
 cipation, and would do so again to-morrow ; but I believe 
 that if even their external form of Christianity has any 
 chance of survival three hundred years hence, it will have 
 been owing to the appearance meanwhile of some extraordi- 
 nary man in power, who, in the teeth of worldly interests, 
 or rather in charitable and sage inclusion of them, shall have 
 proclaimed that the time had arrived for living in the flower 
 of Christian charity, instead of the husks and thorns which 
 may have been necessary to guard it. If it were possible 
 for some new and wonderful pope to make this change, and 
 draw a line between these two Christian epochs, like that 
 between the Old and New Testaments, the world would feel 
 inclined to prostrate itself again and for ever at the feet of 
 Rome. In a catholic state of things like that, delighted 
 should I be, for one, to be among the humblest of its com- 
 municants. How beautiful would their organs be then ! 
 how ascending to an unperplexing Heaven their incense ! 
 
 * It is entitled, " Italy, Austria, and the Pope ;" and is full, not only of 
 the eloquence of zeal, and of evidences of intellectual power, but of the most 
 curious and instructive information.
 
 xiv PREFACE. 
 
 how unselfish their salvation ! how intelligible their talk 
 about justice and love ! 
 
 But if charity (and by charity I do not mean mere tolera- 
 tion, or any other pretended right to permit others to have 
 eyes like ourselves, but whatever the beautiful Greek word 
 implies of good and lovely), if this truly and only divine con- 
 summation of all Christian doctrine be not thought capable 
 of taking a form of belief " strong" enough, Superstition must 
 look out for some new mode of dictation altogether ; for the 
 world is outgrowing the old. 
 
 I cannot, in gratitude for the facilities afforded to myself, 
 as well as for a more obvious and public reason, dismiss this 
 Preface without congratulating men of letters on the estab- 
 lishment and increasing prosperity of the London Library, 
 an institution founded for the purpose of accommodating 
 subscribers with such books, at their own homes, as could 
 only be consulted hitherto at the British Museum. The sole 
 objection to the Museum is thus done away, and the literary 
 world has a fair prospect of possessing two book-institutions 
 instead of one, each with its distinct claims to regard, and pre- 
 senting in combination all that the student can wish ; for 
 while it is highly desirable that authors should be able to have 
 standard works at their command, when sickness or other 
 circumstances render it impossible for them to go to the Mu- 
 seum, it is undoubtedly requisite that one great collection 
 should exist in which they are sure to find the same works 
 unremoved, in case of necessity, not to mention curious vol- 
 umes of all sorts, manuscripts, and a world of books of reference,
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 DANTE. PAOB 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICE OF HIS LIFE AND GENIUS, 1 
 
 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS, 45 
 
 The Journey through Hell, 47 
 
 The Journey through Purgatory, ....... 89 
 
 The Journey through Heaven, ....... 131 
 
 PULCI. 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICE OF HIS LIFE AND GENIUS, ; . . . 167 
 
 HUMOURS OF GIANTS, ... 189 
 
 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES, . *. 207 
 
 BOIARDO. 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICE OF HIS LIFE AND GENIUS, 233 
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA, 249 
 
 THE DEATH OF AGRICAN, ........ 267 
 
 THE SARACEN FRIENDS, 275 
 
 SEEING AND BELIEVING, 291 
 
 ARIOSTO. 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICE OF HIS LIFE AND GENIUS, 299 
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA, (CONTINUED,) . . 339 
 
 Part I. Angelica and her Suitors, ...... 339 
 
 II. Angelica and Medoroi . . . 350 
 
 III. The Jealousy of Orlando 360 
 
 ASTOLFO'S JOURNEY TO THE MOON, 369 
 
 ARIODANTE AND GINEVRA, 381 
 
 SUSPICION, 393 
 
 ISABELLA, 401
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 TASSO. **< 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICE OF HIS LIFE AND GENIUS, ..... 409 
 
 OLINDO AND SOPHRONIA, 461 
 
 TANCRED AND CLORINDA, 471 
 
 RlNALDO AND ARM1DA, ETC., ....... 483 
 
 Part I. Armida in the Christian Camp, 483 
 
 n. Armida's Wrath and Love with Rinaldo, .... 490 
 
 HI. Tancred in the Enchanted Forest, ....'. 494 
 
 IV. The Loves of Rinaldo and Armida, 498 
 
 V. The Disenchantment of the Forest, and the taking of Jerusalem, 501 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 No. I. STORY OF PAULO AND FRANCESCA, 519 
 
 II. ACCOUNTS GIVEN BY DIFFERENT WRITERS OF THE CIRCUMSTAN- 
 CES RELATING TO PAULO AND FRANCESCA J CONCLUDING 
 
 WITH THE ONLY FACTS ASCERTAINED, .... 523 
 
 III. STORY OF UGOLINO, .... ... 526 
 
 IV. PICTURE OF FLORENCE IN THE TIME OF DANTE'S ANCESTORS, 533 
 
 V. THE DEATH OF AGRICAN, 535 
 
 VI. ANGELICA AND MEDORO, ....... 543 
 
 VII. THE JEALOUSY OF ORLANDO, ... . 552 
 
 VIII. THE DEATH OF CLORINDA, ....:. 559 
 
 IX. TANCRED IN THE ENCHANTED FOREST, . . . .561
 
 DANTE: 
 
 Critical Noti of tjis #i
 
 CRITICAL NOTICE 
 
 DANTE'S LIFE AND GENIUS.* 
 
 DANTE was a very great poet, a man of the strongest passions, 
 a claimant of unbounded powers to lead and enlighten the world ; 
 and he lived in a semi-barbarous age, as favourable to the inten- 
 sity of his imagination, as it was otherwise to the rest of his pre- 
 tensions. Party zeal, and the fluctuations of moral and critical 
 opinion, have at different periods over-rated and depreciated his 
 memory ; and if, in the following attempt to form its just estimate, 
 I have found myself compelled, in some important respects, to 
 differ with preceding writers, and to protest in particular against 
 his being regarded as a proper teacher on any one point, poetry 
 excepted, and as far as all such genius and energy cannot in 
 some degree help being, I have not been the less sensible of the 
 wonderful nature of that genius, while acting within the circle to 
 which it belongs. Dante was indeed so great a poet, and at the 
 same time exhibited in his personal character such a mortifying 
 exception to what we conceive to be the natural wisdom and tem- 
 per of great poets ; in other words, he was such a bigoted and 
 exasperated man, and sullied his imagination with so much that 
 
 * As notices of Dante's life have often been little but repetitions of former 
 ones, I think it due to the painstaking character of this volume to state, that 
 besides consulting various commentators and critics, from Boccaccio to Frati- 
 celli and others, I have diligently perused the Vita di Dante, by Cesare Balbo, 
 with Rocco's annotations ; the Histoire Litteraire <T Italic, by Ginguend ; the 
 Discorso sul Testo della Commedia, by Foscolo ; the Amori e Rime di Dante 
 of Arrivabene ; the Veltro Allegorico di Dante, by Troja ; and Ozanam's 
 Dante et la PhUosophie Catholique an Treizieme Siecle. 
 
 2
 
 2 DANTE. 
 
 is contradictory to good feeling, in matters divine as well as hu- 
 man ; that I should not have thought myself justified in assisting, 
 however humbly, to extend the influence of his writings, had I 
 not believed a time to have arrived, when the community may 
 profit both from the marvels of his power and the melancholy ab- 
 surdity of its contradictions. 
 
 Dante Alighieri, who has always been known by his Christian 
 rather than surname (partly owing to the Italian predilection for 
 Christian names, and partly to the unsettled state of patronymics 
 in his time), was the son of a lawyer of good family in Florence, 
 and was born in that city on the 14th of May 1265 (sixty-three 
 years before the birth of Chaucer). The stock is said to have 
 been of Roman origin, of the race of the Frangipani ; but the 
 only certain trace of it is to Cacciaguida, a Florentine cavalier of 
 the house of the Elisei, who died in the Crusades. Dante gives 
 an account of him hi his Paradiso.* Cacciaguida married a 
 lady of the Alighieri family of the Valdipado ; and, giving the 
 name to one of his children, they subsequently retained it as a 
 patronymic in preference to their own. It would appear, from 
 the same poem, not only that the Alighieri were the more impor- 
 tant house, but that some blot had darkened the scutcheon of the 
 Elisei ; perhaps their having been poor, and transplanted (as he 
 seems to imply) from some disreputable district. Perhaps they 
 were known to have been of ignoble origin ; for, in the* course 
 of one of his most philosophical treatises, he bursts into an extra- 
 ordinary ebullition of ferocity against such as adduce a know- 
 ledge of that kind as an argument against a family's acquired 
 nobility ; affirming that such brutal stuff should be answered not 
 with words, but with the dagger. f The Elisei, however, must 
 have been of some standing ; for Macchiavelli, in his History of 
 Florence, mentions them in his list of the early Guelph and Ghi- 
 
 * Canto xv. 88. 
 
 t For the doubt apparently implied respecting the district, see canto xvi. 43, 
 or the summary of it in the present volume. The following is the passage al- 
 luded to in the philosophical treatise : " Risponder si vorrebbe, non colle paiole, 
 ma col coltello, a tanta bestialita." -Convito, Opere Minori, 12mo. Fir. 1834, 
 vol. ii. p. 432. " Beautiful mode" (says Perticeri in a note) " of settling ques- 
 tions."
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 
 
 belline parties, where the side which they take is different from 
 that of the poet's immediate progenitors.* The arms of the 
 Alighieri (probably occasioned by the change in that name, for it 
 was previously written Aldighieri) are interesting on account of 
 their poetical and aspiring character. They are a golden wing 
 on a field azure. f 
 
 It is generally supposed that the name Dante is an abbreviation 
 of Durante ; but this is not certain, though the poet had a 
 nephew so called. Dante is the name he goes by in the gravest 
 records, in law-proceedings, in his epitaph, in the mention of him 
 put by himself into the mouth of a blessed spirit. Boccaccio in- 
 timates that he was christened Dante, and derives the name from 
 the ablative case of dans (giving) a probable etymology, espe- 
 cially for a Christian appellation. As an abbreviation of Du- 
 rante, it would correspond in familiarity with the Ben of Ben 
 Jonson a diminutive that would assuredly not have been used 
 by grave people on occasions like those mentioned, though a wit 
 of the day gave the masons a shilling to carve " O rare Ben 
 Jonson !" on his grave-stone. On the other hand, if given at the 
 font, the name of Ben would have acquired all the legal gravity 
 of Benjamin. In the English Navy List, not long ago, one of 
 our gallant admirals used to figure as " Billy Douglas." 
 
 Of the mother of Dante nothing is known except that she was 
 
 * Istorie Florentine, ii. 43 (in Tulte le Opere, 4to., 1550). 
 
 t The name has been varied into Allagheri, Aligieri, Alleghieri, Alligheri, 
 Aligeri, with the accent generally on the third, but sometimes on the second 
 syllable. See Foscolo, Discoreo ml Teslo, p. 432. He says, that in Verona, 
 where descendants of the poet survive, they call it Aligeri. But names, like 
 other words, often wander so far from their source, that it is impossible to as- 
 certain it. Who would suppose that Pomfret came from Pontefract, or wig 
 from parrucca ? Coats of arms, unless in very special instances, prove nothing 
 but the whims of the heralds. 
 
 Those who like to hear of anything in connexion with Dante or his name, 
 may find something to stir their fancies in the following grim significations of 
 the word in the dictionaries : 
 
 " Dante, a kind of great wild beast in Africa, that hath a very hard skin." 
 Florio's Dictionary, edited by Torreggiano. 
 
 " Dante, an animal called otherwise the Great Beast."- - Vocabolario della 
 Crusca, Compendiato, Ven. 1723.
 
 4 DANTE. 
 
 his father's second wife, and that her Christian name was Bella, 
 or perhaps surname Bello. It might, however, be conjectured, 
 from the remarkable and only opportunity which our author has 
 taken of alluding to her, that he derived his disdainful character 
 rather from his mother than father.* The father appears to have 
 died during the boyhood of his illustrious son. 
 
 The future poet, before he had completed his ninth year, con- 
 ceived a romantic attachment to a little lady who had just entered 
 hers, and who has attained a celebrity of which she was destined 
 to know nothing. This was the famous Beatrice Portinari, 
 daughter of a rich Florentine who founded more than one char- 
 itable institution. She married another man, and died in her 
 youth ; but retained the Platonical homage of her young admirer, 
 living and dead, and became the heroine of his great poem. 
 
 It is unpleasant to reduce any portion of a romance to the 
 events of ordinary life ; but with the exception of those who 
 merely copy from one another, there has been such a conspiracy 
 on the part of Dante's biographers to overlook at least one disen- 
 chanting conclusion to be drawn to that effect from the poet's 
 own writings, that the probable truth of the matter must here for 
 the first time be stated. The case, indeed, is clear enough from 
 his account of it. The natural tendencies of a poetical tempera- 
 ment (oftener evinced in a like manner than the world in general 
 suppose) not only made the boy-poet fall in love, but, in the truly 
 Elysian state of the heart at that innocent and adoring time of 
 life, made him fancy he had discovered a goddess in the object 
 of his ' love ; and strength of purpose as well as imagination 
 made him grow up in the fancy. He disclosed himself, as time 
 advanced, only by his manner received complacent recognitions 
 in company from the young lady offended her by seeming to 
 devote himself to another (see the poem in the Vita Nuova, begin- 
 ning " Ballata io vo") rendered himself the sport.of her and her 
 young friends by his adoring timidity (see the 5th and 6th son- 
 nets in the same work) in short, constituted her a paragon of 
 
 * See the passage in " Hell," where Virgil, to express his enthusiastic appro- 
 bation of the scorn and cruelty which Dante shews to one of the condemned, 
 embraces and kisses him for a right " disdainful soul," and blesses the " mother 
 that bore him."
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 
 
 perfection, and enabled her, by so doing, to shew that she was 
 none. He says, that finding himself unexpectedly near her one 
 day in company, he trembled so, and underwent such change of 
 countenance, that many of the ladies present began to laugh with 
 her about him "si gabbavano di me." And* he adds, in verse, 
 
 " Con P altre donne mia vista gabbate, 
 
 E lion pensate, donna, onde si mova 
 
 Ch' io vi rassembri si figura nova, 
 Quando riguardo la vostra beltate," &c. Son. 5. 
 
 " You laugh with the other ladies to see how I look (literally, 
 you mock my appearance) ; and do not think, lady, what it is 
 that renders me so strange a figure at sight of your beauty." 
 
 And in the sonnet that follows, he accuses her of preventing pity 
 of him in others, by such " killing mockery" as makes him wish 
 for death (" la pieta, che '/ vostro ga bbo recinde," &c.)* 
 
 Now, it is to be admitted, that a young lady, if she is not very 
 wise, may laugh at her lover with her companions, and yet re- 
 turn his love, after her fashion ; but the fair Portinari laughs and 
 marries another. Some less melancholy face, some more intel- 
 ligible courtship, triumphed over the questionable flattery of the 
 poet's gratuitous worship ; and the idol of Dante Alighieri be- 
 came the wife of Messer Simone de' Bardi. Not a word does he 
 say on that mortifying point. It transpired from a clause in her 
 father's will. And yet so bent are the poet's biographers on 
 leaving a romantic doubt in one's mind, whether Beatrice may 
 not have returned his passion, that not only do all of them (as far 
 as I have observed) agree in taking no notice of these sonnets, 
 but the author of the treatise entitled Dante and the Catholic 
 Philosophy of the Thirteenth Century, " in spite" (as a critic 
 says) " of the Beatrice, his daughter, wife of Messer Simone de' 
 Bardi, of the paternal will," describes her as dying in " all the 
 lustre of virginity."! The assumption appears to be thus glo- 
 
 * Opere Minori, vol. iii. 12, Flor. 1839, pp. 292; &c. 
 
 t " Bdatrix quitta la terre dans tout I'e'clat de la jeunesse et de la virginite"." 
 See the work as above entitled, Paris, 1840, p. 60. The words in Latin, aa 
 quoted from the will by the critic alluded to in the Foreign Quarterly Review 
 (No. 65, art. Dante Allighierf), are, " Bici filise sues et uxori D. (Domini)
 
 6 DANTE. 
 
 riously stated, as a counterpart to the notoriety of its untruth. It 
 must be acknowledged that Dante himself gave the cue to it by 
 more than silence ; for he not only vaunts her acquaintance in 
 the next world, but assumes that she returns his love in that re- 
 gion, as if no such person as her husband could have existed, or 
 as if he himself had not been married also. This life-long per- 
 tinacity of will is illustrative of his whole career. 
 
 Meantime, though the young poet's father had died, nothing 
 was wanting on the part of his guardians, or perhaps his mother, 
 to furnish him with an excellent education. It was so complete, 
 as to enable him to become master of all the knowledge of his 
 time ; and he added to this learning more than a taste for draw- 
 ing and music. He speaks of himself as drawing an angel in 
 his tablets on the first anniversary of Beatrice's death.* One of 
 his instructors was Brunetto Latini, the most famous scholar then 
 living ; and he studied both at the universities of Padua and Bo- 
 logna. At eighteen, perhaps sooner, he had shewn such a genius 
 for poetry as to attract the friendship of Guido Cavalcante, a 
 young noble of a philosophical as well as poetical turn of mind, 
 who has retained a reputation with posterity : and it was probably 
 at the same time he became acquainted with Giotto, who drew 
 his likeness, and with Casella, the musician, whom he greets with 
 so much tenderness in the other world. 
 
 Nor were his duties as a citizen forgotten. The year before 
 Beatrice's death, he was at the battle of Campaldino, which his 
 countrymen gained against the people of Arezzo ; and the year 
 after it he was present at the taking of Caprona from the Pisans. 
 It has been supposed that he once studied medicine with a view 
 to it as a profession ; but the conjecture probably originated in 
 nothing more than his having entered himself of one of the city- 
 companies (which happened to be the medical) for the purpose of 
 
 Simonis de Bardis." " Bici" is the Latin dative case of Bice, the abbreviation 
 of Beatrice. This employment, by the way, of an abbreviated name in a 
 will, may seem to go counter to the deductions respecting the name of Dante. 
 And it may really do so. Yet a will is not an epitaph, nor the address of a 
 beatified spirit ; neither is equal familiarity perhaps implied, as a matter of 
 course, in the abbreviated names of male and female. 
 * Vita Nuova, at sup. p. 343.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 
 
 qualifying himself to accept office ; a condition exacted of the 
 gentry by the then democratic tendencies of the republic. It is 
 asserted also, by an early commentator, that he entered the Fran- 
 ciscan order of friars, but quitted it before he was professed ; and, 
 indeed, the circumstance is not unlikely, considering his agitated 
 and impatient turn of mind. Perhaps he fancied that he had 
 done with the world when it lost the wife of Simone de' Bardi. 
 
 Weddings that might have taken place, but do not, are like the 
 reigns of deceased heirs-apparent ; every thing is assumable in 
 their favour, checked only by the histories of husbands and kings. 
 Would the great but splenetic poet have made an angel and a 
 saint of Beatrice, had he married her ? He never utters the 
 name of the woman whom he did marry. 
 
 Gemma Donati was a kinswoman of the powerful family of 
 that name. It seems not improbable, from some passages in his 
 works, that she was the young lady whom he speaks of as taking 
 pity on him on account of his passion for Beatrice ;* and in com- 
 mon justice to his feelings as a man and a gentleman, it is surely 
 to be concluded, that he felt some sort of passion for his bride, if 
 not of a very spiritual sort ; though he afterwards did not scruple 
 to intimate that he was ashamed of it, and Beatrice is made to 
 rebuke him in the other world for thinking of any body after her- 
 self, f At any rate, he probably roused what was excitable in 
 
 * Vita Nuova, p. 345. 
 
 t la the article on Dante, in the Foreign Quarterly Review, (ut supra), 
 the exordium of which made me hope that the eloquent and assumption-de- 
 nouncing writer was going to supply a good final account of his author, equally 
 satisfactory for its feeling and its facts, but which ended hi little better than the 
 customary gratuitousness of wholesale panegyric, I was surprised to find the 
 union with Gemma Donati characterised as " calm and cold, rather the ac- 
 complishment of a social duty than the result of an irresistible impulse of the 
 heart," p. 15. The accomplishment of the "social duty" is an assumption, 
 not very probable with regard to any body, and much less so in a fiery Italian 
 of twenty-six ; but the addition of the epithets, " calm and cold," gives it a 
 sort of horror. A reader of this article, evidently the production of a man of 
 ability but of great wil fulness, is tempted to express the disappointment it has 
 given him in plainer terms than might be wished, in consequence of the extra- 
 ordinary license which its writer does not scruple to allow to his own fancies, 
 in expressing his opinion of what he is pleased to think the fancies of others.
 
 8 DANTE 
 
 his wife's temper, with provocations from his own ; for the nature 
 of the latter is not to be doubted, whereas there is nothing but 
 tradition to shew for the bitterness of hers. Foscolo is of opinion 
 that the tradition itself arose simply from a rhetorical flourish of 
 Boccaccio's, hi his Life of Dante, against the marriages of men 
 of letters ; though Boccaccio himself expressly adds, that he 
 knows nothing to the disadvantage of the poet's wife, except that 
 her husband, after quitting Florence, would never either come 
 where she was, or suffer her to come to him, mother as she was 
 by him of so many children ; a statement, it must be confessed, 
 not a little encouraging to the tradition.* Be this as it may, 
 Dante married in his twenty-sixth year ; wrote an adoring ac- 
 count of his first love (the Vita Nuova) in his twenty-eighth ; 
 and among the six children which Gemma brought him, had a 
 daughter whom he named Beatrice, in honour, it is understood, 
 of the fair Portinari ; which surely was either a very great com- 
 pliment, or no mean trial to the temper of the mother. We shall 
 see presently how their domestic intercourse was interrupted, and 
 what absolute uncertainty there is respecting it, except as far as 
 conclusions may be drawn from his own temper and history. 
 
 Italy, in those days, was divided into the parties of Guelphs 
 and Ghibellines ; the former, the advocates of general church- 
 ascendancy and local government ; the latter, of the pretensions 
 of the Emperor of Germany, who claimed to be the Roman 
 Caesar, and paramount over the Pope. In Florence, the Guelphs 
 had for a long time been so triumphant as to keep the Ghibellines 
 in a state of banishment. Dante was born and bred a Guelph : 
 he had twice borne arms for his country against Ghibelline 
 neighbours ; and now, at the age of thirty-five, in the ninth of 
 
 * " Le invettive contr* essa per tanti secoli originarono dalla enumerazione 
 rettorica del Boccaccio di tutti gli inconvenient! del matrimonio, e dove per al- 
 tre ei dichiara, ' Certo io non affermo queste cose a Dante essere awenute, 
 che non lo so ; comechfe vero sia, che o a simili cose a queste, o ad altro che 
 ne fusse cagione, egli una volta da lei partitosi, che per consolazione de' suoi 
 affanni gli era stata data, mai ne dove ella fusse voile venire, nfe sofferse che 
 dove egli fusse ella venisse giammai, con tutto che di piii figliuoli egli insieme 
 con lei fusse parente.' " Discorso sul Testo, ut sup. Londra, Pickering, 
 1825, p. 184.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 
 
 his marriage, and last of his residence with his wife, he was ap- 
 pointed chief of the temporary administrators of affairs, called 
 Priors ; functionaries who held office only for two months. 
 
 Unfortunately, at that moment, his party had become subdivi- 
 ded into the factions of the Whites and Blacks, or adherents of 
 two different sides in a dispute that took place in Pistoia. The 
 consequences becoming serious, the Blacks proposed to bring in, 
 as mediator, the French^Prince, Charles of Valois, then in arms 
 for the Pope against the Emperor ; but the Whites, of whom 
 Dante was one, were hostile to the measure ; and in order to pre- 
 vent it, he and his brother magistrates expelled for a time the 
 heads of both factions, to the satisfaction of neither. The Whites 
 accused them of secretly leaning to the Ghibellines, and the 
 Blacks of openly favouring the Whites ; who being, indeed, al- 
 lowed to come back before their time, on the alleged ground of 
 the unwholesomeness of their place of exile, which was fatal to 
 Dante's friend Cavalcante, gave a colour to the charge. Dante 
 answered it by saying, that he had then quitted office ; but he 
 could not show that he had lost his influence. Meantime, Charles 
 was still urged to interfere, and Dante was sent ambassador to 
 the Pope to obtain his disapprobation of the interference ; but the 
 Pope (Boniface the Eighth), who had probably discovered that 
 the Whites had ceased to care for any thing but their own dis- 
 putes, and who, at all events, did not like their objection to his 
 representative, beguiled the ambassador and encouraged the 
 French prince ; the Blacks, in consequence, regained their as- 
 cendancy ; and the luckless poet, during his absence, was de- 
 nounced as a corrupt administrator of affairs, guilty of pecula- 
 tion ; was severely mulcted ; banished from Tuscany for two 
 years ; and subsequently, for contumaciousness, was sentenced 
 to be burnt alive, in case he returned ever. He never did return. 
 From that day forth, Dante never beheld again his home or his 
 wife. Her relations obtained possession of power, but no use 
 was made of it except to keep him in exile. He had not accord- 
 ed with them ; and perhaps half the secret of his conjugal dis- 
 comfort was owing to politics. It is the opinion of some, that the 
 married couple were not sorry to part ; others think that the wife 
 remained behind, solely to scrape together what property she
 
 10 DANTE. 
 
 could, and bring up the children. All that is known is, that she 
 never lived with him more. 
 
 Dante now certainly did what his enemies had accused him of 
 wishing to do : he joined the old exiles whom he had helped to 
 make such, the party of the Ghibellines. He alleges, that he 
 never was really of any party but his own ; a naive confession, 
 probably true in one sense, considering his scorn of other people, 
 his great intellectual superiority, and the large views he had for 
 the whole Italian people. And, indeed, he soon quarrelled in 
 private with the individuals composing his new party, however 
 staunch he apparently remained to their cause. His former as- 
 sociates he had learnt to hate for their differences with him and 
 for their self-seeking ; he hated the Pope for deceiving him ; he 
 hated the Pope's French allies for being his allies, and interfer- 
 ing with Florence ; and he had come to love the Emperor for be- 
 ing hated by them all, and for holding out (as he fancied) the only 
 chance of reuniting Italy to their confusion, and making her the 
 restorer of himself, and the mistress of the world. 
 
 With these feelings in his heart, no money in his purse, and no 
 place in which to lay his head, except such as chance-patrons af- 
 forded him, he now began to wander over Italy, like some lonely 
 lion of a man, "grudging in his great disdain." At one moment 
 he was conspiring and hoping ; at another, despairing and en- 
 deavouring to conciliate his beautiful Florence : now again catch- 
 ing hope from some new movement of the Emperor's ; and then, 
 not very handsomely threatening and re-abusing her ; but always 
 pondering and grieving, or trying to appease his thoughts with 
 some composition, chiefly of his great work. It is conjectured, 
 that whenever anything particularly affected him, whether with 
 joy or sorrow, he put it, hot with the impression, into his " sacred 
 poem." Every body who jarred against his sense of right or his 
 prejudices he sent to the infernal regions, friend or foe : the 
 strangest people who sided with them (but certainly no personal 
 foe) he exalted to heaven. He encouraged, if not personally as- 
 sisted, two ineffectual attempts of the Ghibellines against Flor- 
 ence ; wrote, besides his great work, a book of mixed prose and 
 poetry on " Love and Virtue" (the Convito, or Banquet) ; a 
 Latin treatise on Monarchy (de Monarchic), recommending the
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 11 
 
 " divine right" of the Emperor ; another in two parts, and in the 
 same language, on the Vernacular Tongue (de Vulgari Eloquio); 
 and learnt to know meanwhile, as he affectingly tells us, " how 
 hard it was to climb other people's stairs, and how salt the taste 
 of bread is that is not our own." It is even thought not improb- 
 able, from one awful passage of his poem, that he may have 
 " placed himself in some public way," and, " stripping his vis- 
 age of all shame, and trembling in his very vitals," have stretched 
 out his hand " for charity"* an image of suffering, which, 
 proud as he was, yet considering how great a man, is almost 
 enough to make one's common nature stoop down for pardon at 
 his feet ; and yet he should first prostrate himself at the feet of 
 that nature for his outrages on God and man. 
 
 Several of the princes and feudal chieftains of Italy enter- 
 tained the poet for a while in their houses ; but genius and 
 worldly power, unless for worldly purposes, find it difficult to ac- 
 cord, especially in tempers like his. There must be great wis- 
 dom and amiableness on both sides to save them from jealousy of 
 one another's pretensions. Dante was not the man to give and take 
 in such matters on equal terms ; and hence he is at one time in 
 a palace^ and at another in a solitude. Now he is in Sienna, now 
 in Arezzo, now in Bologna ; then probably in Verona with Can 
 Grande's elder brother ; then (if we are to believe those who have 
 tracked his steps) in Casentino ; then with the Marchese Moroello 
 Malaspina in Lunigiana ; then with the great Ghibelline chief- 
 tain Faggiuola in the mountains near Urbino ; then in Romagna, 
 in Padua, in Paris (arguing with the churchmen), some say in 
 Germany, and at Oxford ; then again in Italy ; in Lucca (where 
 he is supposed to have relapsed from his fidelity' to Beatrice in 
 favour of a certain " Gentucca") ; then again in Verona with 
 the new prince, the famous Can Grande (where his sarcasms ap- 
 pear to have lost him a doubtful hospitality) ; then in a monas- 
 tery in the mountains of Umbria ; in Udine ; in Ravenna ; and 
 there at length he put up for the rest of his life with his last and 
 best friend, Guido Novello da Polenta, not the father, but the 
 nephew of the hapless Francesca. 
 
 * Foecolo, in the Edinburgh Review, vol. xxx. p. 351.
 
 12 DANTE. 
 
 % 
 It was probably in the middle period of his exile, that in one 
 
 of the moments of his greatest longing for his native country, he 
 wrote that affecting passage in the Convito, which was evidently 
 a direct effort at conciliation. Excusing himself for some harsh- 
 ness and obscurity in the style of that work, he exclaims, " Ah ! 
 would it had pleased the Dispenser of all things that this excuse 
 had never been needed ; that neither others had done me wrong, 
 nor myself undergone penalty undeservedly the penalty, I say, 
 of exile and of poverty. For it pleased the citizens of the fair- ' 
 est and most renowned daughter of Rome Florence to cast me 
 out of her most sweet bosom, where I was born, and bred, and 
 passed half of the life of man, and in which, with her good leave, 
 I still desire with all my heart to repose my weary spirit, and 
 finish the days allotted me ; and so I have wandered in almost 
 every place to which our language extends, a stranger, almost a 
 beggar, exposing against my will the wounds given me by for- 
 tune, too often unjustly imputed to the sufferer's fault. Truly I 
 have been a vessel without sail and without rudder, driven about 
 upon different ports and shores by the dry wind that springs out 
 of dolorous poverty ; and hence have I appeared vile in the eyes 
 of many, who, perhaps, by some better report had conceived of 
 me a different impression, and in whose sight not only has my 
 person become thus debased, but an unworthy opinion created of 
 every thing which I did, or which I had to do."* 
 
 * " Ahi piaciuto fosse al Dispensatore dell' universe, che la cagione della 
 mia scusa mai non fosse stata ; che ne altri contro a me avria fallato, ne io 
 sofferto avrei pena ingiustamente ; pena, dico, d' esilio e di pov erta. Poichfe 
 fu piacere de' cittadini della bellissima e famosissima figlia di Roma, Fiorenza, 
 di gettarmi fuori del suo dolcissimo seno (nel quale nato e nudrito fui sino al 
 colmo della mia vita, e nel quale, con buona pace di quella. desidero con tutto il 
 core di riposare 1' animo staiico, e terminare il tempo che m' e dato ) ; per le 
 parti quasi tutte, alle quali questa lingua si stende, peregrine, quasi mendican- 
 do, sono andato, mostrando contro a mia voglia la piaga della fortuna, che suolc 
 ingiustamente al piagato molte volte essere imputata. Veramente io sono 
 stato legno sanza vela e sanza governo, portato a diversi porti e foci e liti dal 
 vento secco che vapora la dolorosa poverta ; e sono vile apparito agli occhi a 
 molti, che-forse per alcuna fama in altra forma mi aveano immaginato ; nel 
 cospetto de' quali non solamente mia persona invilift, ma di minor pregio si fece 
 ogni opera, si gia fatta, come quella che fosse a fare." Opere Minori, ut 
 sup. vol. ii. p. 20.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 13 
 
 How simply and strongly written ! How full of the touching 
 yet undegrading commiseration which adversity has a right to 
 take upon itself, when accompanied with the consciousness of 
 manly endeavour and a good motive ! How could such a man 
 condescend at other times to rage with abuse, and to delight him- 
 self in images of infernal torment ! 
 
 The dates of these fluctuations of feeling towards his nati" 
 city are not known ; but it is supposed to have been not very 
 before his abode with Can Grande that he received permissk 
 return to Florence, on conditions which he justly refused and . 
 sented in the following noble letter to a kinsman. The old spell 
 ing of the original (in the note) is retained as given by Foscolo 
 in the article on " Dante " in the Edinburgh Review (vol. xxx. 
 no. 60) ; and I have retained also, with little difference, the trans- 
 lation which accompanies it : 
 
 " From your letter, which I received with due respect and af- 
 fection, I observe how much you have at heart my restoration to 
 my country. I am bound to you the more gratefully, inasmuch 
 as an exile rarely finds a friend. But after mature consideration, 
 I must, by my answer, disappoint the wishes of some little minds ; 
 and I confide in the judgment to which your impartiality and 
 prudence will lead you. Your nephew and mine has written to 
 me, what indeed had been mentioned by many other friends, that 
 by a decree concerning the exiles, I am allowed to return to 
 Florence, provided I pay a certain sum of money, and submit to 
 the humiliation of asking and receiving absolution : wherein, my 
 father, I see two propositions that are ridiculous and impertinent. 
 I speak of the impertinence of those who mention such conditions 
 to me ; for in your letter, dictated by judgment and discretion, 
 there is no such thing. Is such an invitation, then, to return to 
 his country glorious to d. all. (Dante Allighieri), after suffering 
 in exile almost fifteen years ? Is it thus they would recompense 
 innocence which all the world knows, and the labour and fatigue 
 of unremitting study ? Far from the man who is familiar with 
 philosophy be the senseless baseness of a heart of earth, that 
 could act like a little sciolist, and imitate the infamy of some 
 others, by offering himself up as it were in chains : far from the 
 man who cries aloud for justice, this compromise by his money
 
 14 DANTE. 
 
 with his persecutors. No, my father, this is not the way that 
 shall lead me back to my country. I will return with hasty 
 steps, if you or any other can open to me a way that shall not 
 derogate from the fame and honour of d. (Dante) ; but if by no 
 such way Florence can be entered, then Florence I shall never 
 enter. What ! shall I not every where enjoy the light of the 
 sun and stars ? and may I not seek and contemplate, in every 
 corner of the earth, under the canopy of heaven, consoling and 
 delightful truth, without first rendering myself inglorious, nay in- 
 famous, to the people and republic of Florence ? Bread, I hope, 
 will not fail me."* 
 
 Had Dante's pride and indignation always vented themselves 
 in this truly exalted manner, never could the admirers of his ge- 
 nius have refused him their sympathy ; and never, I conceive, 
 need he either have brought his exile upon him, or closed it as 
 he did. To that close we have now come, and it is truly melan- 
 
 * " In licteris vestris et reverentia debita et affectione receptis, quam repa- 
 triatio mea cures it vobis ex animo grata mente ac diligenti animaversione concepi, 
 etenini tanto me districting obligastis, quanto rarius exules invcnire amicos con- 
 tingit ad illam vero significata respondeo : et si non eatenus qualitur forsara 
 pusillanimitas appeteret aliquorum, ut sub examine vestri consilii ante judicium, 
 affectuose deposco. ecce igitur quod per licteras vestri mei : que nepotis, necnon 
 aliorum quamplurium amicorum significatum est mihi. per ordinamentum nu- 
 per factum Florentie super absolutione bannitorum. quod si solvere vellem cer- 
 tam pecunie quantitatem, vellemque pati notam oblationis et absolvi possem 
 et redire ut presens. in quo quidem duo ridenda et male perconciliata sunt. 
 Pater, dico male perconciliata per illos qui tali expresserunt : nam vestre litere 
 discredits et consultius clausulate nicil de talibus continebant. estne ista revo- 
 catio gloriosa qua d. all. (i. e. Dantps Alligherius) revocatur ad patriam per 
 trilustrium fere perpessus exilium ? hecne meruit conscientia manifesta quibus- 
 libet ? hec sudor et labor continuatus in studiis? absit a viro philosophic domes- 
 tica temeraria terreni cordis humilitas, ut more cujusdam cioli et aliorum in- 
 famiam quasi vinctus ipse se patiatur offerri. absit a viro predicante justitiam, 
 ' ut perpessus injuriam inferentibus. velud benemerentibus, pecuniam suam sol- 
 vaL non est hec via redeundi ad patriam, Pater mi, sed si alia per vos, aut 
 deinde per alios invenietur que fame d. (Dantis) que onori non deroget, illam 
 non lentis passibus acceptabo. quod si per nullam talem Florentia introitur, 
 nunquam Florentiam introibo. quidni ? nonne soils astrorumque specula ubique 
 conspiciam? nonno dulcissimas veritates potero speculari ubique sub celo, ni 
 prius inglorium, imo ignominiosum populo, Florentineque civitati me reddam ? 
 quippe panis non deficiet."
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 15 
 
 choly and mortifying. Failure in a negotiation with the Vene- 
 tians for his patron, Guido Novello, is supposed to have been the 
 last bitter drop which made the cup of his endurance run over. 
 He returned from Venice to Ravenna, worn out, and there died, 
 after fifteen years' absence from his country, in the year 1231, 
 aged fifty-seven. His life had been so agitated, that it probably 
 would not have lasted so long, but for the solace of his poetry, 
 and the glory which he knew it must produce him. Guido gave 
 him a sumptuous funeral, and intended to give him a monument ; 
 but such was the state of Italy in those times, that he himself 
 died in exile the year after. The monument, however, and one 
 of a noble sort, was subsequently bestowed by the father of Cardi- 
 nal Bembo, in 1483 ; and another, still nobler, as late as 1780, 
 by Cardinal Gonzaga. His countrymen, in after years, made 
 two solemn applications for the removal of his dust to Florence ; 
 but the just pride of the Ravennese refused them. 
 
 Of the exile's family, three sons died young ; the daughter 
 went into a nunnery ; and the two remaining brothers, who ulti- 
 mately joined their father in his banishment, became respectable 
 men of letters, and left families in Ravenna ; where the race, 
 though extinct in the male line, still survives through a daughter 
 in the noble house of Serego Alighieri. No direct descent of 
 the other kind from poets of former times is, I believe, known to 
 exist. 
 
 The manners and general appearance of Dante have been mi- 
 nutely recorded, and are in striking agreement with his charac- 
 ter. Boccaccio and other novelists are the chief relaters ; and 
 their accounts will be received accordingly with the greater or 
 less trust, as the reader considers them probable ; but the author 
 of the Decameron personally knew some of his friends and rela- 
 tions, and he intermingles his least favourable reports with ex- 
 pressions of undoubted reverence. The poet was of middle 
 height, of slow and serious deportment, had a long dark visage, 
 large piercing eyes, large jaws, an aquiline nose, a projecting 
 under-lip, and thick curling hair an aspect announcing deter- 
 mination and melancholy. There is a sketch of his counte- 
 nance, in his younger days, from the immature but sweet pencil of 
 Giotto ; and it is a refreshment to look at it, though pride and dis.
 
 16 DANTE. 
 
 content, I think, are discernible in its lineaments. It is idle, and 
 no true compliment to his nature, to pretend, as his mere wor- 
 shippers do, that his face owes all its subsequent gloom and exa- 
 cerbation to external causes, and that he was in every respect 
 the poor victim of events the infant changed at nurse by the 
 wicked. What came out of him, he must have had in him, at 
 least in the germ ; and so inconsistent was his nature altogether, 
 or, at any rate, such an epitome of all the graver passions that 
 are capable of co-existing, both sweet and bitter, thoughtful and 
 outrageous, that one is sometimes tempted to think he must have 
 had an angel for 'one parent, and I shall leave his own tolera- 
 tion to say what for the other. 
 
 To continue the account of his manners and inclinations : He 
 dressed with a becoming gravity ; was temperate in his diet ; a 
 great student ; seldom spoke, unless spoken to, but always to the 
 purpose ; and almost all the anecdotes recorded of him, except 
 by himself, are full of pride and sarcasm. He was so swarthy, 
 that a woman, as he was going by a door in Verona, is said to 
 have pointed him out to another, with a remark which made the 
 saturnine poet smile " That is the man who goes to hell when- 
 ever he pleases, and brings back news of the people there." On 
 which her companion observed " Very likely ; don't you see 
 what a curly beard he has, and what a dark face ? owing, I dare 
 say, to the heat and smoke." He was evidently a passionate 
 lover of painting and music is thought to have been less strict 
 in his conduct with regard to the sex than might be supposed 
 from his platonical aspirations (Boccaccio says, that even a goitre 
 did not repel him from the pretty face of a mountaineer) could 
 be very social when he was young, as may be gathered from the 
 sonnet addressed to his friend Cavalcante about a party for a boat 
 and though his poetry was so intense and weighty, the lauda- 
 ble minuteness of a biographer has informed us, that his hand- 
 writing, besides being neat and precise, was of a long and partic- 
 ularly thin character : " meagre" is his word. 
 
 There is a letter, said to be nearly coeval with his time, and to 
 be written by the prior of a monastery to a celebrated Ghibelline 
 leader, a friend of Dante,'s, which, ihough hitherto accounted 
 apocryphal by most, has such an air of truth, and contains an
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 17 
 
 image of the poet in his exile so exceedingly like what we con- 
 ceive of the man, that it is difficult not to believe it genuine, 
 especially as the handwriting has lately been discovered to be 
 that of Boccaccio.* At all events, I am sure the reader will not 
 be sorry to have the substance of it. The writer says, that he 
 perceived one day a man coming into the monastery, whom none 
 of its inmates knew. He asked him what he wanted ; but the 
 stranger saying nothing, and continuing to gaze on the building 
 as though contemplating its architecture, the question was put a 
 second time ; upon which, looking round on his interrogators, he 
 answered, " Peace /" The prior, whose curiosity was strongly 
 excited, took the stranger apart, and discovering who he was, 
 shewed him all the attention becoming his fame ; and then Dante 
 took a little book out of -his bosom, and observing that perhaps 
 the prior had not seen it, expressed a wish to leave it with his 
 new friend as a memorial. It was " a portion," he said, "of 
 his work." The prior received the volume with respect ; and 
 politely opening it at once, and fixing his eyes on the contents, in 
 order, it would seem, to shew the interest he took in it, appeared 
 suddenly to check some observation which they suggested. 
 Dante found that his reader was surprised at seeing the work 
 written in the vulgar tongue instead of Latin. He explained, 
 that he wished to address himself to readers of all classes; and 
 concluded with requesting the prior to add some notes, with the 
 spirit of which he furnished him, and then forward it (transcri- 
 bed, I presume, by the monks) to their common friend, the Ghib- 
 elline chieftain a commission, which, knowing the prior's inti- 
 macy with that personage, appears to have been the main object 
 of his coming to the place.f 
 
 This letter has been adduced as an evidence of Dante's poem 
 having transpired during his lifetime : a thing which, in the 
 teeth of Boccaccio's statement to that effect, and indeed the poet's 
 own testimony,:}: Foscolo holds to be so impossible, that he turns 
 
 * Opere Minori, ut sup. vol. iii. p. 186. 
 
 t Veltro Allegorico di Dante, ut sup. p. 208, where the Appendix contains 
 the Latin original. 
 
 t See Fraticelli's Dissertation on the Convito, in Opere Minori, ut sup. vol. 
 ii. p. 560. 
 
 3
 
 18 DANTE. 
 
 the evidence against the letter. He thinks, that if such bitter in- 
 vectives had been circulated, a hundred daggers would have been 
 sheathed in the bosom of the exasperating poet.* But I cannot 
 help being of opinion, with some writer whom I am unable at 
 present to call to mind (Schlegel, I think), that the strong critical 
 reaction of modern times in- favour of Dante's genius has tended 
 to exaggerate the idea conceived of him in relation to his own. 
 That he was of importance, and bitterly hated in his native city, 
 was a distinction he shared with other partisans who have ob- 
 tained no celebrity, though his poetry, no doubt, must have in- 
 creased the bitterness ; that his genius also became more and 
 more felt out of the city, by the few individuals capable of esti- 
 mating a man of letters in those semi-barbarous times, may be 
 regarded as certain ; but that busy politicians in general, war- 
 making statesmen, and princes constantly occupied in fighting for 
 their existence with one another, were at all alive either to his 
 merits or his invectives, or would have regarded him as any thing 
 but a poor wandering scholar, solacing his foolish interference in 
 the politics of this world with the old clerical threats against his 
 enemies in another, will hardly, I think, be doubted by any one who 
 reflects on the difference between a fame accumulated by ages, 
 and the living poverty that is obliged to seek its bread. A writer 
 on a monkish subject may have acquired fame with monks, and 
 even with a few distinguished persons, and yet have been little 
 known, and less cared for, out of the pale of that very private 
 literary public, which was almost exclusively their own. When 
 we read, now-a-days, of the great poet's being so politely received 
 by Can Grande, lord of Verona, and sitting at his princely table, 
 we are apt to fancy that nothing but his great poetry procured 
 him the reception, and that nobody present competed with him in 
 the eyes of his host. But, to say nothing of the different kinds 
 of retainers, that could sit at a prince's table in those days, Can, 
 who was more ostentatious than delicate in his munificence, kept 
 a sort of caravansera for clever exiles, whom he distributed into 
 lodgings classified according to their pursuits ;f and Dante only 
 shared his bounty with the rest, till the more delicate poet could 
 
 * Digcorso sul Testo, p. 54. t Balbu, Naples edition, p. 132.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 19 
 
 no longer endure either the buffoonery of his companions, or the 
 amusement derived from it by the master. On one occasion, his 
 platter is slily heaped with their bones, which provokes him to 
 call them dogs, as having none to shew for their own. Another 
 time, Can Grande asks him how it is that his companions give 
 more pleasure at court than himself; to which he answers, " Be- 
 cause like loves like." He then leaves the court, and his dis- 
 gusted superiority is no doubt regarded as a pedantic assumption. 
 He stopped long nowhere, except with Guido Novello ; and 
 when that prince, whose downfall was at hand, sent him on the 
 journey above mentioned to Venice, the senate (whom the poet 
 had never offended) were so little aware of his being of conse- 
 quence, that they declined, giving him an audience. He went 
 back, and broke his heart. Boccaccio says, that he would get 
 into such passions with the very boys and girls in the street, who 
 plagued him with party- words, as to throw stones at them a 
 thing that would be incredible, if persons acquainted with his 
 great but ultra-sensitive nation did not know what Italians could 
 do in all ages, from Dante's own age down to the times of Alfieri 
 and Foscolo. It would be as difficult, from the evidence of his 
 own works and of the exasperation he created, to doubt the ex- 
 tremest reports of his irascible temper, as it would be not to give 
 implicit faith to his honesty. The charge of peculation which his 
 enemies brought against this great poet, the world has universally 
 scouted with an indignation that does it honour. He himself 
 seems never to have condescended to allude to it ; and a biogra- 
 pher would feel bound to copy his silence, had not the accusation 
 been so atrociously recorded. But, on the other hand, who can 
 believe that a man so capable of doing his fellow-citizens good 
 and honour, would have experienced such excessive enmity, had 
 he not carried to excess the provocations of his pride and scorn ? 
 His whole history goes to prove it, not omitting the confession he 
 makes of pride as his chief sin, and the eulogies he bestows 'on 
 the favourite vice of the age revenge. His Christianity (at least 
 as shewn in his poem) was not that of Christ, but of a furious 
 polemic. His motives for changing his party, though probably 
 of a mixed nature, like those of most human beings, may reason- 
 ably be supposed to have originated in something better than in-
 
 20 DANTE. 
 
 terest or indignation. He had most likely not agreed thoroughly 
 with any party, and had become hopeless of seeing dispute 
 brought to an end, except by the representative of the Caesars. 
 The inconsistency of the personal characters of the Popes with 
 the sacred claims of the chair of St. Peter, was also calculated 
 greatly to disgust him ; but still his own infirmities of pride and 
 vindictiveness spoiled all ; and when he loaded every body else 
 with reproach for the misfortunes of his country, he should have 
 recollected that, had his own faults been kept in subjection to his 
 understanding, he might possibly have been its saviour. Dante's 
 modesty has been asserted on the ground of his humbling him- 
 self to the fame of Virgil, and at the feet of blessed spirits ; but 
 this kind of exalted humility does not repay a man's fellow-citi- 
 zens for lording it over them with scorn and derision. We learn 
 from Boccaccio, that when he was asked to go ambassador from 
 his party to the pope, he put to them the following useless and 
 mortifying queries " If I go, who is to stay ? and if I stay, 
 who is to go ?"* Neither did his pride make him tolerant of 
 pride in others. A neighbour applying for his intercession with 
 
 * " Di se stesso presunse maravigliosamente tanto, che essendo egli glorioso 
 nel colmo del reggimento della republica, e ragionandosi tra maggiori cittadini 
 di mandare, per alcuna gran bisogna, ambasciata a Bonifazio Papa VIII., e 
 che principe della ambasciata fosse Dante, ed egli in ci6 in presenzia di tutti 
 quegli che cio consigliavano richiesto, avvenne, che soprastando egli alia ris- 
 posta, alcun disse, che pensi ? alle quali parole egli rispose : penso, se io vo, chi 
 rimane ; e s' io rimango, chi va : quasi esso solo fosse colui che tra tutti valesse 
 e per cui tutti gli altri valessero." And he goes on to say, respecting the stone- 
 throwing " Appresso, come che il nostro poeta nelle sua avversita paziente 
 o no si fosse, in una fu impazientissimo : ed egli infino al cominciamento del 
 suo esilio stato guelfissimo, non essendogli aperta la via del ritornare in casa 
 sua, si fuor di modo diventb ghibellino, che ogni femminella, ogni picciol fan- 
 ciullo, e quante volte avesse voluto, ragionando di parte, e la guelfa proponendo 
 alia ghibellina, 1'avrebbe non solamente fatto turbare, ma a tanta insania com- 
 mosso, che se taciuto lion fosse, a gittarle pietre 1'avrebbe condotto." (Vita di 
 Dante, prefixed to the Paris edition of the Commedia, 1844, p. xxv.) And 
 then the " buon Boccaccio," with his accustomed sweetness of nature, begs 
 pardon of so great a man, for being obliged to relate such things of him, and 
 doubts whether his spirit may not be looking down on him that moment dis- 
 dainfully from heaven .' Such an association of ideas had Dante produced 
 between the celestial and the scornful !
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 21 
 
 a magistrate, who had summoned him for some offence, Dante, 
 who disliked the man for riding in an overbearing manner along 
 the streets (stretching out his legs as wide as he could, and hin- 
 dering people from going by), did intercede with the magistrate, 
 but it was in behalf of doubling the fine in consideration of the 
 horsemanship. The neighbour, who was a man of family, was 
 so exasperated, that Sacchetti the novelist says it was the princi- 
 pal cause of Dante's expatriation. This will be considered the 
 less improbable, if, as some suppose, the delinquent obtained pos- 
 session of his derider's confiscated property ; but, at all events, 
 nothing is more likely to have injured him. The bitterest ani- 
 mosities are generally of a personal nature ; and bitter indeed 
 must have been those which condemned a man of official dignity 
 and of genius to such a penalty as the stake.* 
 
 That the Florentines of old, like other half-Christianised peo- 
 ple, were capable of any extremity against an opponent, burning 
 included, was proved by the fates of Savonarola and others ; and 
 that Dante himself could admire the burners is evident from his 
 eulogies and beatification of such men as Folco and St. Dominic. 
 The tragical as well as " fantastic tricks" which 
 
 " Man, proud man, 
 Drest in a little brief authority," 
 
 plays with his energy and bad passions under the guise of duty, 
 is among the most perplexing of those spectacles, which, accord- 
 ing to a greater understanding than Dante's, " make the an- 
 gels weep." (Dante, by the way, has introduced in his heaven 
 no such angels as those ; though he has plenty that scorn and de- 
 nounce.) Lope de Vega, though a poet, was an officer of the In- 
 quisition, and joined the famous Armada that was coming to 
 thumbscrew and roast us into his views of Christian meekness. 
 Whether the author of the story of Paulo and Francesco, could 
 have carried the Dominican theories into practice, had he been 
 the banisher instead of the banished, is a point that may happily 
 be doubted ; but at all events he revenged himself on his enemies 
 
 * Novelle di Franco Sacchetti, Milan edition, 1804, vol. ii. p. 148. It forms 
 the setting, or frame-work, of an inferior story, and is not mentioned in the 
 heading.
 
 22 DANTE. 
 
 after their own fashion ; for he answered their decree of the 
 stake by putting them into hell. 
 
 Dante entitled the saddest poem in the world a Comedy, be- 
 cause it was written in a middle style ; though some, by a strange 
 confusion of ideas, think the reason must have been because it 
 " ended happily !" that is, because, beginning with hell (to some), 
 it terminated with " heaven" (to others). As well might they 
 have said, that a morning's work in the Inquisition ended happily, 
 because, while people were being racked in the dungeons, the of- 
 ficers were making merry in the drawing-room. For the much- 
 injured epithet of " Divine," Dante's memory is not responsible. 
 He entitled his poem arrogantly enough, yet still not with that 
 impiety of arrogance, " The Comedy of Dante Alighieri, a Flor- 
 entine by nation but not by habits." The word " divine" was 
 added by some transcriber ; and it heaped absurdity on absur- 
 dity, too much of it, alas ! being literally infernal tragedy. I 
 am not speaking in mockery, any further than the fact itself can- 
 not help so speaking. I respect what is to be respected in Dante ; 
 I admire in him what is admirable ; would love (if his infernali- 
 ties would let me) what is loveable j but this must not hinder 
 one of the human race from protesting against what is erroneous 
 in his fame, when it jars against every best feeling, human and 
 divine. Mr. Gary thinks that Dante had as much right to avail 
 himself of " the popular creed in all its extravagance" as Homer 
 had of his gods, or Shakspeare of his fairies. But the distinc- 
 tion is obvious. Homer did not personally identify himself with 
 a creed, or do his utmost to perpetuate the worst parts of it in 
 behalf of a ferocious inquisitorial church, and to the risk of en- 
 dangering the peace of millions of gentle minds. 
 
 The great poem thus misnomered is partly a system of theol- 
 ogy, partly an abstract of the knowledge of the day, but chiefly 
 a series of passionate and imaginative pictures, altogether form- 
 ing an account of the author's times, his friends, his enemies, 
 and himself, written to vent the spleen of his exile, and the rest 
 of his feelings, good and bad, and to reform church and state by 
 a spirit of resentment and obloquy, which highly needed reform 
 itself. It has also a design strictly self- referential. The author 
 feigns, that the beatified spirit of his mistress has obtained leave
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 23 
 
 to warn and purify his soul by shewing him the state of things in 
 the next world. She deputes the soul of his master Virgil to 
 conduct him through hell and purgatory, and then takes him her- 
 self through the spheres of heaven, where St. Peter catechises 
 and confirms him, and where he is finally honoured with sights 
 of the Virgin Mary, of Christ, and even a glimpse of the Su- 
 preme Being ! 
 
 His hell, considered as a place, is, to speak geologically, a 
 most fantastical formation. It descends from beneath Jerusalem 
 to the centre of the earth, and is a funnel graduated in circles, each 
 circle being a separate place of torment for a different vice or its 
 co-ordinates, and the point of the funnel terminating with Satan 
 stuck into ice. Purgatory is a corresponding mountain on the 
 other side of the globe, commencing with the antipodes of Jeru- 
 salem, and divided into exterior circles of expiation, which end 
 in a table-land forming the terrestrial paradise. From this the 
 hero and his mistress ascend by a flight, exquisitely conceived, to 
 the stars ; where the sun and the planets of the Ptolemaic sys- 
 tem (for the true one was unknown in Dante's time) form a se- 
 ries of heavens for different virtues, the whole terminating in the 
 empyrean, or region of pure light, and the presence of the Be- 
 atific Vision. 
 
 The boundaries of old and new, strange as it may now 
 seem to us, were so confused in those days, and books were so 
 rare, and the Latin poets held hi such invincible reverence, that 
 Dante, in one and the same poem, speaks of the false gods of Pa- 
 ganism, and yet retains much of its lower mythology ; nay, in- 
 vokes Apollo himself at the door of paradise. There was, per- 
 haps, some mystical and even philosophical inclusion of the past 
 in this medley, as recognising the constant superintendence of 
 Providence ; but that Dante partook of what may be called the 
 literary superstition of the time, even for want of better know- 
 ledge, is clear from the grave historical use he makes of poetic 
 fables in his treatise on Monarchy, and in the very arguments 
 which he puts into the mouths of saints and apostles. There are 
 lingering feelings to this effect even now among the peasantry of 
 Italy ; where, the reader need not be told, Pagan customs of all 
 sorts, including religious and most reverend ones, are existing
 
 24 DANTE. 
 
 under the sanction of other names ; heathenisms christened. A 
 Tuscan postilion, once enumerating to me some of the native 
 poets, concluded his list with Apollo; and a plaster-cast man 
 -over here, in London, appeared much puzzled, when conversing 
 on the subject with a friend of mine, how to discrepate Samson 
 from Hercules. 
 
 Dante accordingly, while, with the frightful bigotry of the 
 schools, he puts the whole Pagan world into hell-borders (with 
 the exception of two or three, whose salvation adds to the absur- 
 dity), mingles the hell of Virgil with that of Tertullian and St. 
 Dominic ; sets Minos at the door as judge ; retains Charon in his 
 old office of boatman over the Stygian lake ; puts fabulous peo- 
 ple with real among the damned, Dido, and Cacus, and Ephialtes, 
 with Ezzelino and Pope Nicholas the Fifth ; and associates the 
 Centaurs and the Furies with the agents of diabolical torture. 
 It has pleased him also to elevate Cato of Utica to the office of 
 warder of purgatory, though the censor's poor good wife, Marcia, 
 is detained in the regions below. By these and other far greater 
 inconsistencies, the whole place of punishment becomes a reduc- 
 lio ab absurdum, as ridiculous as it is melancholy ; so that one 
 is astonished how so great a man, and especially a man who 
 thought himself so far advanced beyond his age, and who pos- 
 sessed such powers of discerning the good and beautiful, could 
 endure to let his mind live in so foul and foolish a region for any 
 length of time, and there wreak and harden the unworthiest of 
 his passions. Genius, nevertheless, is so commensurate with absur- 
 dity throughout the book, and there are even such sweet and balmy 
 as well as sublime pictures in it occasionally, nay often, that not 
 only will the poem ever be worthy of admiration, but when those 
 increasing purifications of Christianity which our blessed refor- 
 mers began, shall finally precipitate the whole dregs of the au- 
 thor into the mythology to which they belong, the world will de- 
 rive a pleasure from it to an amount not to be conceived till the 
 arrival of that day. Dante, meantime, with an impartiality 
 which has been admired by those who can approve the assumption 
 of a theological tyranny at the expense of common feeling and de- 
 cency, has put friends as well as foes into hell : tutors of his child- 
 hood, kinsmen of those who treated him hospitably, even the father
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 25 
 
 of his beloved friend, Guido Cavalcante the last for not believ- 
 ing in a God : therein doing the worst thing possible in behalf of 
 the belief, and totally differing both with the pious heathen Plu- 
 tarch, and the great Christian philosopher Bacon, who were of 
 opinion that a contumelious belief is worse than none, and that 
 it is far better and more pious to believe in " no God at all," than 
 in a God who would " eat his children as soon as they were 
 born." And Dante makes him do worse ; for the whole unbap- 
 tised infant world, Christian as well as Pagan, is in his Tartarus. 
 
 Milton has spoken of the " milder shades of Purgatory ;" and 
 truly they possess great beauties. Even in a theological point 
 of view they are something like a bit of Christian refreshment 
 after the horrors of the Inferno. The first emerging from the 
 hideous gulf to the sight of the blue serenity of heaven, is paint- 
 ed in a manner inexpressibly charming. So is the sea- shore 
 with the coming of the angel ; the valley, with the angels in 
 green ; the repose at night on the rocks ; and twenty other pic- 
 tures of gentleness and love. And yet, special and great has 
 been the escape of the Protestant world from this part of Roman 
 Catholic belief; for Purgatory L; the heaviest stone that hangs 
 about the neck of the old and feeble in that communion. Hell 
 is avoidable by repentance ; but Purgatory, what modest con- 
 science shall escape ? Mr. Gary, in a note on a passage in which 
 Dante recommends his readers to think on what follows this ex- 
 piatory state, rather than what is suffered there,* looks upon the 
 poet's injunction as an " unanswerable objection to the doctrine 
 of purgatory," it being difficult to conceive " how the best can 
 meet death without horror, if they believe it must be followed by 
 immediate and intense suffering." Luckily, assent is not belief; 
 and mankind's feelings are for the most part superior to their 
 opinions ; otherwise the world would have been in a bad way in- 
 deed, and nature not been vindicated of her children. But let 
 us watch and be on our guard against all resuscitations of su- 
 perstition. 
 
 As to our Florentine's Heaven, it is full of beauties also, 
 
 * The Vision ; or, Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, of Dante Alighieri, <f-c 
 Smith's edition, 1844, p, 90.
 
 26 DANTE. 
 
 i ~~ ~~~~ ~~ ~ ~~~ ^~~~ ~ 
 
 though sometimes of a more questionable and pantomimical sort 
 than is to be found in either of the other books. I shall speak of 
 some of them presently ; but the general impression of the place 
 is, that it is no heaven at all. He says it is, and talks much of 
 its smiles and its beatitude ; but always excepting the poetry 
 especially the similes brought from the more heavenly earth we 
 realise little but a fantastical assemblage of doctors and doubtful 
 characters, far more angry and theological than celestial ; giddy 
 raptures of monks and inquisitors dancing in circles, and saints 
 denouncing popes and Florentines ; in short, a heaven libelling 
 itself with invectives against earth, and terminating in a great 
 presumption. Many of the people put there, a Calvinistic Dante 
 would have consigned to the "other place;" and some, if now 
 living, would not be admitted into decent society. At the begin- 
 ning of one of the cantos, the poet congratulates himself, with a 
 complacent superiority, on his being in heaven and occupied with 
 celestial matters, while his poor fellow-creatures are wandering 
 and blundering on earth. But he had never got there ! A di- 
 vine worthy of that name of the Church of England (Dr. 
 Whichcote), has beautifully said, that " heaven is first a temper, 
 and then a place." According to this truly celestial topography, 
 the implacable Florentine had not reached its outermost court. 
 Again, his heavenly mistress, Beatrice, besides being far too di- 
 dactic to sustain the womanly part of her character properly, al- 
 ternates her smiles and her sarcasms in a way that jars horribly 
 against the occasional enchantment of her aspect. She does not 
 scruple to burst into taunts of the Florentines in the presence of 
 Jesus himself; and the spirit of his ancestor, Cacciaguida, in the 
 very bosom of Christian bliss, promises him revenge on his ene- 
 mies ! Is this the kind of zeal that is to be exempt from objec- 
 tion in a man who objected to all the world ? or will it be thought 
 a profaneness against such profanity, to remind the reader of the 
 philosopher in Swift, who " while gazing on the stars, was betray- 
 ed by his lower parts into a ditch !" 
 
 The reader's time need not be wasted with the allegorical and 
 other mystical significations given to the poem ; still less on the 
 question whether Beatrice is theology, or a young lady, or both ; 
 and least of all on the discovery of the ingenious Signer Rossetti,
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 27 
 
 that Dante and all the other great old Italian writers meant no- 
 thing, either by their mistresses or their mythology, but attacks 
 on the court of Rome. Suffice it, that besides all other possible 
 meanings, Dante himself has told us that his poem has its obvi- 
 ous and literal meaning ; that he means a spade by a spade, pur- 
 gatory by purgatory, and truly and unaffectedly to devote his 
 friends to the infernal regions whenever he does so. I confess I 
 think it is a great pity that Guido Cavalcante did not live to read 
 the poem, especially the passage about his father. The under- 
 standing of Guido, who had not the admiration for Virgil that 
 Dante had (very likely for reasons that have been thought sound 
 in modern times), was in all probability as good as that of his 
 friend in many respects, and perhaps more so in one or two ; and 
 modern criticism might have been saved some of its pains of 
 objection by the poet's contemporary. 
 
 The author did not live to publish, in any formal manner, his 
 extraordinary poem, probably did not intend to do so, except un- 
 der those circumstances of political triumph which he was al- 
 ways looking for ; but as he shewed portions of it to his friends, 
 it was no doubt talked of to a certain extent, and must have ex- 
 asperated such of his enemies as considered him worth their hos- 
 tility. No wonder they did all they could to keep him out of 
 Florence. What would they have said of him, could they have 
 written a counter poem ? What would even his friends have 
 said of him ? for we see in what manner he has treated even 
 those ; and yet how could he possibly know, with respect either 
 to friends or enemies, what passed between them and their con- 
 sciences ? or who was it that gave him his right to generate the 
 boasted distinction between an author's feelings as a man and his 
 assumed office as a theologian, and parade the latter at the for- 
 mer's expense ? His own spleen, hatred, and avowed sentiments 
 of vengeance, are manifest throughout the poem ; and there is 
 this, indeed, to be said for the moral and religious inconsistencies 
 both of the man and his verse, that in those violent times the 
 spirit of Christian charity, and even the sentiment of personal 
 shame, were so little understood, that the author in one part of it 
 is made to blush by a friend for not having avenged him ; and it 
 is said to have been thought a compliment to put a lady herself
 
 28 DANTE. 
 
 into hell, that she might be talked of, provided it was for some- 
 thing not odious. An admirer of this infernal kind of celebrity, 
 even in later times, declared that he would have given a sum of 
 money (I forget to what amount) if Dante had but done as much 
 for one of his ancestors. It has been argued, that in all the par- 
 ties concerned in these curious ethics there is a generous love of 
 distinction, and a strong craving after life, action, and sympathy 
 of some kind or other. Granted ; there are all sorts of half-good, 
 half-barbarous feelings in Dante's poem. Let justice be done to 
 the good half; but do not let us take the ferocity for wisdom and 
 piety ; or pretend, in the complacency of our own freedom from 
 superstition, to see no danger of harm to the less fortunate among 
 our fellow-creatures in the support it receives from a man of ge- 
 nius. Bedlams have been filled with such horrors ; thousands, 
 nay millions of feeble minds are suffering by them or from them, 
 at this minute, all over the world. Dante's best critic, Foscolo, 
 has said much of the heroical nature of the age in which the 
 poet lived ; but he adds, that its mixture of knowledge and ab- 
 surdity is almost inexplicable. The truth is, that like everything 
 else which appears harsh and unaccountable in nature, it was an 
 excess of the materials for good, working in an over-active and 
 inexperienced manner ; but knowing this, we are bound, for the 
 sake of the good, not to retard its improvement by ignoring exist- 
 ing impieties, or blind ourselves to the perpetuating tendencies of 
 the bigotries of great men. Oh ! had the first indoctrinators of 
 Christian feeling, while enlisting the " divine Plato" into the ser- 
 vice of diviner charity, only kept the latter just enough in mind 
 to discern the beautiful difference between the philosopher's un- 
 malignant and improvable evil, and their own malignant and 
 eternal one, what a world of folly and misery they might have 
 saved us ! But as the evil has happened, let us hope that even 
 this form of it has had its uses. If Dante thought it salutary to 
 the world to maintain a system of religious terror, the same char- 
 ity which can hope that it may once have been so, has taught us 
 how to commence a better^ But did he, after all, or did he not, 
 think it salutary ? Did he think so, believing the creed himself? 
 or did he think it from an unwilling sense of its necessity ? Or, 
 lastly, did he write only as a mythologist, and care for nothing
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 
 
 but the exercise of his spleen and genius ? If he had no other 
 object than that, his conscientiousness would be reduced to a low 
 pitch indeed. Foscolo is of opinion he was not only in earnest, 
 but that he was very near taking himself for an apostle, and 
 would have done so had his prophecies succeeded, perhaps with 
 success to the pretension.* Thank heaven, his " Hell" has not 
 embittered the mild reading-desks of the Church of England. 
 If King George the Third himself, with all his arbitrary notions, 
 and willing religious acquiescence, could not endure the creed of 
 St. Athanasius with its damnatory enjoinments of the impossible, 
 what would have been said to the inscription over Dante's hell- 
 gate, or the account of Ugolino eating an archbishop, in the gen- 
 tie chapels of Queen Victoria ? May those chapels have every 
 beauty in them, and every air of heaven, that painting and music 
 can bestow divine gifts, not unworthy to be set before their Di- 
 vine Bestower ; but far from them be kept the foul fiends of in- 
 humanity and superstition ! 
 
 It is certainly impossible to get at a thorough knowledge of 
 the opinions of Dante even in theology ; and his morals, if 
 judged according to the received standard, are not seldom puz- 
 zling. He rarely thinks as the popes do ; sometimes not as the 
 Church does ; he is lax, for instance, on the subject of absolution 
 by the priest at death. f All you can be sure of is, the predomi- 
 nance of his will, the most wonderful poetry, and the notions he 
 entertained of the degrees of vice and virtue. Towards the 
 errors of love he is inclined to be so lenient (some think because 
 he had indulged in them himself), that it is pretty clear he would 
 not have put Paulo and Francesca into hell, if their story had 
 not been too recent, and their death too sudden, to allow him to 
 assume their repentance in the teeth of the evidence required. 
 He avails himself of orthodox license to put " the harlot Rahab" 
 into heaven (" cette bonne fille de Jericho," as Ginguene calls 
 her) ; nay, he puts her into the planet Venus, as if to compli- 
 ment her on her profession ; and one of her companions there is 
 
 Discorso sul Testo, pp. 64, 77-90, 335-338. 
 
 t Purgatorio, canto iii. 1 18, 138 ; referred to by Foscolo, in the Discorso 
 aid Testo, p. 383.
 
 30 DANTE. 
 
 a fair Ghibelline, sister of the tyrant Ezzelino, a lady famous for 
 her gallantries, of whom the poet good-naturedly says, that she 
 " was overcome by her star" to wit, the said planet Venus ; 
 and yet he makes her the organ of the most unfeminine triumphs 
 over the Guelphs. But both these ladies, it is to be understood, 
 repented for they had time for repentance ; their good fortune 
 saved them. Poor murdered Francesca had no time to repent ; 
 therefore her mischance was her damnation ! Such are the com- 
 pliments theology pays to the Creator. In fact, nothing is really 
 punished in Dante's Catholic hell but impenitence, deliberate or 
 accidental. No delay of repentance, however dangerous, hin- 
 ders the most hard-hearted villain from reaching his heaven. The 
 best man goes to hell for ever, if he does not think he has sinned 
 as Dante thinks ; the worst is beatified, if he agrees with him : 
 the only thing which every body is sure of, is some dreadful du- 
 ration of agony in purgatory the great horror of Catholic death- 
 beds. Protestantism may well hug itself on having escaped it. 
 O Luther ! vast was the good you did us. O gentle Church of 
 England ! let nothing persuade you that it is better to preach 
 frightful and foolish ideas of God from your pulpits, than loving- 
 kindness to all men, and peace above all things. 
 
 If Dante had erred only on the side of indulgence, humanity 
 could easily have forgiven him for the excesses of charity are 
 the extensions of hope ; but, unfortunately, where he is sweet- 
 natured once, he is bitter a hundred times. This is the impres- 
 sion he makes on universalists of all creeds and parties ; that is 
 to say, on men who having run the whole round of sympathy 
 with their fellow-creatures, become the only final judges of sove- 
 reign pretension. It is very well for individuals to make a god 
 of Dante for some encouragement of their own position or pre- 
 tension ; but a god for the world at large he never was, or can 
 be ; and I doubt if an impression to this effect was not always, 
 from the very dawn of our literature, the one entertained of him 
 by the genius of our native country, which could never long 
 endure any kind of unwarrantable dictation. Chaucer evidently 
 thought him a man who would spare no unnecessary probe to the 
 feelings (see the close of his version of Ugolino). Spenser says 
 not a word of him, though he copied Tasso, and eulogised Ariosto.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 31 
 
 Shakspeare would assuredly have put him into the list of those 
 presumptuous lookers into eternity who " take upon themselves to 
 know" (Cymbeline, act v. sc. 4). Milton, in his sonnet to Henry 
 Lawes, calls him "that sad Florentine" a lamenting epithet, by 
 which we do not designate a man whom we desire to resemble. 
 The historian of English poetry, admirably applying to him a 
 passage out of Milton, says that 
 
 " Hell grows darker at his frown."* 
 
 Walter Scott could not read him, at least not with pleasure. He 
 tells Miss Seward that the " plan" of the poem appeared to him 
 " unhappy ; the personal malignity and strange mode of revenge 
 presumptuous and uninteresting, "f Uninteresting, I think, it is 
 impossible to consider it. The known world is there, and the 
 unknown pretends to be there ; and both are surely interesting 
 to most people. 
 
 Landor, in his delightful book the Pentameron a book full of 
 the profoundest as well as sweetest humanity makes Petrarch 
 follow up Boccaccio's eulogies of the episode of Paulo and Fran- 
 cesca with ebullitions of surprise and horror : 
 
 "Petrarca. Perfection of poetry ! The greater is my won- 
 der at discovering nothing else of the same order or cast in this 
 whole section of the poem. He who fainted at the recital of 
 Francesca, 
 
 ' And he who fell as a dead body falls,' 
 
 would exterminate all the inhabitants of every town in Italy ! 
 What execrations against Florence, Pistoia, Pisa, Siena, Genoa ! 
 what hatred against the whole human race ! what exultation and 
 merriment at eternal and immitigable sufferings ! Seeing this, I 
 cannot but consider the Inferno as the most immoral and impious 
 book that ever was written. Yet, hopeless that our country shall 
 ever see again such poetry, and certain that without it our future 
 poets would be more feebly urged forward to excellence, I would 
 
 Warton's History of English Poetry, edition of 1840, vol. iii. p. 214. 
 t Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, Bart. vol. ii. p. 122.
 
 32 DANTE. 
 
 have dissuaded Dante from cancelling it, if this had been his in- 
 tention."* 
 
 Most happily is the distinction here intimated between the un- 
 desirableness of Dante's book in a moral and religious point of 
 view, and the greater desirableness of it, nevertheless, as a pat- 
 tern of poetry ; for absurdity, however potent, wears itself out in 
 the end, and leaves what is good and beautiful to vindicate even 
 so foul an origin. 
 
 Again, Petrarch says, " What an object of sadness and of con- 
 sternation, he who rises up from hell like a giant refreshed ! 
 
 "Boccaccio. Strange perversion ! A pillar of smoke by day 
 and of fire by night, to guide no one. Paradise had fewer wants 
 for him to satisfy than hell had, all which he fed to repletion ; but 
 let us rather look to his poetry than his temper." 
 
 See also what is said in that admirable book further on (p. 50), 
 respecting the most impious and absurd passage in all Dante's 
 poem, the assumption about Divine Love in the inscription over 
 hell-gate one of those monstrosities of conception which none 
 ever had the effrontery to pretend to vindicate, except theologians 
 who profess to be superior to the priests of Moloch, and who yet 
 defy every feeling of decency and humanity for the purpose of 
 explaining their own worldly, frightened, or hard-hearted sub- 
 mission to the mistakes of the most wretched understandings. 
 
 Ugo Foscolo, an excellent critic where his own temper and vi- 
 olence did not interfere, sees nothing but jealousy in Petrarch's 
 dislike of Dante, and nothing but Jesuitism in similar feelings en- 
 tertained by such men as Tiraboschi. But all gentle and con- 
 siderate hearts must dislike the rage and bigotry in Dante, even 
 were it true (as the Dantesque Foscolo thinks) that Italy will never 
 be regenerated till one-half of it is baptised in the blood of the 
 other !f Such men, with all their acuteness, are incapable of 
 seeing what can be effected by nobler and serener times, and the 
 progress of civilisation. They fancy, no doubt, that they are vin- 
 dicating the energies of Nature herself, and the inevitable neces- 
 sity of "doing evil that good may come." But Dante in so do- 
 
 * Pentameron and Pentalogia, pp. 44-50. 
 
 t Discorso sul Testo, p. 226. The whole passage (sect, ex.) is very elo- 
 quent, horrible, and self-betraying.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 33 
 
 ing violated the Scripture he professed to revere ; and men must 
 not assume to themselves that final knowledge of results, which 
 is the only warrant of the privilege, and the possession of which 
 is to be arrogated by no earthly wisdom. One calm discovery 
 of science may do away with all the boasted eternal necessities 
 of the angry and the self-idolatrous. The passions that may be 
 necessary to savages are not bound to remain so to civilised men, 
 any more than the eating of man's flesh or the worship of Jug- 
 ghernaut. When we think of the wonderful things lately done 
 by science for the intercourse of the world, and the beautiful and 
 tranquil books of philosophy written by men of equal energy and 
 benevolence, and opening the peacefulest hopes for mankind, and 
 views of creation to which Dante's universe was a nutshell, 
 such a vision as that of his poem (in a theological point of view) 
 seems no better than the dream of an hypochondriacl savage, and 
 his nutshell a rottenness to be spit out of the mouth. 
 
 Heaven send that the great poet's want of charity has not made 
 myself presumptuous and uncharitable ! But it is in the name 
 of society I speak ; and words, at all events, now-a-days are not 
 the terrible, stake-preceding things they were in his. Readers in 
 general, however even those of the literary world have little 
 conception of the extent to which Dante carries either his cruelty 
 or his abuse. The former (of which I shall give some examples 
 presently) shews appalling habits of personal resentment; the 
 latter is outrageous to a pitch of the ludicrous positively scream, 
 ing. I will give some specimens of it out of Foscolo himself, 
 who collects them for a different purpose ; though, with all his 
 idolatry of Dante, he was far from being insensible to his mis- 
 takes. 
 
 " The people of Sienna," according to this national and Chris- 
 tian poet, were " a parcel of coxcombs ; those of Arezzo, dogs ; 
 and of Casentino, hogs. Lucca made a trade of perjury. Pis- 
 toia was a den of beasts, and ought to be reduced to ashes ; and 
 the river Arno should overflow and drown every soul in Pisa. 
 Almost all the women in Florence walked half-naked in public, 
 and were abandoned in private. Every brother, husband, son, 
 and father, in Bologna, set their women to sale. In all Lombardy 
 were not to be found three men who were not rascals ; and in 
 
 3
 
 34 DANTE. 
 
 Genoa and Romagna people went about pretending to be men, 
 but in reality were bodies inhabited by devils, their souls having 
 gone to the ' lowest pit of hell' to join the betrayers of their 
 friends and kinsmen."* 
 
 So much for his beloved countrymen. As for foreigners, par- 
 ticularly kings, " Edward the First of England, and Robert of 
 Scotland, were a couple of grasping fools ; the Emperor Albert 
 was an usurper ; Alphonso the Second, of Spain, a debauchee ; 
 the King of Bohemia a coward ; Frederick of Arragon a coward 
 and miser ; the Kings of Portugal and Norway forgers ; the 
 King of Naples a man whose virtues were expressed by a unit, 
 and his vices by a million ; and the King of France, the de- 
 scendant of a Paris butcher, and of progenitors who poisoned St. 
 Thomas Aquinas, their descendants conquering with the arms of 
 Judas rather than of soldiers, and selling the flesh of their daugh- 
 ters to old men, in order to extricate themselves from a danger. "} 
 
 When we add to these invectives, damnations of friends as 
 well as foes, of companions, lawyers, men of letters, princes, 
 philosophers, popes, pagans, innocent people as well as guilty, 
 fools and wise, capable and incapable, men, women, and chil- 
 dren, it is really no better than a kind of diabolical sublimation 
 of Lord Thurlow's anathemas in the Rolliad, which begins with 
 
 " Damnation seize ye all ;" 
 and ends with 
 
 " Damn them beyond what mortal tongue can tell, 
 Confouiid, sink, plunge them all to deepest, blackest hell."t 
 
 In the gross, indeed, this is ridiculous enough. No burlesque 
 can beat it. But in the particular, one is astonished and sad- 
 dened at the cruelties in which the poet allows his imagination to 
 riot : horrors generally described with too intense a verisimili- 
 tude not to excite our admiration, with too astounding a perse- 
 verance not to amaze our humanity, and sometimes with an 
 amount of positive joy and delight that makes us ready to shut 
 
 * Discorso, as above, p. 101. t Discorso, p. 103. 
 
 \ Criticisms on the Rolliad, and Probationary Odes for the Laureateship. 
 Third edit 1785, p. 317.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 35 
 
 the book with disgust and indignation. Thus, in a circle in hell, 
 where traitors are stuck up to their chins in ice (canto xxxii.), 
 the visitor, in walking about, happens to give one of their faces 
 a kick ; the sufferer weeps, and then curses him with such in- 
 fernal truth does the writer combine the malignant with the pa- 
 thetic ! Dante replies to the curse by asking the man his name. 
 He is refused it. He then seizes the miserable wretch by the 
 hair, in order to force him to the disclosure ; and Virgil is rep- 
 resented as commending the barbarity !* But he does worse. 
 To barbarity he adds treachery of his own. He tells another 
 poor wretch, whose face is iced up with his tears, as if he had worn 
 a crystal vizor, that if he will disclose his name and offence, he 
 will relieve his eyes awhile, that he may weep. The man does 
 so ; and the ferocious poet then refuses to perform his promise, 
 adding mockery to falsehood, and observing that ill manners are 
 the only courtesy proper towards such a fellow !j~ It has been 
 conjectured that Macchiavelli apparently encouraged the enormi- 
 ties of the princes of his time, with a design to expose them to 
 indignation. It might have been thought of Dante, if he had 
 not taken a part in the cruelty, that he detailed the horrors of his 
 hell out of a wish to disgust the world with its frightful notions 
 of God. This is certainly the effect of the worse part of his de- 
 scriptions in an age like the present. Black burning gulfs, full 
 of outcries and blasphemy, feet red-hot with fire, men eternally 
 eating their fellow-creatures, frozen wretches malignantly dash- 
 ing their iced heads against one another, other adversaries mu- 
 tually exchanging shapes by force of an attraction at once irre- 
 sistible and loathing, and spitting with hate and disgust when it is 
 done Enough, enough, for God's sake ! Take the disgust out 
 of one's senses, O flower of true Christian wisdom and charity, 
 now beginning to fill the air with fragrance ! 
 
 But it will be said that Dante did all this out of his hate of 
 
 * The writer of the article on Dante in the Foreign Quarterly Review (as 
 above) concedes that his hero in this passage becomes " almost cruel." Almost ! 
 Tormenting a man further, who is up to his chin in everlasting ice, and whose 
 face he has kicked ! 
 
 t " Cortesia fu lui esser villano." 
 
 Inferno, canto xxxiii. 150.
 
 36 DANTE. 
 
 cruelty itself, and of treachery itself. Partly no doubt he did ; 
 and entirely he thought he did. But see how the notions of such 
 retribution react upon the judge, and produce in him the bad pas- 
 sions he punishes. It is true the punishments are imaginary. 
 Were a human being actually to see such things, he must be de- 
 humanised or he would cry out against them with horror and de- 
 testation. But the poem draws them as truths ; the writer's 
 creed threatened them ; he himself contributed to maintain the 
 belief; and however we may suppose such a belief to have had 
 its use in giving alarm to ruffian passions and barbarously igno- 
 rant times, an age arrives when a beneficent Providence permits 
 itself to be better understood, and dissipates the superfluous horror. 
 
 Many, indeed, of the absurdities of Dante's poem are too ob- 
 vious now-a-days to need remark. Even the composition of the 
 poem, egotistically said to be faultless by such critics as Alfieri, 
 who thought they resembled him, partakes, as every body's style 
 does, of the faults as well as good qualities of the man. It is 
 nervous, concise, full almost as it can hold, picturesque, mighty, 
 primeval ; but it is often obscure, often harsh, and forced in its 
 constructions, defective in melody, and wilful and superfluous in 
 the rhyme. Sometimes, also, the writer is inconsistent in cir- 
 cumstance (probably from not having corrected the poem) ; and 
 he is not above being filthy. Even in the episode of Paulo and 
 Francesca, which has so often been pronounced faultless, and 
 which is unquestionably one of the most beautiful pieces of wri- 
 ting in the world, some of these faults are observable, particular- 
 ly in the obscurity of the passage about tolta forma, the cessation 
 of the incessant tempest, and the non-adjuration of the two lovers 
 in the manner that Virgil prescribes. 
 
 But truly it is said, that when Dante is great, nobody surpass- 
 es him. I doubt if anybody equals him, as to the constant inten- 
 sity and incessant variety of his pictures ; and whatever he 
 paints, he throws, as it were, upon its own powers ; as though an 
 artist should draw figures that started into life, and proceeded to 
 action for themselves, frightening their creator. Every motion, 
 word, and look of these creatures becomes full of sensibility and 
 suggestions. The invisible is at the back of the visible ; dark- 
 ness becomes palpable ; silence describes a character, nay, forms
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 37 
 
 the most striking part of a story ; a word acts as a flash of light- 
 ning, which displays some gloomy neighbourhood, where a tower 
 is standing, with dreadful faces at the window ; or where, at 
 your feet, full of eternal voices, one abyss is beheld dropping out 
 of another in the lurid light of torment. In the present volume 
 a story will be found which tells a long tragedy in half-a-dozen 
 lines. Dante has the minute probabilities of a Defoe in the 
 midst of the loftiest and most generalising poetry ; and this feel- 
 ing of matter-of-fact is impressed by fictions the most improbable, 
 nay, the most ridiculous and revolting. You laugh at the ab- 
 surdity ; you are shocked at the detestable cruelty ; yet, for the 
 moment, the thing almost seems as if it must be true. You feel 
 as you do in a dream, and after it ; you wake and laugh, but 
 the absurdity seemed true at the time ; and while you laugh you 
 shudder. 
 
 Enough of this crueller part of his genius has been exhibited ; 
 but it is seldom you can have the genius without sadness. In 
 the circle of hell, soothsayers walk along weeping, with their 
 faces turned the wrong way, so that their tears fall between their 
 shoulders. The picture is still more dreadful. Warton thinks 
 it ridiculous. But I cannot help feeling with the poet, that it is 
 dreadfully pathetic. It is the last mortifying insult to human 
 pretension. Warton, who has a grudge against Dante natural to 
 a man of happier piety, thinks him ridiculous also in describing 
 the monster Geryon lying upon the edge of one of the gulfs 
 of hell "like a beaver" (canto xvii.). He is of opinion that the 
 writer only does it to show his knowledge of natural history. 
 But surely the idea of so strange and awful a creature (a huge 
 mild-faced man ending in a dragon's body) lying familiarly on 
 the edge of the gulf, as a beaver does by the water, combines the 
 supernatural with the familiar in a very impressive manner. It 
 is this combination of extremes which is the life and soul of the 
 whole poem ; you have this world in the next ; the same persons, 
 passions, remembrances', intensified by superhuman despairs or 
 beatitudes ; the speechless entrancements of bliss, the purgatorial 
 trials of hope and patience ; the supports of hate and anger (such 
 as they are) in hell itself; nay, of loving despairs, and a self- 
 pity made unboundedly pathetic by endless suffering. Hence 
 
 293930
 
 38 DANTE. 
 
 there is no love-story so affecting as that of Paulo and Francesca 
 thus told and perpetuated in another world ; no father's misery 
 so enforced upon as Ugolino's, who, for hundreds of years, has 
 not grown tired of the revenge to which it wrought him. Dante 
 even puts this weight and continuity of feeling into passages of 
 mere transient emotion or illustration, unconnected with the next 
 world ; as in the famous instance of the verses about evening, 
 and many others which the reader will meet with in this volume. 
 Indeed, if pathos and the most impressive simplicity, and grace- 
 ful beauty of all kinds, and abundant grandeur, can pay (as the 
 reader, I believe, will think it does even in a prose abstract), for 
 the pangs of moral discord and absurdity inflicted by the perusal 
 of Dante's poem, it may challenge competition with any in point 
 of interest. His Heaven, it is true, though containing both sub- 
 lime and lovely passages, is not so good as his Earth. The 
 more unearthly he tried to make it, the less heavenly it became. 
 When he is content with earth in heaven itself, when he literal- 
 ises a metaphor, and with exquisite felicity finds himself arrived 
 there in consequence of fixing his eyes on the eyes of Beatrice, 
 then he is most celestial. But his endeavours to express degrees 
 of beatitude and holiness by varieties of flame and light, of 
 dancing lights, revolving lights, lights of smiles, of stars, of star- 
 ry crosses, of didactic letters and sentences, of animal figures 
 made up of stars full of blessed souls, with saints forming an 
 eagle's beak and David in its eye ! such superhuman attempts 
 become for the most part tricks of theatrical machinery, on which 
 we gaze with little curiosity and no respect. 
 
 His angels, however, are another matter. Belief was prepared 
 for those winged human forms, and they furnished him with some 
 of his most beautiful combinations of the natural with the super- 
 natural. Ginguene has remarked the singular variety as well as 
 beauty of Dante's angels. Milton's, indeed, are commonplace in 
 the comparison. In the eighth canto of the Inferno, the devils in- 
 solently refuse the poet and his guide an- entrance into the city of 
 Dis : an angel comes sweeping over the Stygian lake to enforce 
 it ; the noise of his wings makes the shores tremble, and is like 
 a crashing whirlwind such as beats down the trees and sends the 
 peasants and their herds flying before it. The heavenly messen-
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 39 
 
 ger, after rebuking the devils, touches the portals of the city with 
 his wand ; they fly open ; and he returns the way he came with- 
 out uttering a word to the two companions. His face was that 
 of one occupied with other thoughts. This angel is announced 
 by a tempest. Another, who brings the souls of the departed to 
 Purgatory, is first discovered at a distance, gradually disclosing 
 white splendours, which are his wings and garments. He comes 
 in a boat, of which his wings are the sails ; and as he approaches, 
 it is impossible to look him in the face for its brightness. Two 
 other angels have green wings and green garments, and the dra- 
 pery is kept in motion like a flag by the vehement action of the 
 wings. A fifth has a face like the morning star, casting forth 
 quivering beams. A sixth is of a lustre so oppressive, that the 
 poet feels a weight on his eyes before he knows what is coming. 
 Another's presence affects the senses like the fragrance of a May- 
 morning ; and another is in garments dark as cinders, but has a 
 sword in his hand too sparkling to be gazed at. Dante's occa- 
 sional pictures of the beauties of external nature are worthy of 
 these angelic creations, and to the last degree fresh and lovely. 
 You long to bathe your eyes, smarting with the fumes of hell, in 
 his dews. You gaze enchanted on his green fields and his celes- 
 tial blue skies, the more so from the pain and sorrow in midst of 
 which the visions are created. 
 
 Dante's grandeur of every kind is proportionate to that of his 
 angels, almost to his ferocity ; and that is saying every thing. 
 It is not always the spiritual grandeur of Milton, the subjection 
 of the material impression to the moral ; but it is equally such 
 when he chooses, and far more abundant. His infernal precipices 
 his black whirlwinds his innumerable cries and claspings of 
 hands his very odours of huge loathsomeness his giants at twi- 
 light standing up to the middle in pits, like towers, and causing 
 earthquakes when they move his earthquake of the mountain in 
 Purgatory, when a spirit is set free for heaven his dignified 
 Mantuan Sordello, silently regarding him and his guide as they 
 go by, " like a lion on his watch" his blasphemer, Capaneus, 
 lying in unconquered rage and sullenness under an eternal rain 
 of flakes of fire (human precursor of Milton's Satan) his aspect 
 of Paradise, " as if the universe had smiled" his inhabitants of
 
 40 DANTE. 
 
 the whole planet Saturn crying out so loud, in accordance with 
 the anti-papal indignation of Saint Pietro Damiano, that the poet, 
 though among them, could not hear what they said and the blush- 
 ing eclipse, like red clouds at sunset, which takes place at the 
 apostle Peter's denunciation of the sanguinary filth of the court 
 of Rome all these sublimities, and many more, make us not 
 know whether to be more astonished at the greatness of the poet 
 or the raging littleness "of the man. Grievous is it to be forced 
 to bring two such opposites together ; and I wish, for the honour 
 and glory of poetry, I did not feel compelled to do so. But the 
 swarthy Florentine had not the healthy temperament of his 
 brethren, and he fell upon evil times. Compared with Homer 
 and Shakspeare, his very intensity seems only superior to theirs 
 from an excess of the morbid ; and he is inferior to both in other 
 sovereign qualities of poetry to the one, in giving you the health- 
 iest general impression of nature itself to Shakspeare, in bound- 
 less universality to most great poets, in thorough harmony and 
 delightfulness. He wanted (generally speaking) the music of a 
 happy and a happy-making disposition. Homer, from his large 
 vital bosom, breathes like a broad fresh air over the world, amidst 
 alternate storm and sunshine, making you aware that there is 
 rough work to be faced, but also activity and beauty to be en- 
 joyed. The feeling of health and strength is predominant. Life 
 laughs at death itself, or meets it with a noble confidence is not 
 taught to dread it as a malignant goblin. Shakspeare has all the 
 smiles as well as tears of nature, and discerns the " soul of good- 
 ness in things evil." He is comedy as well as tragedy the en- 
 tire man in all his qualities, moods, and experiences ; and he 
 beautifies all. And both those truly divine poets make nature 
 their subject through her own inspiriting medium not through 
 the darkened glass of one man's spleen and resentment. Dante, 
 in constituting himself the hero of his poem, not only renders 
 her, in the general impression, as dreary as himself, in spite of 
 the occasional beautiful pictures he draws of her, but narrows her 
 very immensity into his pettiness. He fancied, alas, that he could 
 build her universe over again out of the politics of old Rome and 
 the divinity of the schools ! 
 
 Dante, besides his great poem, and a few Latin eclogues, of no
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 41 
 
 great value, wrote lyrics full of Platonical sentiment, some of 
 which anticipated the loveliest of Petrarch's ; and he was the 
 author of various prose works, political and philosophical, all 
 more or less masterly for the time in which he lived, and all co- 
 adjutors of his poetry in fixing his native tongue. His account 
 of his Early Life (the Vita Nuova) is a most engaging history 
 of a boyish passion, evidently as real and true on his own side as 
 love and truth can be, whatever might be its mistake as to its ob- 
 ject. The treatise on the Vernacular Tongue (de Vulgari Elo- 
 quio) shews how critically he considered his materials for im- 
 pressing the world, and what a reader he was of every production 
 of his contemporaries. The Banquet (Convito} is but an abstruse 
 commentary on some of his minor poems ; but the book on Mon- 
 archy (de Monarchia) is a compound of ability and absurdity, in 
 which his great genius is fairly overborne by the barbarous ped- 
 antry of the age. It is an argument to prove that the world must 
 all be governed by one man ; that this one man must be the suc- 
 cessor of the Roman Emperor God having manifestly designed 
 the world to be subject for ever to the Roman empire ; and last- 
 ly, that this Emperor is equally designed by God to be indepen- 
 dent of the Pope spiritually subject to him, indeed, but so far 
 only as a good son is subject to the religious advice of his father ; 
 and thus making Church and State happy for ever in the two di- 
 vided supremacies. And all this assumption of the obsolete and 
 impossible the author gravely proves in all the forms of logic, by 
 arguments drawn from the history of ^Eneas, and the providential 
 cackle of the Roman geese ! 
 
 How can the patriots of modern Italy, justified as they are in 
 extolling the poet to the skies, see him plunge into such depths of 
 bigotry in his verse and childishness in his prose, and consent to 
 perplex the friends of advancement with making a type of their 
 success out of so erring though so great a man ? Such slavish- 
 ness, even to such greatness, is a poor and unpromising thing, 
 compared with an altogether unprejudiced and forward-looking 
 self-reliance. To have no faith in names has been announced as 
 one of their principles ; and " God and Humanity " is their motto. 
 What, therefore, has Dante's name to do with their principles ? 
 or what have the semi-barbarisms of the thirteenth century to do
 
 42 DANTE. 
 
 with the final triumph of " God and Humanity ?" Dante's lauded 
 wish for that union of the Italian States, which his fame has led 
 them so fondly to identify with their own, was but a portion of 
 his greater and prouder wish to see the whole world at the feet 
 of his boasted ancestress, Rome. Not, of course, that he had no 
 view to what he considered good and just government (for what 
 sane despot purposes to rule without that ?) ; but his good and 
 just government was always to be founded on the sine qua non 
 principle of universal Italian domination.* 
 
 All that Dante said or did has its interest for us in spite of his 
 errors, because he was an earnest and suffering man and a great 
 genius ; but his fame must ever continue to lie where his greatest 
 blame does, in his principal work. He was a gratuitous logician, 
 a preposterous politician, a cruel theologian ; but his wonderful 
 imagination, and (considering the bitterness that was in him) still 
 more wonderful sweetness, have gone into the hearts of his fel- 
 low-creatures, and will remain there in spite of the moral and 
 religious absurdities with which they are mingled, and of the in- 
 ability which the best-natured readers feel to associate his entire 
 memory, as a poet, with their usual personal delight in a poet 
 and his name. 
 
 * Every body sees this who is not wilfully blind. " Passionate," says the editor 
 of the Opere Minori, " for the ancient Italian glories, and the greatness of the 
 Roman name, he was of opinion that it was only by means of combined strength, 
 and one common government, that Italy could be finally secured from discord 
 in its own bosom and enemies from without, and recover its ancient empire 
 over the whole world." " Amantissimo delle antiche glorie Italiane, e della 
 grandezza del nome romano, ei considerava, che soltanto pel mezzo d' una gen- 
 eral forza ed autorita poteva 1' Italia dalle interne contese e dalle straniere Lu- 
 vasioni restarsi sicura, e recuperare F antico imperio sopra tutte le genti." Ut 
 sup. vol. iii. p. 8.
 
 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS,
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL 
 
 THE infernal regions, according to Dante, are situate in the globe we inhabit, 
 directly beneath Jerusalem, and consist of a succession of gulfs or circles, nar- 
 rowing as they descend, and terminating in the centre ; so that the general 
 shape is that of a funnel Commentators have differed as to their magnitude ; 
 but the latest calculation gives 315 miles for the diameter of the mouth or cra- 
 ter, and a quarter of a mile for that of its terminating point. In the middle is 
 the abyss, pervading the whole depth, and 245 miles in diameter at the open- 
 ing ; which reduces the different platforms, or territories that surround it, to a 
 size comparatively small. These territories are more or less varied with land 
 and water, lakes, precipices, &c. A precipice, fourteen miles high, divides the 
 first of them from the second. The passages from the upper world to the en- 
 trance are various ; and the descents from one circle to another are effected by 
 the poet and his guide in different manners sometimes on foot through by- 
 ways, sometimes by the conveyance of supernatural beings. The crater he 
 finds to be the abode of those who have done neither good nor evil, caring for 
 nothing but themselves. In the first circle are the whole unbaptised world 
 heathens and infants melancholy, though not tormented. Here also is found 
 the Elysium of Virgil, whose Charon and other infernal beings are among the 
 agents of torment. In the second circle the torments commence with the sin 
 of incontinence ; and the punishment goes deepening with the crime from cir- 
 cle to circle, through gluttony, avarice, prodigality, wrath, sullenness, or unwil- 
 lingness to be pleased with the creation, disbelief in God and the soul (with 
 which the punishment by fire commences), usury, murder, suicide, blas- 
 phemy, seduction and other carnal enormities, adulation, simony, soothsaying, 
 astrology, witchcraft, trafficking with the public interest, hypocrisy, highway 
 robbery (on the great Italian scale;, sacrilege, evil counsel, disturbance of the 
 Church, heresy, false apostleship, alchemy, forgery, coining (all these, from se- 
 duction downwards, in one circle) ; then, in the frozen or lowest circle of all,
 
 46 ARGUMENT. 
 
 treachery ; and at the bottom of this is Satan, stuck into the centre of the 
 earth. 
 
 With the centre of the globe commences the antipodean attraction of its 
 opposite side, together with a rocky ascent out of it, through a huge ravine. 
 The poet and his guide, on their arrival at this spot, accordingly find their po- 
 sition reversed ; and so conclude their downward journey upwards, till they 
 issue forth to light on the borders of the sea which contains the island of Pur- 
 gatory.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL. 
 
 DANTE says, that when he was half-way on his pilgrimage 
 through this life, he one day found himself, towards nightfall, in a 
 wood where he could no longer discern the right path. It was a 
 place so gloomy and terrible, every thing in it growing in such a 
 strange and savage manner, that the horror he felt returned on 
 him whenever he thought of it. The pass of death could hardly 
 be more bitter. Travelling through it all night with a beating 
 heart, he at length came to the foot of a hill, and looking up, as 
 he began to ascend it, he perceived the shoulders of the hill clad 
 in the beams of morning ; a sight which gave him some little 
 comfort. He felt like a man who has buffeted his way to land 
 out of a shipwreck, and who, though still anxious to get farther 
 from his peril, cannot help turning round to gaze on the wide wa- 
 ters. So did he stand looking back on the pass that contained 
 that dreadful wood. 
 
 After resting a while, he again betook him up the hill ; but 
 had not gone far when he beheld a leopard bounding in front of 
 him, and hindering his progress. After the leopard came a lion, 
 with his head aloft, mad with hunger, and seeming to frighten 
 the very air ;* and after the lion, more eager still, a she- wolf, so 
 lean that she appeared to be sharpened with every wolfish want. 
 The pilgrim fled back in terror to the wood, where he again 
 found himself in a darkness to which the light never penetrated. 
 In that place, he said, the sun never spoke word.f But the wolf 
 was still close upon him.J 
 
 * " Parea che 1' aer ne temesse." 
 t " La dove '1 sol tace." 
 
 " The sun to me is dark, 
 And silent is the moon, 
 
 Hid in her vacant interlunar cave." Milton. 
 t There is great difference among the commentators respecting the mean-
 
 48 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 While thus flying, he beheld coming towards him a man, who 
 spoke something, but he knew not what. The voice sounded 
 strange and feeble, as if from disuse. Dante loudly called out to 
 him to save him, whether he was a man or only a spirit. The 
 apparition, at whose sight the wild beasts disappeared, said that 
 he was no longer man, though man he had been in the time of the 
 false gods, and sung the history of the offspring of Anchises. 
 
 " And art thou, then, that Virgil," said Dante, " who has filled 
 the world with such floods of eloquence ? O glory and light of 
 all poets, thou art my master, and thou mine author ; thou alone 
 the book from which I have gathered beauties that have gained 
 me praise. Behold the peril I am in, and help me, for I tremble 
 in every vein and pulse." 
 
 Virgil comforted Dante. He told him that he must quit the 
 wood by another road, and that he himself would be his guide, 
 leading him first to behold the regions of woe underground, and 
 then the spirits that lived content in fire because it purified them 
 for heaven ; and then that he would consign him to other hands 
 worthier than his own, which should raise him to behold heaven 
 itself; for as the Pagans, of whom he was one, had been rebels 
 to the law of him that reigns there, nobody could arrive at Par- 
 adise by their means.* 
 
 ing of the three beasts ; some supposing them passions, others political troubles, 
 others personal enemies, &c. The point is not of much importance, especially 
 as a mystery was intended ; but nobody, as Mr. Gary says, can doubt that the 
 passage was suggested by one in the prophet Jeremiah, v. 6 : " Wherefore a 
 lion out of the forest shall slay them, and a wolf of the evenings shall spoil 
 them ; a leopard shall watch over their cities." 
 
 * " Che quello 'mperador che la su regna 
 Perch' i' fu' ribellante a la sua legge, 
 Non vuol che 'n sua citta per me si vegna." 
 
 The Pagans could not be rebels to a law they never heard of, any more than 
 Dante could be a rebel to Luther. But this is one of the absurdities with which 
 the impious effrontery or scarcely less impious admissions of Dante's teachers 
 avowedly set reason at defiance, retaining, meanwhile, their right of contempt 
 for the impieties of Mahometans and Brahmins ; " which is odd," as the poet 
 says ; for being not less absurd, or, as the others argued, much more so, they 
 had at least an equal claim on the submission of the reason ; since the greater 
 the irrationality, the higher the theological triumph.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL. 49 
 
 So saying, Virgil moved on his way, and Dante closely fol- 
 lowed. He expressed a fear, however, as they went, lest being 
 " neither ./Eneas nor St. Paul," his journey could not be worthily 
 undertaken, or end in wisdom. But Virgil, after sharply rebu- 
 king him for his faintheartedness, told him, that the spirit of her 
 whom he loved, Beatrice, had come down from heaven, on pur- 
 pose to commend her lover to his care ; upon which the drooping 
 courage of the pilgrim was raised to an undaunted confidence ; 
 as flowers that have been closed and bowed down by frosty nights, 
 rise all up on their stems in the morning sun.* 
 
 " Through me is the road to the dolorous city ; 
 Through me is the road to the everlasting sorrows ; 
 Through me is the road to the lost people. 
 Justice was the motive of my exalted maker ; 
 
 I was made by divine power, by consummate wisdom, and by primal love ; 
 Before me was no created thing, if not eternal ; and eternal am I also. 
 Abandon hope, all ye who enter." 
 
 Such were the words which Dante beheld written in dark 
 characters over a portal. " Master," said he to Virgil, " I find_ 
 their meaning hard." 
 
 " A man," answered Virgil, " must conduct himself at this 
 door like one prepared. Hither must he bring no mistrust. 
 Hither can come and live no cowardice. We have arrived at 
 the place I told thee of. Here thou art to behold the dolorous 
 people who have lost all intellectual good."f 
 
 * " Quale i fioretti dal notturno gelo 
 
 China! i e chiusi, poi clie '1 sol gl' imbianca, 
 Si drizzan tutti aperti in loro stelo." 
 Like as the flowers that with the frosty night 
 Are bowed and closed, soon as the sun returns, 
 Rise on their stems, all open and upright. 
 
 t This loss of intellectual good, and the confession of the poet that he finds 
 the inscription over hell-portal hard to understand (il senso lor m' e duro), are 
 among the passages in Dante which lead some critics to suppose that his hell 
 is nothing but an allegory, intended at once to imply his own disbelief in it as 
 understood by the vulgar part of mankind, and his employment of it, neverthe- 
 less, as a salutary check both to the foolish and the reflecting ; to the foolish, 
 as an alarm ; and to the reflecting, as a parable. It is possible, in the teeth 
 of many appearances to the contrary, that such may have been the case ; but 
 
 5
 
 50 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 So saying, Virgil placed his hand on Dante's, looking on him 
 with a cheerful countenance ; and the Florentine passed with 
 him through the dreadful gate. 
 
 They entered upon a sightless gulf, in which was a black air 
 without stars ; and immediately heard a hubbub of groans, and 
 wailings, and terrible things said in many languages, words of 
 wretchedness, outcries of rage, voices loud and hoarse, and 
 sounds of the smitings of hands one against another. Dante 
 began to weep. The sound was as if the sand in a whirlwind 
 were turned into noises, and filled the blind air with incessant 
 conflict. 
 
 Yet these were not the souls of the wicked. They were those 
 only who had lived without praise or blame, thinking of nothing 
 but themselves. These miserable creatures were mixed with the 
 angels who stood neutral in the war with Satan. Heaven would 
 not dull its brightness with those angels, nor would lower hell 
 receive them, lest the bad ones should triumph in their company. 
 
 " And what is it," said Dante, " which makes them so griev- 
 ously suffer ?" 
 
 " Hopelessness of death," said Virgil. " Their blind existence 
 here, and immemorable former life, make them so wretched, that 
 they envy every other lot. Mercy and justice alike disdain 
 them. Let us speak of them no more. Look, and pass." 
 
 The companions went on till they came to a great river with a 
 multitude waiting on the banks. A hoary old man appeared 
 crossing the river towards them in a boat ; and as he came, he 
 said, " Woe to the wicked. Never expect to see heaven. I 
 come to bear you across to the dark regions of everlasting fire 
 and ice." Then looking at Dante, he said, " Get thee away 
 from the dead, thou who standest there, live spirit." 
 
 "Torment thyself not, Charon," said Virgil. "He has a 
 passport beyond thy power to question." 
 
 The shaggy cheeks of the boatman of the livid lake, who had 
 
 in the doubt that it affects either the foolish or the wise to any good purpose, 
 and in the certainty that such doctrines do a world of mischief to tender con- 
 sciences and the cause of sound piety, such monstrous contradictions, in terms, 
 of every sense of justice and charity which God has implanted in the heart of 
 man, are not to be passed over without indignant comment.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL. 51 
 
 wheels of fire about his eyes, fell at these words ; and he was 
 silent. But the naked multitude of souls whom he had spoken to 
 changed colour, and gnashed their teeth, blaspheming God, and 
 their parents, and the human species, and the place, and the hour, 
 and the seed of the sowing of their birth ; and all the while they 
 felt themselves driven onwards, by a fear which became a desire, 
 towards the cruel river-side, which awaits every one destitute of 
 the fear of God. The demon Charon, beckoning to them with 
 eyes like brasiers, collected them as they came, giving blows to 
 those that lingered, with his oar. One by one they dropped into 
 the boat like leaves from a bough in autumn, till the bough is 
 left bare ; or as birds drop into the decoy at the sound of the 
 bird-call. 
 
 There was then an earthquake, so terrible that the recollection 
 of it made the poet burst into a sweat at every pore. A whirl- 
 wind issued from the lamenting ground, attended by vermilion 
 flashes ; and he lost his senses, and fell like a man stupified. 
 
 A crash of thunder through his brain woke up the pilgrim so 
 hastily, that he shook himself like a person roused by force. He 
 found that he was on the brink of a gulf, from which ascended 
 a thunderous sound of innumerable groanings. He could see 
 nothing down it. It was too dark with sooty clouds. Virgil 
 himself turned pale, but said, " We are to go down here. I will 
 lead the way." 
 
 " O master," said Dante, " if even thou fearest, what is to be- 
 come of myself?" 
 
 " It is pity, not fear," replied Virgil, "that makes me change 
 colour." 
 
 With these words his guide led him into the first circle of hell, 
 surrounding the abyss. The great noise gradually ceased to be 
 heard, as they journeyed inwards, till at last they became aware 
 of a world of sighs, which produced a trembling in the air. 
 They were bfeathed by the souls of such as had died without 
 baptism, men, women, and infants ; no matter how good ; no mat- 
 ter if they worshipped God before the coming of Christ, for they 
 worshipped him not "properly." Virgil himself was one of 
 them. They were all lost for no other reason ; and their " only 
 suffering" consisted in " hopeless desire !"
 
 52 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 Dante was struck with great sorrow when he heard this, know- 
 ing how many good men must be in that place. He inquired if 
 no one had ever been taken out of it into heaven. Virgil told him 
 there had, and he named them ; to wit, Adam, Abel, Noah, 
 Moses, King David, obedient Abraham the patriarch, and Isaac, 
 and Jacob, with their children, and Rachel, for whom Jacob did 
 so much, and " many more ;" adding, however, that there was 
 no instance of salvation before theirs. 
 
 Journeying on through spirits as thick as leaves, Dante per- 
 ceived a lustre at a little distance, and observing shapes in it evi- 
 dently of great dignity, inquired who they were that thus lived 
 apart from the rest. Virgil said that heaven thus favoured them 
 by reason of their renown on earth. A voice was then heard 
 exclaiming, " Honour and glory to the lofty poet ! Lo, his shade 
 returns." Dante then saw four other noble figures coming to- 
 wards them, of aspect neither sad nor cheerful. 
 
 "Observe him with the sword in his hand," said Virgil, as 
 they were advancing. " That is Homer, the poets' sovereign. 
 Next to him comes Horace the satirist ; then Ovid ; and the last 
 is Lucan." 
 
 " And thus I beheld," says Dante, " the bright school of the 
 loftiest of poets, who flies above the rest like an eagle." 
 
 For a while the illustrious spirits talked together, and then 
 turned to the Florentine with a benign salutation, at which his 
 master smiled : and " further honour they did me," adds the 
 father of Italian poetry, " for they admitted me of their tribe ; so 
 that to a band of that high account I added a sixth."* 
 
 The spirits returned towards the bright light in which they 
 lived, talking with Dante by the way, and brought him to a mag- 
 nificent castle, girt with seven lofty walls, and further defended 
 with a river, which they all passed as if it had been dry ground. 
 Seven gates conducted them into a meadow of fresh green, the 
 resort of a race whose eyes moved with a deliberate soberness, and 
 whose whole aspects were of great authority, their voices sweet, 
 
 * It is seldom that a boast of this kind not, it must be owned, bashfnl has 
 been allowed by posterity to be just ; nay, in four out of the five instances, be- 
 low its claims.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL. 53 
 
 and their speech seldom.* Dante was taken apart to an eleva- 
 tion in the ground, so that he could behold them all distinctly ; 
 and there, on the " enamelled green, "f were pointed out to him 
 the great spirits, by the sight of whom he felt exalted in his own 
 esteem. He saw Electra with many companions, among whom 
 were Hector and ^Eneas, and Caesar in armour with his hawk's 
 eyes ; and on another side he beheld old King Latinus with his 
 daughter Lavinia, and the Brutus that expelled Tarquin, and Lu- 
 cretia, and Julia, and Cato's wife Marcia, and the mother of the 
 Gracchi, and, apart by himself, the Sultan Saladin. He then 
 raised his eyes a little, and beheld the " master of those who 
 know":}: (Aristotle), sitting amidst the family of philosophers, 
 and honoured by them all. Socrates and Plato were at his side. 
 Among the rest was Democritus, who made the world a chance, 
 and Diogenes, and Heraclitus, &c. and Dioscorides, the good 
 gatherer of simples. Orpheus also he saw, and Cicero, and the 
 moral Seneca, and Euclid, and Hippocrates, and Avicen, and 
 Averroes, who wrote the great commentary, and others too nume- 
 rous to mention. The company of six became diminished to 
 two, and Virgil took him forth on a far different road, leaving that 
 serene air for a stormy one ; and so they descended again into 
 darkness. 
 
 It was the second circle into which they now came a sphere 
 narrower than the first, and by so much more the wretcheder. 
 Minos sat at the entrance, gnarling he that gives sentence on 
 every one that comes, and intimates the circle into which each is 
 to be plunged by the number of folds into which he casts his tail 
 round about him. Minos admonished Dante to beware how he 
 entered unbidden, and warned him against his conductor ; but 
 Virgil sharply rebuked the judge, and bade him not set his will 
 against the will that was power. 
 
 * " Genti v' eran, con occhi tardi e gravi, 
 Di grande autorita ne' lor sembianti : 
 Parlavan rado, con voci soavi." 
 
 t " Sopra '1 verde smalto." Mr. Cary has noticed the appearance, for the 
 first time, of this beautiful but now commonplace image, 
 t " II maestro di color che sanuo."
 
 54 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 The pilgrims then descended through hell-mouth, till they came 
 to a place dark as pitch, that bellowed with furious cross-winds, 
 like a sea in a tempest. It was the first place of torment, and 
 the habitation of carnal sinners. The winds, full of stifled 
 voices, buffeted the souls for ever, whirling them away to and 
 fro, and dashing them against one another. Whenever it seized 
 them for that purpose, the wailing and the shrieking was loudest, 
 crying out against the Divine Power. Sometimes a whole mul- 
 titude came driven in a body like starlings before the wind, now 
 hither and thither, now up, now down ; sometimes they went in a 
 line like cranes, when a company of those birds is beheld sailing 
 along in the air, uttering its dolorous clangs. 
 
 Dante, seeing a group of them advancing, inquired of Virgil 
 who they were. " Who are these," said he, " coming hither, 
 scourged in the blackest part of the hurricane ?" 
 
 " She at the head of them," said Virgil, " was empress over 
 many nations. So foul grew her heart with lust, that she or- 
 dained license to be law, to the end that herself might be held 
 blameless. She is Semiramis, of whom it is said that she gave 
 suck to Ninus, and espoused him. Leading the multitude next 
 to her is Dido, she that slew herself for love, and broke faith to 
 the ashes of Sichseus ; and she that follows with the next is the 
 luxurious woman, Cleopatra." 
 
 Dante then saw Helen, who produced such a world of misery ; 
 and the great Achilles, who fought for love till it slew him ; and 
 Paris ; and Tristan ; and a thousand more whom his guide 
 pointed at, naming their names, every one of whom was lost 
 through love. 
 
 The poet stood for a while speechless for pity, and like one 
 bereft of his wits. He then besought leave to speak to a particu- 
 lar couple who went side by side, and who appeared to be borne 
 before the wind with speed lighter than the rest. His conduc- 
 tor bade him wait till they came nigher, and then to entreat them 
 gently by the love which bore them in that manner, and they 
 would stop and speak with him. Dante waited his time, and then 
 lifted up his voice between the gusts of wind, and adjured the 
 two " weary souls" to halt and have speech with him, if none
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL. 55 
 
 forbade their doing so ; upon \fhich they came to him, like doves 
 to the nest.* 
 
 There was a lull in the tempest, as if on purpose to let them 
 speak ; and the female addressed Dante, saying, that as he shew- 
 ed such pity for their state, they would have prayed heaven to 
 give peace and repose to his life, had they possessed the friend- 
 ship of heaven, j- 
 
 " Love," she said, " which is soon kindled in a gentle heart, 
 seized this my companion for the fair body I once inhabited how 
 deprived of it, my spirit is bowed to recollect. Love, which 
 compels the beloved person upon thoughts of love, seized me in 
 turn with a delight in his passion so strong, that, as thou seest, 
 even here it forsakes me not. Love brought us both to one end. 
 The punishment of Cain awaits him that slew us." 
 
 The poet was struck dumb by this story. He hung down his 
 head, and stood looking on the ground 'so long, that his guide 
 
 * This is the famous episode of Paulo and Francesco. She was daughtei 
 to Count Guido da Polenta, lord of Ravenna, and wife to Giovanni Malatesta 
 one of the sons of the lord of Rimini. Paulo was her brother-ia-law. They 
 were surprised together by the husband, and slain on the spot. Particulars of 
 their history will be found in the Appendix, together with the whole original 
 passage. 
 
 " Quali colombe, dal disio chiamate, 
 Con 1' ali aperte e ferme, al dolce nido 
 Volan per 1' aer dal voler portate : 
 
 Cotali uscir de la schiera ov' e Dido, 
 A noi veuendo per 1' aer maligno, 
 Si forte fu 1' affettuoso grido." 
 
 As doves, drawn home from where they circled still, 
 Set firm their open wings, and through the air 
 Come sweeping, wafted by their pure good-will : 
 
 So broke from Dido's flock that gentle pair, 
 Cleaving, to where we stood, the air malign, 
 Such strength to bring them had a loving prayer. 
 
 t Francesca is to be conceived telling her story in anxious intermitting sen- 
 tences now all tenderness for her lover, now angry at their slayer ; watching 
 the poet's face, to see what he thinks, and at times averting her own. I take 
 this excellent direction from Ugo Foscolo.
 
 56 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 asked him what was in his 'mind. " Alas !" answered he, " such 
 then was this love, so full of sweet thoughts ; and such the pass 
 to which it brought them ! Oh, Francesca !" he cried, turning 
 again to the sad couple, " thy sufferings make me weep. But 
 tell me, I pray thee, what was it that first made thee know, for a 
 certainty, that his love w^as returned ? that thou couldst refuse 
 him thine no longer ?" 
 
 " There is not a greater sorrow," answered she, " than calling 
 to mind happy moments in the midst of wretchedness.* But since 
 thy desire is so great to know our story to the root, hear me 
 tell it as well as I may for tears. It chanced, one day, that we 
 sat reading the tale of Sir Launcelot, how love took him in thrall. 
 We were alone, and had no suspicion. Often, as we read, our 
 eyes became suspended ,f and we changed colour ; but one pas- 
 sage alone it was that overcame us. When we read how Gene- 
 vra smiled, and how the lover, out of the depth of his love, could 
 not help kissing that smile, he that is never more to be parted 
 from me kissed me himself on the mouth, all in a tremble. 
 Never had we go-between but that book. The writer was the 
 betrayer. That day we read no more." 
 
 While these words were being uttered by one of the spirits, 
 the other wailed so bitterly, that the poet thought he should have 
 
 * " Nessun maggior dolore, 
 Che ricordarei del tempo felice 
 Ne la miseria." 
 
 t " Per piii fiate gli occhi ci sospinse 
 Quella lettura." 
 
 " To look at one another," says Boccaccio ; and his interpretation has been fol- 
 lowed by Gary and Foscolo ; but, with deference to such authorities, I oeg 
 leave to think that the poet meant no more than he says, namely, that their 
 eyes were simply " suspended" hung, as it were, over the book, without be- 
 ing able to read on ; which is what I intended to express (if I may allude to a 
 production of which both those critics were pleased to speak well), when, in my 
 youthful attempt to enlarge this story, I wrote 
 
 " And o'er the book they hung, and nothing said, 
 And every lingering page grew longer as they read." 
 
 Story of Rimini,
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL. 57 
 
 died for pity. His senses forsook him, and he fell flat on the 
 ground, as a dead body falls.* 
 
 On regaining his senses, the poet found himself in the third 
 circle of hell, a place of everlasting wet, darkness, and cold, one 
 heavy slush of hail and mud, emitting a squalid smell. The 
 triple-headed dog Cerberus, with red eyes and greasy black 
 beard, large belly, and hands with claws, barked above the heads 
 of the wretches who floundered in the mud, tearing, skinning, 
 and dismembering them, as they turned their sore and soddened 
 bodies from side to side. When he saw the two living men, he 
 shewed his fangs, and shook in every limb for desire of their 
 flesh. Virgil threw lumps of dirt into his mouth, and so they 
 passed him. 
 
 It was the place of Gluttons. The travellers passed over them, 
 as if they had been ground to walk upon. But one of them sat 
 up, and addressed the Florentine as his acquaintance. Dante did 
 not known him, for the agony in his countenance. He was a man 
 nicknamed Hog (Ciacco), and by no other name does the poet, or 
 any one else, mention him. His countiyman addressed him by it, 
 though declaring at the same time that he wept to see him. Hog 
 prophesied evil to his discordant native city, adding that there 
 
 * " Mentre che 1' uno spirto questo disse, 
 L' altro piangeva si, che di pietade 
 I' venni men cosl com' io morisse, 
 E caddi come corpo morto cade." 
 
 This last line has been greatly admired for the corresponding deadness of its 
 
 expression. 
 
 While thus one spoke, the other spirit mourn'd 
 With wail so woful, that at his remorse 
 I felt as though I should have died. I turn'd 
 Stone-stiff; and to the ground, fell like a corse. 
 
 The poet fell thus on the ground (some of the commentators think) because 
 he had sinned in the same way ; and if Foscolo's opinion could be established 
 that the incident of the book is invention their conclusion would receive 
 curious collateral evidence, the circumstance of the perusal of the romance in 
 company with a lady being likely enough to have occurred to Dante. But the 
 same probability applies in the case of the lovers. The reading of such books 
 was equally the taste of their own times ; and nothing is more likely than the 
 volume's having been found in the room where they perished.
 
 58 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 were but two just men in it all the rest being given up to ava- 
 rice, envy, and pride. Dante inquired by name respecting the 
 fate of five other Florentines, who had done good, and was in- 
 formed that they were all, for various offences, in lower gulfs of 
 hell. Hog then begged that he would mention having seen him 
 when he returned to the sweet world ; and so, looking at him a 
 little, bent his head, and disappeared among his blinded compan- 
 ions. 
 
 " Satan ! hoa, Satan !" roared the demon Plutus, as the poets 
 were descending into the fourth circle. 
 
 " Peace !" cried Virgil, " with thy swollen lip, thou accursed 
 wolf. No one can hinder his coming down. God wills it."* 
 
 Flat fell Plutus, collapsed, like the sails of a vessel when the 
 mast is split. 
 
 This circle was the most populous one they had yet come to. 
 The sufferers, gifted with supernatural might, kept eternally roll- 
 ing round it, one against another, with terrific violence, and so 
 dashing apart, and returning. " Why grasp ?" cried the one 
 " Why throw away ?" cried the other ; and thus exclaiming, 
 they dash furiously together. 
 
 They were the Avaricious and the Prodigal. Multitudes of 
 them were churchmen, including cardinals and popes. Not all 
 the gold beneath the moon could have purchased them a mo- 
 ment's rest. Dante asked if none of them were to be recognised 
 by their countenances. Virgil said, "No; "for the stupid and 
 sullied lives which they led on earth swept their faces away from 
 all distinction for ever. 
 
 In discoursing of fortune, they descend by the side of a tor- 
 rent, black as ink, into the fifth circle, or place of torment for the 
 Angry, the Sullen, and the Proud. Here they first beheld a 
 filthy marsh, full of dirty naked bodies, that in everlasting rage 
 
 * Plutus's exclamation about Satan is a great choke-pear to the commenta- 
 tors. The line in the original is 
 
 " Pape Satan, pape Satan aleppe." 
 
 The words, as thus written, are not Italian. It is not the business of this ab- 
 stract to discuss such points ; and therefore I content myself with believing 
 that the context implies a call of alarm on the Prince of Hell at the sight of 
 the living creature and his guide.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL. 59 
 
 tore one another to pieces. In a quieter division of the pool were 
 seen nothing but bubbles, carried by the ascent, from its slimy 
 bottom, of the stifled words of the sullen. They were always 
 saying, " We were sad and dark within us in the midst of the 
 sweet sunshine, and now we live sadly in the dark bogs." The 
 poets walked on till they came to the foot of a tower, which hung 
 out two blazing signals to another just discernible in the distance. 
 A boat came rapidly towards them, ferried by the wrathful 
 Phlegyas j* who cried out, " Aha, felon ! and so thou hast come 
 at last !" 
 
 " Thou errest," said Virgil. " We come for no longer time 
 than it will take thee to ferry us across thy pool." 
 
 Phlegyas looked like one defrauded of his right ; but proceeded 
 to convey them. During their course a spirit rose out of the 
 mire, looking Dante in the face, and said, " Who art thou, that 
 comest before thy time ?" 
 
 " Who art thou ?" said Dante. 
 
 " Thou seest who I am," answered the other ; " one among 
 the mourners." 
 
 " Then mourn still, and howl, accursed spirit," returned the 
 Florentine. " I know thee, all over filth as thou art." 
 
 The wretch in fury laid hold of the boat, but Virgil thrust 
 him back, exclaiming, " Down with thee ! down among the other 
 dogs !" 
 
 Then turning to Dante, he embraced and kissed him, saying, 
 " O soul, that knows how to disdain, blessed be she that bore 
 thee ! Arrogant, truly, upon earth was this sinner, nor is his 
 memory graced by a single virtue. Hence the furiousness of 
 his spirit now. How many kings are there at this moment lord- 
 ing it as gods, who shall wallow here, as he does, like swine in 
 the mud, and be thought no better of by the world !" 
 
 * Phlegyas, a sou of Mars, was cast into hell by Apollo for setting the god's 
 temple on fire in resentment for the violation of his daughter Corouis. The 
 actions of gods were not to be questioned, in Dante's opinion, even though the 
 gods turned out to be false. Jiigghanant is as good as any, while he lasts. It 
 is an ethico-theological puzzle, involving very nice questions ; but at any rate, 
 had our poet been a Brahmin of Benares, we know how he would have writ- 
 ten about it in Sanscrit.
 
 60 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 " I should like to see him smothering in it," said Dante, " be- 
 fore we go." 
 
 " A right wish," said Virgil, " and thou shalt, to thy heart's 
 content." 
 
 On a sudden the wretch's muddy companions seized and 
 drenched him so horribly that (exclaims Dante) " I laud and 
 thank God for it now at this moment." 
 
 " Have at him !" cried they ; " have at Filippo Argenti ;" and 
 the wild fool of a Florentine dashed his teeth for rage into his 
 own flesh.* 
 
 The poet's attention was now drawn off by a noise of lamenta- 
 tion, and he perceived that he was approaching the city of Dis.f 
 The turrets glowed vermilion with the fire within it, the walls 
 appeared to be of iron, and moats were round about them. The 
 boat circuited the walls till the travellers came to a gate, which 
 Phlegyas, with a loud voice, told them to quit the boat and enter. 
 But a thousand fallen angels crowded over the top of the gate, 
 refusing to open it, and making furious gestures. At length 
 they agreed to let Virgil speak with them inside ; and he left 
 Dante for a while, standing in terror without. The parley was 
 
 * Filippo Argenti (Philip Silver, so called from his shoeing his horse with 
 the precious metal) was a Florentine remarkable for bodily strength and ex- 
 treme irascibility. What a barbarous strength and confusion of ideas is there 
 in this whole passage about him ! Arrogance punished by arrogance, a 
 Christian mother blessed for the unchristian disdainfulness of her son, revenge 
 boasted of and enjoyed, passion arguing in a circle ! Filippo himself might 
 have written it. Dante says, 
 
 " Con piangere e con lutto 
 Spirito maladetto, ti rimani. 
 
 Via cosU con gli altri cani," &c. 
 Then Virgil, kissing and embracing him, 
 
 " Alma sdegnosa 
 Benedetta colei che 'n te s' incinse," &c. 
 
 And Dante again, 
 
 " Maestro, molto sarei vago 
 Di vederlo attuffare in questa broda," &c. 
 
 t Dis, one of the Pagan names of Pluto, here used for Satan. Within the 
 walls of the city of Dis commence the punishments by fire.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL. 61 
 
 in vain. They would not let them pass. Virgil, however, bade 
 his companion be of good cheer, and then stood listening and 
 talking to himself; disclosing by his words his expectation of 
 some extraordinary assistance, and at the same time his anxiety 
 for its arrival. On a sudden, three raging figures arose over the 
 gate, coloured with gore. Green hydras twisted about them ; 
 and their fierce temples had snakes instead of hair. 
 
 " Look," said Virgil. " The Furies ! The one on the left is 
 Megsera ; Alecto is she that is wailing on the right ; and in the 
 middle is Tisiphone." Virgil then hushed. The Furies stood 
 clawing their breasts, smiting their hands together, and raising 
 such hideous cries, that Dante clung to his friend. 
 
 " Bring the Gorgon's head !" cried the Furies, looking down ; 
 " turn him to adamant !" 
 
 " Turn round," said Virgil, " and hide thy face ; for if thou 
 beholdest the Gorgon, never again wilt thou see the light of day." 
 And with these words he seized Dante and turned him round him- 
 self, clapping his hands over his companion's eyes. 
 
 And now was heard coming over the water a terrible crashing 
 noise, that made the banks on either side of it tremble. It was 
 like a hurricane which comes roaring through the vain shelter of 
 the woods, splitting and hurling away the boughs, sweeping along 
 proudly in a huge cloud of dust, and making herds and herdsmen 
 fly before it. " Now stretch your eyesight across the water," 
 said Virgil, letting loose his hands ; " there, where the smoke 
 of the foam is thickest." Dante looked ; and saw a thousand of 
 the rebel angels, like frogs before a serpent, swept away into a 
 heap before the coming of a single spirit, who flew over the tops 
 of the billows with unwet feet. The spirit frequently pushed 
 the gross air from before his face, as if tired of the base obstacle ; 
 and as he came nearer, Dante, who saw it was a messenger from 
 heaven, looked anxiously at Virgil. Virgil motioned him to be 
 silent and bow down. 
 
 The angel, with a face full of scorn, as soon as he arrived at 
 the gate, touched it with a wand that he had in his hand, and it 
 flew open. 
 
 " Outcasts of heaven," said he ; " despicable race ! whence 
 this fantastical arrogance ? Do ye forget that your torments are
 
 62 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 laid on thicker every time ye kick against the Fates ? Do ye 
 forget how your Cerberus was bound and chained till he lost the 
 hair ofF his neck like a common dog ?" 
 
 So saying he turned swiftly and departed the way he came, 
 not addressing a word to the travellers. His countenance had 
 suddenly a look of some other business, totally different from the 
 one he had terminated. 
 
 The companions passed in, and beheld a place full of tombs 
 red-hot. It was the region of Arch-heretics and their followers. 
 Dante and his guide passed round betwixt the walls and the sep- 
 ulchres as in a churchyard, and came to the quarter which held 
 Epicurus and his sect, who denied the existence of spirit apart 
 from matter. The lids of the tombs remaining unclosed till the 
 day of judgment, the soul of a noble Florentine, Farinata degli 
 Uberti, hearing Dante speak, addressed him as a countryman, 
 asking him to stop.* Dante, alarmed, beheld him rise half out 
 of his sepulchre, looking as lofty as if he scorned hell itself. 
 Finding who Dante was, he boasted of having three times ex- 
 pelled the Guelphs. " Perhaps so," said the poet ; " but they 
 came back again each time ; an art which their enemies have 
 not yet acquired." 
 
 A visage then appeared from out another tomb, looking ea- 
 gerly, as if it expected to see some one else. Being disappointed, 
 the tears came into its eyes, and the sufferer said, " If it is thy 
 genius that conducts thee hither, where is my son, and why is he 
 not with thee ?" 
 
 " It is not my genius that conducts me," said Dante, " but that 
 of one, whom perhaps thy son held in contempt." 
 
 " How sayest thou ?" cried the shade ; " held in contempt ? 
 He is dead then ? He beholds no longer the sweet light ?" And 
 with these words he dropped into his tomb, and was seen no more. 
 It was Cavalcante Cavalcanti, the father of the poet's friend, Guido.f 
 
 * Farinata was a Ghibelline leader before the time of Dante, and had van- 
 quished the poet's connexions at the battle of Montaperto. 
 
 t What would Guido have said to this ? More, I suspect, than Dante would 
 have liked to hear, or known how to answer. But he died before the verses 
 transpired ; probably before they were written ; for Dante, in the chronology 
 of his poem, assumes what times and seasons he finds most convenient.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL. 63 
 
 The shade of Farinata, who had meantime been looking on, 
 now replied to the taunt of Dante, prophesying that he should 
 soon have good reason to know that the art he spoke of had been 
 acquired ; upon which Dante, speaking with more considerate- 
 ness to the lofty sufferer, requested to know how the gift of pro- 
 phecy could belong to spirits who were ignorant of the time pres- 
 ent. Farinata answered that so it was ; just as there was a kind 
 of eyesight which could discern things at a distance though not 
 at hand. Dante then expressed his remorse at not having in- 
 formed Cavalcante that his son was alive. He said it was owing 
 to his being overwhelmed with thought on the subject he had just 
 mentioned, and entreated Farinata to tell him so. 
 
 Quitting this part of the cemetery, Virgil led him through the 
 midst of it towards a descent into a valley, from which there as- 
 cended a loathsome odour. They stood behind one of the tombs 
 for a while, to accustom themselves to the breath of it ; and then 
 began to descend a wild fissure in a rock, near the mouth of 
 which lay the infamy of Crete, the Minotaur. The monster be- 
 holding them gnawed himself for rage ; and on their persisting 
 to advance, began plunging like a bull when he is stricken by the 
 knife of the butcher. They succeeded, however, in entering the 
 fissure before he recovered sufficiently from his madness to run 
 at them ; and at the foot of the descent, came to a river of boil- 
 ing blood, on the strand of which ran thousands of Centaurs armed 
 with bows and arrows. In the blood, more or less deep accord- 
 ing to the amount of the crime, and shrieking as they boiled, 
 were the souls of the Inflicters of Violence ; and if any of them 
 emerged from it higher than he had a right to do, the Centaurs 
 drove him down with their arrows. Nessus, the one that be- 
 queathed Hercules the poisoned garment, came galloping towards 
 the pilgrims, bending his bow, and calling out from a distance to 
 know who they were ; but Virgil, disdaining his hasty charac- 
 ter, would explain himself only to Chiron, the Centaur who in- 
 structed Achilles. Chiron, in consequence, bade Nessus accom- 
 pany them along the river ; and there they saw tyrants immersed 
 up to the eyebrows ; Alexander the Great among them, Diony- 
 sius of Syracuse, and Ezzelino the Paduan. There was one of 
 the Pazzi of Florence, and Rinieri of Corneto (infestors of the
 
 64 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. . 
 
 public ways), now shedding bloody tears, and Attila the Scourge, 
 and Pyrrhus king of Epirus. Further on, among those immersed 
 up to the throat, was Guy de Montfort, the Englishman, who slew 
 his father's slayer, Prince Henry, during divine service, in the 
 bosom of God ; and then by degrees the river became shallower 
 and shallower till it covered only the feet ; and here the Centaur 
 quitted the pilgrims, and they crossed over into a forest. 
 
 The forest was a trackless and dreadful forest the leaves not 
 green, but black the boughs not freely growing, but knotted and 
 twisted the fruit no fruit, but thorny poison. The Harpies wail- 
 ed among the trees, occasionally shewing their human faces ; and 
 on every side of him Dante heard lamenting human voices, but 
 could see no one from whom they came. " Pluck one of the 
 boughs," said Virgil. Dante did so ; and blood and a cry fol- 
 lowed it. 
 
 " Why pluckest thou me ?" said the trunk. " Men have we 
 been, like thyself; but thou couldst not use us worse, had we been 
 serpents." The blood and words came out together, as a green 
 bough hisses and spits in the fire. 
 
 The voice was that of Piero delle Vigne, the good chancellor 
 of the Emperor Frederick the Second. Just though he had been 
 to others, he was thus tormented for having been unjust to him- 
 self; for, envy having wronged him to his sovereign, who sen- 
 tenced him to lose his eyes, he dashed his brains out against a 
 wall. Piero entreated Dante to vindicate his memory. The 
 poet could not speak for pity ; so Virgil made the promise for 
 him, inquiring at "the same time in what manner it was that Sui- 
 cides became thus identified with trees, and how their souls were 
 to rejoin their bodies at the day of judgment. Piero said, that 
 the moment the fierce self-murderer's spirit tore itself from the 
 body, and passed before Charon, it fell, like a grain of corn, into 
 that wood, and so grew into a tree. The Harpies then fed on its 
 leaves, causing both pain and a vent for lamentation. The body 
 it would never again enter, having thus cast away itself, but it 
 would finally drag the body down to it by a violent attraction ; 
 and every suicide's carcass will be hung upon the thorn of its 
 wretched shade. 
 
 The naked souls of two men, whose profusion had brought
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL. 65 
 
 them to a violent end, here came running through the wood from 
 the fangs of black female mastiffs leaving that of a suicide to 
 mourn the havoc which their passage had made of his tree. He 
 begged his countryman to gather his leaves up, and lay them at 
 the foot of his trunk, and Dante did so ; and then he and Virgil 
 proceeded on their journey. 
 
 They issued from the wood on a barren sand, flaming hot, on 
 which multitudes of naked souls lay down, or sat huddled up, or 
 restlessly walked about, trying to throw from them incessant 
 flakes of fire, which came down like a fall of snow. They were 
 the souls of the Impious. Among them was a great spirit, who 
 lay scornfully submitting himself to the fiery shower, as though 
 it had not yet ripened him.* Overhearing Dante ask his guide 
 who he was, he answered for himself, and said, " The same dead 
 as living. Jove will tire his flames out before they conquer me." 
 
 " Capaneus," exclaimed Virgil, " thy pride is thy punishment. 
 No martyrdom were sufficient for thee, equal to thine own rage." 
 The besieger of Thebes made no reply. 
 
 In another quarter of the fiery shower the pilgrims met a 
 crowd of Florentines, mostly churchmen, whose offence is not to 
 be named ; after which they beheld Usurers ; and then arrived 
 at a huge waterfall, which fell into the eighth circle, or that of 
 the Fraudulent. Here Virgil, by way of bait to the monster 
 Geryon, or Fraud, let down over the side of the waterfall the 
 cord of St. Francis, which Dante wore about his waist,f and pres- 
 ently the dreadful creature came up, and sate on the margin of 
 the fall, with his serpent's tail hanging behind him in the air, af- 
 ter the manner of a beaver ; but the point of the tail was occa- 
 
 * *' Si cho la pioggia non par che '1 maturi." 
 
 This is one of the grandest passages in Dante. It was probably (as English 
 commentators have observed) in Milton's recollection when he conceived the 
 character of Satan. 
 
 t The satire of friarly hypocrisy is at least as fine as Ariosto's discovery of 
 Discord in a monastery. 
 
 The monster Geryon, son of Chrysaor (Golden-sword), and the Ocean-nymph 
 Callirhoe (Fair-flowing), was rich in the possession of sheep. His wealth, 
 and perhaps his derivatives, rendered him this instrument of satire. The mon- 
 strosity, the mild face, the glancing point of venom, and the beautiful skin, 
 make it as fine as can be. 
 
 6
 
 66 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 sionally seen glancing upwards. He was a gigantic reptile, with 
 the face of a just man, very mild. He had shaggy claws for 
 arms, and a body variegated all over with colours that ran in 
 knots and circles, each within the other, richer than any Eastern 
 drapery. Virgil spoke apart to him, and then mounted on his 
 back, bidding his companion, who was speechless for terror, do 
 the same. Geryon pushed back with them from the edge of the 
 precipice, like a ship leaving harbour ; and then, turning about, 
 wheeled, like a sullen successless falcon, slowly down through 
 the air in many a circuit. Dante would not have known that he 
 was going downward, but for the air that struck upwards on his 
 face. Presently they heard the crash of the waterfall on the cir- 
 cle below, and then distinguished flaming fires and the noises of 
 suffering. The monster Geryon, ever sullen as the falcon who 
 seats himself at a distance from his dissatisfied master, shook his 
 riders from off his back to the water's side, and then shot away 
 like an arrow. 
 
 This eighth circle of hell is called Evil-Budget,* and consists of 
 ten compartments, or gulfs of torment, crossed and connected 
 with one another by bridges of flint. In the first were beheld 
 Pimps and Seducers, scourged like children by horned devils ; 
 in the second, Flatterers, begrimed with ordure ; in the third, 
 Simonists, who were stuck like plugs into circular apertures, with 
 their heads downwards, and their legs only discernible, the soles 
 of their feet glowing with a fire which made them incessantly 
 quiver. Dante, going down the side of the gulf with Virgil, 
 was allowed to address one of them who seemed in greater agony 
 than the rest ; and doing so, the sufferer cried out in a malignant 
 
 * " Malebolge," literally Evil-Budget Bolgia is an old form of the modern 
 battle, the common term for a valise or portmanteau. " Bolgia" (says the 
 Vocdholario della Crusca, compendiato, Ven. 1792), " a valise ; Latin, bulga, 
 hippopera ; Greek, imroir/jpa. In reference to valises which open lengthways 
 like a chest, Dante uses the word to signify those compartments which he feigns 
 in his Hell." (Per similitudine di quelle valigie, che B' aprono per lo lungo, a 
 guisa di cassa, significa quegli spartimenti, che Dante finge nell' Inferno.) The 
 reader will think of the homely figurative names in Bunyan, and the contempt 
 which great and awful states of mind have for conventional notions of rank in 
 phraseology. It is a part, if well considered, of their grandeur.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL. 67 
 
 rapture, " Aha, is it thou that standest there, Boniface ?* Thou 
 hast come sooner than it was prophesied." It was the soul of 
 Pope Nicholas the Third that spoke. Dante undeceived and then 
 sternly rebuked him for his avarice and depravity, telling him 
 that nothing but reverence for the keys of St. Peter hindered him 
 from using harsher words, and that it was such as he that the 
 Evangelist beheld in the vision, when he saw the woman with 
 seven heads and ten horns, who committed whoredom with the 
 kings of the earth. 
 
 " O Constantine !" exclaimed the poet, " of what a world of 
 evil was that dowry the mother, which first converted the pastor 
 of the church into a rich man I"^ The feet of the guilty pope 
 spun with fiercer agony at these words ; and Virgil, look- 
 ing pleased on Dante, returned with him the way he came, till 
 they found themselves on the margin of the fourth gulf, the hab- 
 itation of the souls of False Prophets. 
 
 It was 'a valley, in which the souls came walking along, silent 
 and weeping, at the pace of choristers who chant litanies. 
 Their faces were turned the wrong way, so that the backs of their 
 heads came foremost, and their tears fell on their loins. Dante 
 was so overcome at the sight, that he leant against a rock and 
 wept ; but Virgil rebuked him, telling him that no pity at all was 
 the only pity fit for that place. ^ There was Amphiaraus, whom 
 the earth opened and swallowed up at Thebes ; and Tiresias, 
 who was transformed from sex to sex ; and Aruns, who lived in 
 
 * Boniface the Eighth was the pope then living, and one of the causes of 
 Dante's exile. It is thus the poet contrives to put his enemies in hell before 
 their time. 
 
 t An allusion to the pretended gift of the Lateran by Constantine to Pope 
 Sylvester, ridiculed so strongly by Ariosto and others. 
 
 t A truly infernal sentiment. The original is, 
 
 " Qui vive la pieta quand' e ben morta." 
 Here pity lives when it is quite dead. 
 
 " Chi fe pin scellerato," continues the poet, " di colui, 
 Ch' al giudicio divin passion porta." 
 
 That is : " Who is wickeder than he that sets his impassioned feelings against 
 the judgments of God ?" The answer is : He that attributes judgments to God 
 which are to render humanity pitiless.
 
 68 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS 
 
 a cavern on the side of the marble mountains of Carrara, looking 
 out on the stars and ocean ; and M anto, daughter of Tiresias 
 (her hind tresses over her bosom), who wandered through the 
 world till she came and lived in the solitary fen, whence after- 
 wards arose the city of Mantua ; and Michael Scot, the magician, 
 with his slender loins ;* and Eurypylus, the Grecian augur, who 
 gave the signal with Calchas at Troy when to cut away the ca- 
 bles for home. He came stooping along, projecting his face over 
 his swarthy shoulders. Guido Bonatti, too, was there, astrologer 
 of Forli ; and Ardente, shoemaker of Parma, who now wishes he 
 had stuck to his last ; and the wretched women who quit the 
 needle and the distaff to wreak their malice with herbs and 
 images. Such was the punishment of those who, desiring to see 
 too far before them, now looked only behind them, and walked 
 the reverse way of their looking. 
 
 The fifth gulf was a lake of boiling pitch, constantly heaving 
 and subsiding throughout, and bubbling with the breath of those 
 within it. They were Public Peculators. Winged black devils 
 were busy about the lake, pronging the sinners when they occa- 
 sionally darted up their backs for relief like dolphins, or thrust 
 out their jaws like frogs. Dante at first looked eagerly down into 
 the gulf, like one who feels that he shall turn away instantly out 
 of the very horror that attracts him. " See look behind thee !'' 
 said Virgil, dragging him at the same time from the place where 
 he stood, to a covert behind a crag. Dante looked round, and 
 beheld a devil coming up with a newly-arrived sinner across his 
 shoulders, whom he hurled into the lake, and then dashed down 
 after him, like a mastiff let loose on a thief. It was a man from 
 Lucca, where every soul was a false dealer -except Bonturo.f 
 
 * Ne' fianchi cosi poco. Michael Scot had been in Florence ; to which cir- 
 cumstance we are most probably indebted for this curious particular respecting 
 his shape. The consignment of such men to he!l is a mortifying instance of 
 the great poet's participation in the vulgarest errors of his time. It is hardly, 
 however, worth notice, considering what we see him swallowing every moment, 
 or pretending to swallow. 
 
 t " Bonturo must have sold him something cheap," exclaimed a hearer of 
 this passage. No : the exception is an irony ! There was not one honest 
 man in all Lucca !
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL. 69 
 
 The devil called out to other devils, and a heap of them fell upon 
 the wretch with hooks as he rose to the surface ; telling him, that 
 he must practise there in secret, if he practised at all ; and 
 thrusting him back into the boiling pitch, as cooks thrust back 
 flesh into the pot. The devils were of the lowest and most re- 
 volting habits, of which they made disgusting jest and parade. 
 Some of them, on a sudden, perceived Dante and his guide, and 
 were going to seize them, when Virgil resorted to his usual holy 
 rebuke. For a while they let him alone ; and Dante saw one 
 of them haul a sinner out of the pitch by the clotted locks, and 
 hold him up sprawling like an otter. The rest then fell upon 
 him and flayed him. 
 
 It was Ciampolo, a peculator in the service of the good Thie- 
 bault, king of Navarre. One of his companions under the 
 pitch was Friar Gomita, governor of Gallura ; and another, 
 Michael Zanche, also a Sardinian. Ciampolo ultimately escaped 
 by a trick out of the hands of the devils, who were so enraged 
 that they turned upon the two pilgrims ; but Virgil, catching up 
 Dante with supernatural force, as a mother does a child in a 
 burning house, plunged with him out of their jurisdiction intr 
 the borders of gulf the sixth, the region of Hypocrites. 
 
 The hypocrites, in perpetual tears, walked about in a weari- 
 some and exhausted manner, as if ready to faint. They wore 
 huge cowls, which hung over their eyes, and the outsides of 
 which were gilded, but the insides of lead. Two of them had 
 been rulers of Florence ; and L'ante was listening to their story, 
 when his attention was called off by the sight of a cross, or 
 which Caiaphas the High Priest was writhing, breathing hard all 
 the while through his beard with sighs. It was his office to see 
 that every soul which passed him, on its arrival in the place, was 
 oppressed with the due weight. His father-in-law, Annas, and 
 all his council, were stuck in like manner on crosses round the 
 borders of the gulf. The pilgrims beheld little else in this region 
 of weariness, and soon passed into the borders of one of the most 
 terrible portions of Evil-budget, the land of the transformation 
 of Robbers. 
 
 The place was thronged with serpents of the most appalling and 
 unwonted description, among which ran tormented the naked
 
 70 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 spirits of ths robbers, agonised with fear. Their hands were 
 bound behind them with serpents their bodies pierced and en- 
 folded with serpents. Dante saw one of the monsters leap up 
 and transfix a man through the nape of the neck ; when, lo ! 
 sooner than a pen could write o or i, the sufterer burst into flames, 
 burnt up, fell to the earth a heap of ashes was again brought 
 together, and again became a man, aghast with his agony, and 
 staring about him, sighing.* Virgil asked him who he was. 
 
 " I was but lately rained down into this dire gullet," said the 
 man, " amidst a shower of Tuscans. The beast Vanni Fucci 
 am I, who led a brutal life, like the mule that I was, in that den 
 Pistoia." 
 
 " Compel him to stop," said Dante, " and relate what brought 
 him hither. I knew the bloody and choleric wretch when he 
 was alive." 
 
 The sinner, who did not pretend to be deaf to these words, 
 turned round to the speaker with the most painful shame in his 
 face, and said, " I feel more bitterly at being caught here by thee 
 in this condition, than when I first arrived. A power which I 
 cannot resist compels me to let thee know, that I am here because 
 I committed sacrilege and charged another with the crime ; but 
 now, mark me, that thou mayest hear something not to render 
 this encounter so pleasant : Pistoia hates thy party of the Whites, 
 and longs for the Blacks back again. It will have them, and so 
 will Florence ; and there will be a bloody cloud shall burst over 
 the battle-field of Piceno, which will dash many Whites to the 
 earth. I tell thee this to make thee miserable." 
 
 So saying, the wretch gave a gesture of contempt with his 
 thumb and finger towards heaven, and said, " Take it, God a 
 fig for thee !"f 
 
 * " Intorno si mira 
 Tutto smarrito da la grande angoscia 
 Ch' egli ha sofferta, e guardando soepira." 
 
 This is one of the most terribly natural pictures of agonised astonishment ever 
 painted. 
 
 t I retain this passage, horrible as it is to Protestant ears, because it is not 
 only an instance of Dante's own audacity, but a salutary warning specimen of 
 the extremes of impiety generated by extreme superstition ; for their first cause
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL. 71 
 
 "From that instant," said Dante, "the serpents and I were 
 friends ; for one of them throttled him into silence, and another 
 dashed his hands into a knot behind his back. O Pistoia ! Pis- 
 toia ! why art not thou thyself turned into ashes, and swept from 
 the face of the earth, since thy race has surpassed in evil thine 
 ancestors ? Never, through the whole darkness of hell, beheld I 
 a blasphemer so dire as this not even Capaneus himself." 
 
 The Pistoian fled away with the serpents upon him, followed 
 by a Centaur, who came madly galloping up, crying, " Where is 
 the caitiff'?" It was the monster-thief Cacus, whose den upon 
 earth often had a pond of blood before it, and to whom Hercules, 
 in his rage, when he slew him, gave a whole hundred blows with 
 his club, though the wretch perceived nothing after the ninth. 
 He was all over adders up to the mouth ; and upon his shoulders 
 lay a dragon with its wings open, breathing fire on whomsoever 
 it met. 
 
 The Centaur tore away ; and Dante and Virgil were gazing 
 after him, when they heard voices beneath the bank on which 
 they stood, crying, " Who are ye ?" The pilgrims turned their 
 eyes downwards, and beheld three spirits, one of whom, looking 
 about him, said, " Where's Cianfa ?" Dante made a sign to 
 Virgil to say nothing. 
 
 Cianfa came forth, a man lately, but now a serpent with six 
 feet.* 
 
 " If thou art slow to believe, reader, what I am about to tell 
 thee," says the poet, " be so ; it is no marvel ; for I myself, even 
 now, scarcely credit what I beheld." 
 
 is the degradation of the Divine character. Another, no doubt, is the impul- 
 sive vehemence of the South. I have heard more blasphemies, in the course 
 of half an hour, from the lips of an Italian postilion, than are probably uttered 
 in England, by people not out of their senses, for a whole year. Yet the 
 words, after all, were mere words ; for the man was a good-natured fellow, and 
 I believe presented no image to his mind of anything he was saying. Dante, 
 however, would certainly not have taught him better by attempting to frighten 
 him. A violent word would have only produced more violence. Yet this was 
 the idle round which the great poet thought it best to run ! 
 
 * Cianfa, probably a condottiere of Mrs. RadclifFe's sort, and robber, on a 
 large scale, is said to have been one of the Donati family, connexions of the 
 poet by marriage.
 
 72 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 The six-footed serpent sprang at one of the three men front to 
 front, clasping him tightly with all its legs, and plunging his 
 fangs into either cheek. Ivy never stuck so close to a tree as the 
 horrible monster grappled with every limb of that pinioned man. 
 The two forms then gradually mingled into one another like 
 melting wax, the colours of their skin giving way at the same time 
 to a third colour, as the white in a piece of burning paper re- 
 cedes before the brown, till it all becomes black. The other 
 two human shapes looked on, exclaiming, " Oh, how thou changest, 
 Agnello ! See, thou art neither two nor yet one/' And truly, 
 though the two heads first became one, there still remained two 
 countenances in the face. The four arms then became but 
 two, and such also became the legs and thighs ; and the two 
 trunks became such a body as was never beheld ; and the hideous 
 two-fold monster walked slowly away.* 
 
 A small black serpent on fire now flashed like lightning on to 
 the body of one of the other two, piercing him in the navel, and 
 then falling on the ground, and lying stretched before him. The 
 wounded man, fascinated and mute, stood looking at the adder's 
 eyes, and endeavouring to stand steady on his legs, yawning the 
 while as if smitten with lethargy or fever ; the adder, on his part, 
 looked up at the eyes of the man, and both of them breathed 
 hard, and sent forth a smoke that mingled into one volume. 
 
 And now, let Lucan never speak more of the wretched Sabel- 
 lus or Nisidius, but listen and be silent ; and ntiw, let Ovid be 
 silent, nor speak again of his serpent that was Cadmus, or his 
 fountain that was Arethusa ; for, says the Tuscan poet, I envy 
 him not. Never did he change the natures of two creatures face 
 to face, so that each received the form of the other. 
 
 With corresponding impulse, the serpent split his train into a 
 fork, while the man drew his legs together into a train ; the skin 
 of the serpent grew soft, while the man's hardened ; the serpent 
 acquired tresses of hair, the man grew hairless ; the claws of the 
 one projected into legs, while the arms of the other withdrew into 
 
 * This, and the transformation that follows, may well excite the pride of 
 such a poet as Dante ; though it is curious to see how he selects inventions of 
 this kind as special grounds of self-complacfcncy. They are the most appalling 
 ver yet produced.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL. 73 
 
 his shoulders ; the face of the serpent, as it rose from the ground, 
 retreated towards the temples, pushing out human ears ; that of 
 the man, as he fell to the ground, thrust itself forth into a muzzle, 
 withdrawing at the same time its ears into its head, as the slug 
 does its horns ; and each creature kept its impious eyes fixed on 
 the other's, while the features beneath the eyes were changing. 
 The soul which had become the serpent then turned to crawl 
 away, hissing in scorn as he departed ; and the serpent, which 
 had become the man, spat after him, and spoke words at him. 
 The new human-looking soul then turned his back on his late 
 adversary, and said to the third spirit, who remained unchanged, 
 " Let Buoso now take to his crawl, as I have done." 
 
 The two then hastened away together, leaving Dante in a state 
 of bewildered amazement, yet not so confused but that he recog- 
 nised the unchanged one for another of his countrymen, Puccio 
 the Lame. " Joy to thee, Florence !" cried the poet ; " not con- 
 tent with having thy name bruited over land and sea, it flourishes 
 throughout hell." 
 
 The pilgrims now quitted the seventh, and looked down from 
 its barrier into the eighth gulf, where they saw innumerable 
 flames, distinct from one another, flickering all over the place 
 like fire-flies. 
 
 " In those flames," said Virgil, " are souls, each tormented 
 with the fire that swathes it." 
 
 " I observe one," said Dante, " divided at the summit. Are 
 the Theban brothers in it ?" 
 
 " No," replied Virgil ; " in that flame are Diomed and Ulys- 
 ses." The sinners punished in this gulf were Evil Counsellors ; 
 and those two were the advisers of the stratagem of the Trojan 
 horse. 
 
 Virgil addressed Ulysses, who told him the conclusion of his 
 adventures, not to be found in books : how he tired of an idle life, 
 and sailed forth again into the wide ocean ; and how he sailed so 
 far that he came into a region of new stars, and in sight of a 
 mountain, the loftiest he ever saw ; when, unfortunately, a hurri- 
 cane fell upon them from the shore, thrice whirled their vessel 
 round, then dashed the stern up in air and the prow under water, 
 and sent the billows over their heads.
 
 74 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 " Enough," said Virgil ; " I trouble thee no more." The soul 
 of Guido di Montefeltro, overhearing the great Mantuan speak 
 in a Lombard dialect, asked him news of the state of things in 
 Romagna ; and then told him how he had lost his chance of para- 
 dise, by thinking Pope Boniface could at once absolve him from 
 his sins, and use them for his purposes.* He was going to hea- 
 ven, he said, by the help of St. Francis, who came on purpose to 
 fetch him, when a black angel met them, and demanded his ab- 
 solved, indeed, but unrepented victim. " To repent evil, and to 
 will to do it, at one and the same time, are," said the dreadful 
 angel, " impossible : therefore wrong me not." " Oh, how I 
 shook," said the unhappy Guido, " when he laid his hands upon 
 me !" And with these words the flame writhed and beat itself 
 about for agony, and so took its way. 
 
 The pilgrims crossed over to the banks of the ninth gulf, 
 where the Sowers of Scandal, the Schismatics, Heretics, and 
 Founders of False Religions, underwent the penalties of such as 
 load themselves with the sins of those whom they seduce. 
 
 The first sight they beheld was Mahomet, tearing open hi own 
 bowels, and calling out to them to mark him. Before him walked 
 his son-in-law, Ali, weeping, and cloven to the chin ; and the di- 
 visions in the church were punished in like manner upon all the 
 schismatics in the place. They all walked round the circle, 
 their gashes closing as they went ; and on their reaching a cer- 
 tain point, a fiend hewed them open again with a sword. The 
 Arabian prophet, ere he passed on, bade the pilgrims warn Friar 
 Dolcino how he suffered himself to be surprised in his mountain- 
 hold by the starvations of winter-time, if he did not wish speedily 
 to follow him.-j- 
 
 * Guido, Conte di Montefeltro, a celebrated soldier of that day, became a 
 Franciscan in his old age, in order to repent of his sins ; but, being consulted in 
 his cloister by Pope Boniface on the best mode of getting possession of an estate 
 belonging to the Colonna family, and being promised absolution for his sins in 
 the lump, including the opinion requested, he recommended the holy father to 
 " promise much, and perform nothing" (molto prometlere, e nulla attendere}. 
 
 t Dolcino was a Lombard friar at the beginning of the fourteenth century, 
 who is said to have preached a community of goods, including women, and to 
 have pretended to a divine mission for reforming the church. He appears to 
 have made a considerable impression, having thousands of followers, but was
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL. 75 
 
 Among other mangled wretches, they beheld Piero of Medicina, 
 a sower of dissension, exhibiting to them his face and throat all 
 over wounds ; and Curio, compelled to shew his tongue cut out 
 for advising Caesar to cross the Rubicon ; and Mosca de' Lam- 
 berti, an adviser of assassination, and one of the authors of the 
 Guelf and Ghibelline miseries, holding up the bleeding stumps of 
 his arms, which dripped on his face. " Remember Mosca," cried 
 he ; " remember him, alas ! who said, ' A deed done is a thing 
 ended.' A bad saying of mine was that for the Tuscan nation." 
 
 " And death to thy family," cried Dante. 
 
 The assassin hurried away like a man driven mad with grief 
 upon grief; and Dante now beheld a sight, which, if it were not, 
 he says, for the testimony of a good conscience that best of 
 friends, which gives a man assurance of himself under the breast- 
 plate of a spotless innocence* he should be afraid to relate 
 without further proof. He saw and while he was writing the 
 account of it he still appeared to see a headless trunk about 
 to come past him with the others. It held its severed head by 
 the hair, like a lantern ; and the head looked up at the two pil- 
 grims, and said, " Woe is me !" The head was, in fact, a lantern 
 to the paths of the trunk ; and thus there were two separated 
 things in one, and one in two ; and how that could be, he only 
 
 ultimately seized in the mountains where they lived, and burnt with his female 
 companion Margarita, and many others. Landino says he was very eloquent, 
 and that " both he and Margarita endured their fate with a firmness worthy of 
 a better cause." Probably his real history is not known, for want of somebody 
 in such times bold enough to write it. 
 
 * Literally, " under the breastplate of knowing himself to be pure :" 
 
 " Sotto 1' osbergo del seutirsi pura." 
 
 The expression is deservedly admired ; but it is not allowable in English, and 
 it is the only one admitting no equivalent which I have met with in the whole 
 poem. It might be argued, perhaps, against the perfection of the passage, that 
 a good " conscience," and a man's " knowing himself to be pure," are a tau- 
 tology ; for Dante himself has already used that word ; 
 
 " Conscienzia m' assicura ; 
 La buona compagnia che 1' uom francheggia 
 Sotto 1' osbergo," &,c. 
 
 But still we feel the impulsive beauty of the phrase ; and I wish I could have 
 kept it
 
 76 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 can tell who ordained it. As the figure came nearer, it lifted 
 the head aloft, that the pilgrims might hear better what it said. 
 
 " Behold," it said, " behold, thou that walkest living among the 
 dead, and say if there be any punishment like this. I am Ber- 
 trand de Born, he that incited John of England to rebel against 
 his father. Father and son I set at variance closest affections I 
 set at variance and hence do I bear my brain severed from the 
 body on which it grew. In me behold the work of retribution."* 
 
 The eyes of Dante were so inebriate with all that diversity of 
 bleeding wounds, that they longed to stay and weep ere his guide 
 proceeded further. Something also struck them on the sudden 
 which added to his desire to stop. But Virgil asked what ailed 
 him, and why he stood gazing still on the wretched multitude. 
 " Thou hast not done so," continued he, " in any other portion of 
 this circle ; and the valley is twenty-two miles further about, and 
 the moon already below us. Thou hast more yet to see than 
 thou wottest of, and the time is short." 
 
 Dante, excusing himself for the delay, and proceeding to follow 
 his leader, said he thought he had seen, in the cavern at which 
 he was gazing so hard, a spirit that was one of his own family 
 and it was so. It was the soul of Geri del Bello, a cousin of the 
 poet's. Virgil said that he had observed him, while Dante was 
 occupied with Bertrand de Born, pointing at his kinsman in a 
 threatening manner. " Waste not a thought on him," concluded 
 the Roman, " but leave him as he is." 
 
 " O honoured guide !" said Dante, " he died a violent death, 
 which his kinsmen have not yet avenged ; and hence it is that he 
 disdained to speak to me ; and I must needs feel for him the more 
 on that account, "f 
 
 They came now to the last partition of the circle of Evil-budg- 
 et, and their ears were assailed with such a burst of sharp wail- 
 ings, that Dante was fain to close his with his hands. The 
 misery there, accompanied by a horrible odour, was as if all the 
 hospitals in the sultry marshes of Valdichiana had brought their 
 
 * This ghastly fiction is a rare instance of the meeting of physical horror 
 with the truest pathos. 
 
 t The reader will not fail to notice this characteristic instance of the ferocity 
 of the tune.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL. 77 
 
 maladies together into one infernal ditch. It was the place of 
 punishment for pretended Alchemists, Coiners, Personators of 
 other people, False Accusers, and Impostors of all such descrip- 
 tions. They lay on one another in heaps, or attempted to crawl 
 about some itching madly with leprosies some swollen and 
 gasping with dropsies some wetly reeking, like hands washed 
 in winter-time. One was an alchemist of Sienna, a nation vainer 
 than the French ; another a Florentine, who tricked a man into 
 making a wrong will ; another, Sinon of Troy ; another, Myrrha ; 
 another, the wife of Potiphar. Their miseries did not hinder 
 them from giving one another malignant blows ; and Dante was 
 listening eagerly to an abusive conversation between Sinon and a 
 Brescian coiner, when Virgil rebuked him for the disgraceful con- 
 descension, and said it was a pleasure fit only for vulgar minds.* 
 
 The blushing poet felt the reproof so deeply, that he could not 
 speak for shame, though he manifested by his demeanour that he 
 longed to do so, and thus obtained the pardon he despaired of. 
 He says he felt like a man that, during an unhappy dream, wish- 
 es himself dreaming while he is so, and does not know it. Virgil 
 understood his emotion, and, as Achilles did with his spear, healed 
 the wound with the tongue that inflicted it. 
 
 A silence now ensued between the companions ; for they had 
 quitted Evil-budget, and arrived at the ninth great circle of hell, 
 on the mound of which they passed along, looking quietly and 
 steadily before them. Daylight had given place to twilight ; and 
 Dante was advancing his head a little, and endeavouring to dis- 
 cern objects in the distance, when his whole attention was called 
 to one particular spot, by a blast of a horn so loud, that a thunder- 
 clap was a whisper in comparison. Orlando himself blew no 
 such terrific blast, after the dolorous rout, when Charlemagne 
 was defeated in his holy enterprise. f The poet raised his head, 
 
 * This is admirable sentiment ; and it must have been no ordinary conscious- 
 ness of dignity in general which could have made Dante allow himself to be 
 the person rebuked for having forgotten it. Perhaps it was a sort of penance 
 for his having, on some occasion, fallen into the unworthiness. ^ 
 
 t By the Saracens in Roncesvalles ; afterwards so favourite a topic with the 
 poets. The circumstance of the horn is taken from the Chronicle of the pre- 
 tended Archbishop Turpiu, chapter xxiv.
 
 78 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 thinking he perceived a multitude of lofty towers. He asked 
 Virgil to what region they belonged ; but Virgil said, " Those 
 are no towers : they are giants, standing each up to his middle in 
 the pit that goes round this circle." Dante looked harder ; and 
 as objects clear up by little and little in the departing mist, he 
 saw, with alarm, the tremendous giants that warred against Jove, 
 standing half in and half out of the pit, like the towers that 
 crowned the citadel of Monteseggione. The one whom he saw 
 plainest, and who stood with his arms hanging down on each side, 
 appeared to him to have a face as huge as the pinnacle of St. 
 Peter's, and limbs throughout in proportion. The monster, as 
 the pilgrims were going by, opened his dreadful mouth, fit for no 
 sweeter psalmody, and called after them, in the words of some 
 unknown t >ngue, Rafel, maee a mech zabee almee.* " Dull 
 wretch !" e xclaimed Virgil, " keep to thine horn, and so vent 
 better whatsoever frenzy or other passion stuff thee. Feel the 
 chain round thy throat, thou confusion ! See, what a clenching 
 hoop is about thy gorge !" Then he said to Dante, " His howl is 
 its owi mockery. This is Nimrod, he through whose evil am- 
 bition it was that mankind ceased to speak one language. Pass 
 him, and say nothing ; for every other tongue is to him as his is 
 to thee." 
 
 The companions went on for about the length of a sling's 
 throw, when they passed the second giant, who was much fiercer 
 and huger than Nimrod. He was fettered round and round 
 with chains, that fixed one arm before him and the other behind 
 him Ephialtes his name, the same that would needs make trial 
 of his strength against Jove himself. The hands which he then 
 wielded were now motionless, but he shook with passion ; and 
 Dante thought he should have died for terror, the effect on the 
 ground about him was so fearful. It surpassed that of a tower 
 shaken by an earthquake. The poet expressed a wish to look at 
 Briareus, but he was too far off. He saw, however, Antaeus, 
 who, not having fought against heaven, was neither tongue-con- 
 founded nor shackled ; and Virgil requested the " taker of a 
 
 * The gaping monotony of this jargon, full of the vowel a, is admirably 
 suited to the mouth of the vast, half-stupid speaker. It is like a babble of the 
 gigantic infancy of the world.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL. 79 
 
 thousand lions," by the fame which the living poet had it in his 
 power to give him, to bear the travellers in his arms down the 
 steep descent into this deeper portion of hell, which was the re- 
 gion of tormenting cold. Antfeus, stooping, like the leaning tower 
 of Bologna, to take them up, gathered them in his arms, and, de- 
 positing them in the gulf below, raised himself to depart like the 
 mast of a ship.* 
 
 Had I hoarse and rugged words equal to my subject, says the 
 poet, I would now make them fuller of expression, to suit the 
 rocky horror of this hole of anguish ; but I have not, and there- 
 fore approach it with fear, since it is no jesting enterprise to de- 
 scribe the depths of the universe, nor fit for a tongue that babbles 
 of father and mother.f Let such of the Muses assist me as 
 turned the words of Amphion into Theban walls ; so shall the 
 speech be not too far different from the matter. 
 
 Oh, ill-starred creatures ! wretched beyond all others, to in- 
 habit a place so hard to speak of better had ye been sheep or 
 goats. 
 
 The poet was beginning to walk with his guide along the place 
 in which the giant had set them down, and was still looking up at 
 the height from which he had descended, when a voice close to 
 him said, " Have a care where thou treadest. Hurt not with thy 
 feet the heads of thy unhappy brethren." 
 
 Dante looked down and before him, and saw that he was walk- 
 ing on a lake of ice, in -which were Murderous Traitors up to 
 their chins, their teeth chattering, their faces held down, their 
 eyes locked up frozen with tears. Dante saw two at his feet so 
 closely stuck together, that the very hairs of their heads were 
 mingled. He asked them who they were, and as they lifted up 
 
 * " Ne si chinato li fece dimora, 
 E come albero in nave si levo." 
 
 A magnificent image ! I have retained the idiomatic expression of the original 
 raised himself, instead of saying rose, because it seemed to me to give the 
 more grand and deliberate image. 
 
 t Of " mamma" and " bdbbo," says the primitive poet. We have corres- 
 ponding words in English, but the feeling they produce is not identical. The 
 lesser fervour of the northern nations renders them, in some respects, more so- 
 phisticate than they suspect, compared with the " artful" Italians.
 
 dO THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 their heads for astonishment, and felt the cold doubly congeal 
 them, they dashed their heads against one another for hate and 
 fury. They were two brothers who had murdered each other.* 
 Near them were other Tuscans, one of whom the cold had de- 
 prived of his ears ; and thousands more were seen grinning like 
 dogs, for the pain. 
 
 Dante, as he went along, kicked the face of one of them, 
 whether by chance, or fate, or will,] he could not say. The 
 sufferer burst into tears, and cried out, " Wherefore dost thou 
 torment me ? Art thou come to revenge the defeat at Monta- 
 perto ?" The pilgrim at this question felt eager to know who he 
 was ; but the unhappy wretch would not tell. His countryman 
 seized him by the hair to force him ; but still he said he would 
 not tell, were he to be scalped a thousand times. Dante, upon 
 this, began plucking up his hairs by the roots, the man barking^ 
 with his eyes squeezed up, at every pull ; when another soul ex- 
 claimed, " Why, Bocca, what the devil ails thee ? Must thou 
 needs bark for cold as well as chatter ?" 
 
 " Now, accursed traitor, betrayer of thy country's standard," 
 said Dante, " be dumb if thou wilt ; for I shall tell thy name to 
 the world." 
 
 " Tell and begone !" said Bocca ; " but carry the name of this 
 babbler with thee ; 'tis Buoso, who left the pass open to the en- 
 emy between Piedmont and Parma ; and near him is the traitor 
 for the pope, Beccaria ; and Ganellone, who betrayed Charle- 
 
 * Alessandro and Napoleon degli Alberti, sons of Alberto, lord of the valley 
 of Falterona in Tuscany. After their father's death they tyrannised over the 
 neighbouring districts, and finally had a mortal quarrel. The name of Napo- 
 leon used to be so rare till of late years, even in Italian books, that it gives 
 one a kind of interesting surprise to meet with it. 
 
 t " Se voter fu, o destino o fortuna, 
 
 Non so." 
 What does the Christian reader think of that ? 
 
 t Latrando. 
 
 Bocca degli Abbati, whose soul barks like a dog, occasioned the defeat of 
 the Guelfs at Montaperto, in the year 1260, by treacherously cutting off the 
 hand of the standard-bearer.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL. 81 
 
 magne ; and Tribaldello, who opened Faenza to the enemy at 
 night-time." 
 
 The pilgrims went on, and beheld two other spirits so closely 
 locked up together in one hole of the ice, that the head of one 
 was right over the other's like a cowl ; and Dante, to his horror, 
 saw that the upper head was devouring the lower with all the 
 eagerness of a man who is famished. The poet asked what could 
 possibly make him shew a hate so brutal ; adding, that if there 
 were any ground for it, he would tell the story to the world.* 
 
 The sinner raised his head from the dire repast, and after wi- 
 ping his jaws with the hair of it, said, " You ask a thing which 
 it shakes me to the heart to think of. It is a story to renew all 
 my misery. But since it will produce this wretch his due in- 
 famy, hear it, and you shall see me speak and weep at the same 
 time. How thou earnest hither I know not ; but I perceive by 
 thy speech that thou art Florentine. 
 
 " Learn, then, that I was the Count Ugolino, and this man was 
 Ruggieri the Archbishop. How I trusted him, and was betrayed 
 into prison, there is no need to relate ; but of his treatment of 
 me there, and how cruel a death I underwent, hear ; and then 
 judge if he has offended me. 
 
 " I had been imprisoned with my children a long time in the 
 tower which has since been called from me the Tower of Fam- 
 ine ; and many a new moon had I seen through the hole that 
 served us for a window, when I dreamt a dream that foreshadow- 
 ed to me what was coming. Methought that this man headed a 
 great chase against the wolf, in the mountains between Pisa and 
 Lucca. Among the foremost hi his party were Gualandi, Sis- 
 mondi, and Lanfranchi, and the hounds were thin and eager, and 
 high-bred ; and in a little while I saw the hounds fasten on the 
 flanks of the wolf and the wolfs children, and tear them. At 
 that moment I awoke with the voices of my own children in my 
 ears, asking for bread. Truly cruel must thou be, if thy heart 
 does not ache to think of what I thought then. If thou feel not 
 for a pang like that, what is it for which thou art accustomed to 
 
 * This is the famous story of Ugolino, who betrayed the castles of Pisa to 
 the Florentines, and was starved with his children in the Tower of Famine. 
 
 7
 
 82 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 feel ? We were now all awake ; and the time was at hand when 
 they brought us bread, and we had all dreamt dreams which 
 made us anxious. At that moment I heard the key of the horri- 
 ble tower turn in the lock of the door below, and fasten it. I 
 looked at my children, and said not a word. I did not weep. I 
 made a strong effort upon the soul within me. But my little 
 Anselm said, 'Father, why do you look so? Is any thing the 
 matter ?' Nevertheless I did not weep, nor say a word all the 
 day, nor the night that followed. In the morning a ray of light 
 fell upon us through the window of our sad prison, and I beheld 
 in those four little faces the likeness of my own face, and then 
 I began to gnaw my hands for misery. My children, thinking 
 I did it for hunger, raised themselves on the floor, and said, ' Fa- 
 ther, we should be less miserable if you would eat our own flesh. 
 [t was you that gave it us. Take it again.' Then I sat still, 
 in order not to make them unhappier : and that day and the 
 next we all remained without speaking. On the fourth day, 
 Gaddo stretched himself at my feet, and said, ' Father, why 
 won't you help me ?' and there he died. And as surely as 
 thou lookest on me,. so surely I beheld the whole three die in 
 the same manner. So I began in my misery to grope about 
 in the dark for them, for I had become blind ; and three days I 
 kept calling on them by name, though they were dead ; till fam- 
 ine did for me what grief had been unable to do." 
 
 With these words, the miserable man, his eyes starting from 
 his head, seized that other wretch again with his teeth, and 
 ground them against the skull as a dog does with a bone. 
 
 O Pisa ! scandal of the nations ! since thy neighbours are so 
 slow to punish thee, may the very islands tear themselves up 
 from their roots in the sea, and come and block up the mouth of 
 thy river, and drown every soul within thee. What if this Count 
 Ugolino did, as report says he did, betray thy castles to the 
 enemy ? his children had not betrayed them ; nor ought they to 
 have been put to an agony like this. Their age was their inno- 
 cence ; and their deaths have given thee the infamy of a second 
 Thebes.* 
 
 * I should be loath to disturb the inimitable pathos of this story, if there did 
 not seem grounds for believing that the poet was too hasty in giving credit to
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL. 83 
 
 The pilgrims passed on, and beheld other traitors frozen up in 
 swathes of ice, with their heads upside down. Their very tears 
 had hindered them from shedding more ; for their eyes were en- 
 crusted with the first they shed, so as to be enclosed with them as 
 in a crystal visor, which forced back the others into an accumula- 
 tion of anguish. One of the sufferers begged Dante to relieve him 
 of this ice, in order that he might vent a little of the burden 
 which it repressed. The poet said he would do so, provided he 
 would disclose who he was. The man said he was the friar Al- 
 berigo, who invited some of his brotherhood to a banquet in order 
 to slay them. 
 
 " What !" exclaimed Dante, " art thou no longer, then, among 
 the living ?" 
 
 " Perhaps I appear to be," answered the friar ; " for the mo- 
 ment any one commits a treachery like mine, his soul gives up 
 his body to a demon, who thenceforward inhabits it in the man's 
 likeness. Thou knowest Branca Doria, who murdered his father- 
 in-law, Zanche ? He seems to be walking the earth still, and yet 
 he has been in this place many years."* 
 
 " Impossible !" cried Dante ; " Branca Doria is still alive ; he 
 eats, drinks, and sleeps, like any other man." 
 
 " I tell thee," returned the friar, " that the soul of the man he 
 slew had not reached that lake of boiling pitch in which thou 
 sawest him, ere the soul of his slayer was in this place, and his 
 body occupied by a demon in its stead. But now stretch forth 
 thy hand, and relieve mine eyes." 
 
 Dante relieved them not. Ill manners, he said, were the only 
 courtesy fit for such a wretch.f 
 
 parts of it, particularly the ages of some of his fellow-prisoners, and the guilt 
 of the archbishop. See the Appendix to this volume. 
 
 * This is the most tremendous lampoon, as far as I am aware, in the whole 
 circle of literature. 
 
 t " Cortesia fu lui esser villano." This is the foulest blot which Dante has 
 cast on his own character in all his poem (short of the cruelties he thinks fit to 
 attribute to God). It is argued that he is cruel and false, out of hatred to cru- 
 elty and falsehood. But why then add to the sum of both? and towards a 
 man, too, supposed to be suffering eternally ? It is idle to discern in such bar- 
 barous inconsistencies any thing but the writer's own contributions to the stock
 
 84 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 O ye Genoese ! he exclaims, men that are perversity all 
 over, and full of every corruption to the core, why are ye not 
 swept from the face of the earth ? There is one of you whom 
 you fancy to be walking about like other men, and he is all the 
 while in the lowest pit of hell ! 
 
 " Look before thee," said Virgil, as they advanced : " behold 
 the banners of the King of Hell." 
 
 Dante looked, and beheld something which appeared like a 
 windmill in motion, as seen from a distance on a dark night. A 
 wind of inconceivable sharpness came from it. 
 
 The souls of those who had been traitors to their benefactors 
 were here frozen up in depths of pellucid ice, where they were 
 seen in a variety of attitudes, motionless ; some upright, some 
 downward, some bent double, head to foot. 
 
 At length they came to where the being stood who was once 
 eminent for all fair seeming.* This was the figure that seemed 
 tossing its arms at a distance like a windmill. 
 
 " Satan," whispered Virgil ; and put himself in front of Dante 
 to re-assure him, halting him at the same time, and bidding him 
 summon all his fortitude. Dante stood benumbed, though con- 
 scious ; as if he himself had been turned to ice. He felt neither 
 alive nor dead. 
 
 The lord of the dolorous empire, each of his arms as big as a 
 giant, stood in the ice half-way up his breast. He had one head, 
 
 of them. The utmost credit for right feeling is not to be given on every occa- 
 sion to a man who refuses it to every one else. 
 
 * " La creatura ch' ebbe il bel sembiante." 
 
 This is touching ; but the reader may as well be prepared for a total failure in 
 Dante's conception of Satan, especially the English reader, accustomed to the 
 sublimity of Milton's. Granting that the Roman Catholic poet intended to 
 honour the fallen angel with no sublimity, but to render him an object of mere 
 hate and dread, he has overdone and degraded the picture into caricature. A 
 great stupid being, stuck up in ice, with three faces, one of which is yellow, 
 and three mouths, each eating a sinner, one of those sinners being Brutus, is 
 an object for derision ; and the way in which he eats these, his everlasting 
 bonnes-bouches, divides derision with disgust. The passage must be given, 
 otherwise the abstract of the poem would be incomplete ; but I cannot help 
 thinking it the worst anti-climax ever fallen into by a great poet.
 
 ITHE JOURNEY THROUGH HELL. 85 
 
 but three faces ; the middle, vermilion ; the one over the right 
 shoulder a pale yellow ; the other black. His sails of wings, 
 huger than ever were beheld at sea, were in shape and texture 
 those of a bat ; and with these he constantly flapped, so as to 
 send forth the wind that froze the depths of Tartarus. From his 
 six eyes the tears ran down, mingling at his three chins with 
 bloody foam ; for at every mouth he crushed a sinner with his 
 teeth, as substances are broken up by an engine. The middle 
 sinner was the worst punished, for he was at once broken and 
 flayed, and his head and trunk were inside the mouth. It was 
 Judas Iscariot. Of the other two, whose heads were hanging 
 out, one was Brutus, and the other Cassius. Cassius was very 
 large-limbed. Brutus writhed with agony, but uttered not a 
 word.* 
 
 " Night has returned," said Virgil, " and all has been seen. 
 It is time to depart onward." 
 
 Dante then, at his bidding, clasped, as Virgil did, the huge in- 
 attentive being round the neck ; and watching their opportunity, 
 as the wings opened and shut, they slipped round it, and so down 
 his shaggy and frozen sides, from pile to pile, clutching it as they 
 went ; till suddenly, with the greatest labour and pain, they were 
 compelled to turn themselves upside down, as it seemed, but in 
 reality to regain their proper footing ; for they had passed the 
 centre of gravity, and become Antipodes. Then looking down at 
 what lately was upward, they saw Lucifer with his feet towards 
 them ; and so taking their departure, ascended a gloomy vault, 
 
 * This silence is, at all events, a compliment to Brutus, especially from a 
 man like Dante, and the more because it is extorted. Dante, no doubt, hated 
 , all treachery, particularly treachery to the leader of his beloved Roman em- 
 perors ; forgetting three things ; first, that Caesar was guilty of treachery him- 
 self to the Roman people ; second, that he, Dante, has put Curio in hell for ad- 
 vising Caesar to cross the Rubicon, though he has put the crosser among the 
 good Pagans ; and third, that Brutus was educated in the belief that the pun- 
 ishment of such treachery as Caesar's by assassination was one of the first of 
 duties. How differently has Shakspeare, himself an aristocratic rather than 
 democratic poet, and full of just doubt of the motives of assassins in general, 
 treated the error of the thoughtful, conscientious, Platonic philosopher !
 
 86 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 till at a distance, through an opening above their heads, they be- 
 held the loveliness of the stars.* 
 
 * At the close of this medley of genius, pathos, absurdity, sublimity, horror, 
 and revoltingness, it is impossible for any reflecting heart to avoid asking, Cui 
 bono ? What is the good of it to the poor wretches, if we are to suppose it true ? 
 and what to the world except, indeed, as a poetic study and a warning against 
 degrading notions of God if we are to take it simply as a fiction ? Theology, 
 disdaining both questions, has an answer confessedly incomprehensible. Hu- 
 manity replies: Assume not premises for which you have worse than no proofs.
 
 II. 
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY,
 
 Argument. 
 
 PURGATORY, in the system of Dante, is a mountain at the Antipodes, on the 
 top of which is the Terrestrial Paradise, once the seat of Adam and Eve. It 
 forms the principal part of an island in a sea, and possesses a pure air. Its 
 lowest region, with one or two exceptions of redeemed Pagans, is occupied by 
 Excommunicated Penitents and by Delayers of Penitence, all of whom are 
 compelled to lose time before their atonement commences. The other and 
 greater portion of the ascent is divided into circles or plains, in which are expi- 
 ated the Seven Deadly Sins. The Poet ascends from circle to circle with 
 Virgil and Statins, and is met in a forest oa the top by the spirit of Beatrice, 
 who transports him to Heaven.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY. 
 
 WHEN the pilgrims emerged from the opening through which 
 they beheld the stars, they found themselves in a scene which en- 
 chanted them with hope and joy. It was dawn : a sweet pure 
 air came on their faces ; and they beheld a sky of the loveliest 
 oriental sapphire, whose colour seemed to pervade the whole 
 serene hollow from earth to heaven. The beautiful planet which 
 encourages loving thoughts made all the orient laugh, obscuring 
 by its very radiance the stars in its train ; and among those 
 which were still lingering and sparkling in the southern horizon, 
 Dante saw four in the shape of a cross, never beheld by man 
 since they gladdened the eyes of our first parents. Heaven seem- 
 ed to rejoice in their possession. O widowed northern pole ! be- 
 reaved art thou, indeed, since thou canst not gaze upon them !* 
 
 * " Dolce color d' oriental zaffiro 
 
 Che s' accoglieva nel sereno aspetto 
 De 1' aer puro infino al primo giro, 
 
 A gli occhi miei ricomincio diletto, 
 Tosto ch' io usci' I'uor de 1' aura morta 
 Che m' avea contristati gli occhi e '1 petto. 
 
 Lo bel pianeta, ch' ad amar conforta, 
 Faceva tutto rider 1' oriente, 
 Velando i Pesci, ch' erano in sua scorta. 
 
 Io mi volsi a man destra, e posi mente 
 All' altro polo, e vidi quattro stelle 
 Non viste mai, fuor ch' a la prima gente ; 
 
 Goder pareva '1 ciel di lor fiammelle. 
 O settentrional vedovo sito, 
 Poi che private sei di mirar quelle !"
 
 90 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 The poet turned to look at the north where he had been accus- 
 tomed to see stars that no longer appeared, and beheld, at his side, 
 an old man, who struck his beholder with a veneration like that 
 of a son for his father. He had grey hairs, and a long beard 
 which parted in two down his bosom ; and the four southern stars 
 
 The sweetest oriental sapphire blue, 
 Which the whole air in its pure bosom had, 
 Greeted mine eyes, far as the heavens withdrew ; 
 
 So that again they felt assured and glad, 
 Soon as they issued forth from the dead air, 
 Where every sight and thought had made them sad. 
 
 The beauteous star, which lets no love despair, 
 Made all the orient laugh with loveliness, 
 Veiling the Fish that glimmered in its hair. 
 
 I turned me to the right to gaze and bless, 
 And saw four more, never of living wight 
 Beheld, since Adam brought us our distress ; 
 
 Heaven seemed rejoicing in their happy light 
 O widowed northern pole, bereaved indeed, 
 Since thou hast had no power to see that sight ! 
 
 Readers who may have gone thus far with the " Italian Pilgrim's Progress," 
 will allow me to congratulate them on arriving at this lovely scene, one of the 
 most admired in the poem. 
 
 This is one of the passages which make the religious admirers of Dante in- 
 clined to pronounce him divinely inspired ; for how could he otherwise have 
 seen stars, they ask us, which were not discovered till after his time, and 
 which compose the constellation of the Cross? But other commentators are 
 of opinion, that the Cross, though not so named till subsequently (and Dante, 
 we see, gives no prophetic hint about the name), had been seen probably by 
 stray navigators. An Arabian globe is even mentioned by M. Artaud (see 
 Gary), in which the Southern Cross is set down. Mr. Gary, in his note on the 
 passage, refers to Seneca's prediction of the discovery of America ; most likely 
 suggested by similar information. " But whatever," he adds, " may be thought 
 of this, it is certain that the four stars are here symbolical of the four cardinal 
 virtues ;" and he refers to cauto xxxi., where those virtues are retrospectively 
 associated with these stars. The symbol, however, is not necessary. Dante 
 was a very curious inquirer on all subjects, and evidently acquainted with ships 
 and seamen as well as geography ; and his imagination would eagerly have 
 seized a magnificent novelty like this, and used it the first opportunity. Co- 
 lumbus's discovery, as the reader will see, was anticipated by Pulci.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY. 91 
 
 beamed on his face with such lustre, that his aspect was as radi- 
 ant as if he had stood in the sun. 
 
 " Who are ye ?" said the old man, " that have escaped from 
 the dreadful prison-house ? Can the laws of the abyss be viola- 
 ted ? Or has heaven changed its mind, that thus ye are allowed 
 to come from the regions of condemnation into mine ?" 
 
 It was the spirit of Cato of Utica, the warder of the ascent of 
 purgatory. 
 
 The Roman poet explained to his countryman who they were, 
 and how Dante was under heavenly protection ; and then he 
 prayed leave of passage of him by the love he bore to the chaste 
 eyes of his Marcia, who sent him a message from the Pagan cir- 
 cle, hoping that he would still own her. 
 
 Cato replied, that although he was so fond of Marcia while on 
 earth that he could deny her nothing, he had ceased, in obedience 
 to new laws, to have any affection for her, now that she dwelt be- 
 yond the evil river ; but as the pilgrim, his companion, was un- 
 der heavenly protection, he would of course do what he desired.* 
 He then desired him to gird his companion with one of the sim- 
 plest and completest rushes he would see by the water's side, and 
 to wash the stain of the lower world out of his face, and so take 
 their journey up the mountain before them, by a path which the 
 rising sun would disclose. And with these words he disap- 
 peared.! 
 
 The pilgrims passed on, with the eagerness of one who thinks 
 every step in vain till he finds the path he has lost. The full 
 dawn by this time had arisen, and they saw the trembling of the 
 
 * Generous and disinterested ! Cato, the republican enemy of Caesar, and 
 committer of suicide, is not luckily chosen for his present office by the poet, 
 who has put Brutus into the devil's mouth in spite of his agreeing with Cato, 
 and the suicide Piero delle Vigne into hell in spite of his virtues. But Dante 
 thought Cato's austere manners like his own. 
 
 } The girding with the rush (givmco schietto) is supposed by the commen- 
 tators to be an injunction of simplicity and patience. Perhaps it is to enjoin 
 sincerity ; especially as the region of expiation has now been entered, and sin- 
 cerity is the first step to repentance. It will be recollected that Dante's for- 
 mer girdle, the cord of the Franciscan friars, has been left in the hands of 
 Fraud.
 
 92 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 sea in the distance.* Virgil then dipped his hands into a spot of 
 dewy grass, where the sun had least affected it, and with the 
 moisture bathed the face of Dante, who held it out to him, suffused 
 with tears ;f and then they went on till they came to a solitary 
 shore, whence no voyager had ever returned, and there the loins 
 of the Florentine were girt with the rush. 
 
 On this shore they were standing in doubt how to proceed, 
 moving onward, as it were, in mind, while yet their feet were 
 staying, when they beheld a light over the water at a distance, 
 rayless at first as the planet Mars when he looks redly out of the 
 horizon through a fog, but speedily growing brighter and brighter 
 with amazing swiftness. Dante had but turned for an instant to 
 ask his guide what it was, when, on looking again, it had grown 
 far brighter. Two splendid phenomena, he knew not what, then 
 developed themselves from it on either side ; and, by degrees, 
 another below it. The two splendours quickly turned out to be 
 wings ; and Virgil, who had hitherto watched its coming in si- 
 lence, cried out, " Down, down, on thy knees ! It is God's 
 angel. Clasp thine hands. Now thou shall behold operancy 
 indeed. Lo, how he needs neither sail nor oar, coming all this 
 way with nothing but his wings ! Lo, how he holds them aloft, 
 using the air with them at his will, and knowing they can never 
 be weary." 
 
 The " divine bird " grew brighter and brighter as he came, so 
 that the eye at last could not sustain the lustre ; and Dante 
 turned his to the ground. A boat then rushed to shore which the 
 
 * " L' alba vinceva 1' ora mattutina 
 Che fuggia 'nnanzi, si che di lontano 
 Conobbi il tremolar de la marina." 
 
 The lingering shadows now began to flee 
 Before the whitening dawn, so that mine eyes 
 Discerned far off the trembling of the sea. 
 
 " Conobbi il tremolar de la marina" 
 
 Is a beautiful verse, both for the picture and the sound. 
 
 t This evidence of humility and gratitude on the part of Dante would be 
 very affecting, if we could forget all the pride and passion he has been shew- 
 ing elsewhere, and the torments in which he has left his fellow-creatures. With 
 these recollections upon us, it looks like an overweening piece of self-congratu- 
 lation at other people's expense.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY. 93 
 
 angel had brought with him, so light that it drew not a drop of 
 water. The celestial pilot stood at the helm, with bliss written in 
 his face ; and a hundred spirits were seen within the boat, who, 
 lifting up their voices, sang the psalm beginning " When Israel 
 came out of Egypt." At the close of the psalm, the angel bless- 
 ed them with the sign of the cross, and they all leaped to shore ; 
 upon which he turned round, and departed as swiftly as he came. 
 The new-comers, after gazing about them for a while, in the 
 manner of those who are astonished to see new sights, inquired of 
 Virgil and his companion the best way to the mountain. Virgil 
 explained who they were ; and the spirits, pale with astonishment 
 at beholding in Dante a living and breathing man, crowded about 
 him, in spite of their anxiety to shorten the period of their trials. 
 One of them came darting out of the press to embrace him, in a 
 manner so affectionate as to move the poet to return his warmth ; 
 but his arms again and again found themselves crossed on his 
 own bosom, having encircled nothing. The shadow, smiling at 
 the astonishment in the other's face, drew back ; and Dante 
 hastened as much forward to shew his zeal in the greeting, when 
 the spirit in a sweet voice recommended him to desist. The Flor- 
 entine then knew who it was, Casella, a musician, to whom he 
 had been much attached. After mutual explanations as to their 
 meeting, Dante requested his friend, if no ordinance opposed it, 
 to refresh his spirit awhile with one of the tender airs that used to 
 charm away all his troubles on earth. Casella immediately began 
 one of his friend's own productions, commencing with the words, 
 
 " Love, that delights to talk unto my soul 
 Of all the wonders of my lady's nature." 
 
 And he sang it so beautifully, that the sweetness rang within 
 the poet's heart while recording the circumstance. The other 
 spirits listened with such attention, that they seemed to have for- 
 gotten the very purpose of their coming ; when suddenly the 
 voice of Cato was heard, sternly rebuking their delay ; and the 
 whole party speeded in trepidation towards the mountain.* 
 
 * " Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona 
 
 De la mia donna disiosamente," 
 is the beginning of the ode sung by Dante's friend. The incident is beautifully
 
 94 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 The two pilgrims, who had at first hastened with the others, in 
 a little while slackened their steps ; and Dante found that his 
 body projected a shadow, while the form of Virgil had none. 
 When arrived at the foot of the mountain, they were joined by a 
 second party of spirits, of whom Virgil inquired the way up it. 
 One of the spirits, of a noble aspect, but with a gaping wound in 
 his forehead, stepped forth, and asked Dante if he remembered 
 him. The poet humbly answering in the negative, the stranger 
 disclosed a second wound, that was in his bosom ; and then, with 
 a smile, announced himself as Manfredi, king of Naples, who was 
 slain in battle against Charles of Anjou, and died excommuni- 
 cated. Manfredi gave Dante a message to his daughter Co- 
 stanza, queen of Arragon, begging her to shorten the consequen- 
 ces of the excommunication by her prayers ; since he, like the 
 rest of the party with him, though repenting of his contumacy 
 against the church, would have to wander on the outskirts of 
 Purgatory three times as long as the presumption had lasted, un- 
 less relieved by such petitions from the living.* 
 
 Dante went on, with his thoughts so full of this request, that 
 he did not perceive he had arrived at the path which Virgil asked 
 for, till the wandering spirits called out to them to say so. The 
 
 introduced ; and Casella's being made to select a production from the pen of 
 the man who asks him to sing, very delicately implies a graceful cordiality in 
 the musician's character. 
 
 Milton alludes to the passage in his sonnet to Henry Lawes 
 
 " Thou honour's! verse, and verse must lend her wing 
 To honour thee, the priest of Phrebus' quire, 
 That tun'st their happiest lines in hymn or story. 
 Dante shall give Fame leave to set thee higher 
 Than his Casella, whom he wooed to sing, 
 Met in the milder shades of Purgatory." 
 
 * Manfredi was the natural son of the Emperor Frederick the Second. " He 
 was lively and agreeable in his manners," observes Mr. Gary," and delighted in 
 poetry, music, and dancing. But he was luxurious and ambitious, void of re- 
 ligion, and in his philosophy an epicurean." Translation of Dante, Smith's 
 edition, p. 77. Thus King Manfredi ought to have been in a red-hot tomb, 
 roasting for ever with Epicurus himself, and with the father of the poet's be- 
 loved friend, Guido Cavalcante : but he was the son of an emperor, and a foe 
 to the house of Anjou ; so Dante gives him a passport to heaven. There is 
 no ground whatever for the repentance assumed in the text
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY. 95 
 
 pilgrims then, with great difficulty, began to ascend through an 
 extremely narrow passage ; and Virgil, after explaining to Dante 
 how it was that in this antipodal region his eastward face beheld 
 the sun in the north instead of the south, was encouraging him to 
 proceed manfully in the hope of finding the path easier by de- 
 grees, and of reposing at the end of it, when they heard a voice 
 observing, that they would most likely find it expedient to repose 
 a little sooner. The pilgrims looked about them, and observed 
 close at hand a crag of a rock, in the shade of which some spir- 
 its were standing, as men stand idly at noon. Another was sit- 
 ting down, as if tired out, with his arms about his knees, and his 
 face bent down between them.* 
 
 " Dearest master !" exclaimed Dante to his guide, " what 
 thinkest thou of a croucher like this, for manful journeying ? 
 Verily he seems to have been twin-born with Idleness herself." 
 
 The croucher, lifting up his eyes at these words, looked hard 
 at Dante, and said, "Since thou art so stout, push on." 
 
 Dante then saw it was Belacqua, a pleasant acquaintance of 
 his, famous for his indolence. 
 
 " That was a good lesson," said Belacqua, " that was given 
 thee just now in astronomy." 
 
 The poet could not help smiling at the manner in which his 
 acquaintance uttered these words, it was so like his ways of old. 
 Belacqua pretended, even in another world, that it was of no use 
 to make haste, since the angel had prohibited his going higher up 
 the mountain. He and his companions had to walk round the 
 foot of it as many years as they had delayed repenting ; unless, 
 as in the case of Manfredi, their time was shortened by the pray- 
 ers of good people. 
 
 A little further on, the pilgrims encountered the spirits of such 
 Delayers of Penitence as, having died violent deaths, repented at 
 the last moment. One of them, Buonconte da Montefeltro, who 
 died in battle, and whose body could not be found, described 
 how the devil, having been hindered from seizing him by the 
 shedding of a single tear, had raised in his fury a tremendous 
 
 * The unexpected bit of comedy here ensuing la very remarkable and pleas- 
 ant. Belacqua, according to an old commentator, was a musician.
 
 96 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 tempest, which sent the body down the river Arno, and buried it 
 in the mud.* 
 
 Another spirit, a female, said to Dante, " Ah ! when thou re- 
 turnest to earth, and shalt have rested from thy long journey, re- 
 member me, Pia. Sienna gave me life ; the Marshes took it 
 from me. This he knows, who put on my finger the wedding- 
 ring.''! 
 
 * Buonconte was the son of that Guido da Montefeltro, whose soul we have 
 seen carried off from St. Francis by a devil, for having violated the conditions 
 of penitence. It is curious that both father and son should have been contested 
 for in this manner. 
 
 t This is the most affecting and comprehensive of all brief stories. 
 
 " Deh quando tu sarai tomato al mondo, 
 E riposato de la lunga via, 
 Seguito '1 terzo spirito al secondo, 
 
 Ricordjti di me che son la Pia : 
 Siena mi fe ; disfecemi Maremma ; 
 Salsi colui che 'nnauellata pria 
 
 Disposando m' avea con la sua gemma." 
 
 Ah, when thou findest thee again on earth 
 (Said then a female soul), remember me 
 Pia. Sienna was my place of birth, 
 
 The Marshes of my death. This knoweth he, 
 Who placed upon my hand the spousal ring. 
 
 " Nello della Pietra," says M. Beyle, in his work entitled De V Amour, " ob 
 tained in marriage the hand of Madonna Pia, sole heiress of the Ptolomei, tbr 
 richest and most noble family of Sienna. Her beauty, which was the admira 
 tion of all Tuscany, gave rise to a jealousy in the breast of her husband, that 
 envenomed by wrong reports and suspicious continually reviving, led to a fright- 
 ful catastrophe. It is not easy to determine at this day if his wife was altogethei 
 innocent ; but Dante has represented her as such. Her husband carried her 
 with him into the marshes of Volterra, celebrated then, as now, for the pestifer- 
 ous effects of the air. Never would he tell his wife the reason of her banish- 
 ment into so dangerous a place. His pride did not deign to pronounce either 
 complaint or accusation. He lived with her alone, in a deserted tower, of which 
 I have been to see the ruins on the sea-shore ; he never broke his disdainful si- 
 lence, never replied to the questions of his youthful bride, never listened to her 
 entreaties. He waited, unmoved by her, for the air to produce its fatal effects. 
 The vapours of this unwholesome swamp were not long in tarnishing features 
 the most beautiful, they say, that in that age had appeared upon earth. In a
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY. 97 
 
 The majority of this party were so importunate with the Flor- 
 entine to procure them the prayers of their friends, that he had 
 as much difficulty to get away, as a winner at dice has to free 
 himself from the mercenary congratulations of the by-standers. 
 On resuming their way, Dante quoted to Virgil a passage in the 
 jEneid, decrying the utility of prayer, and begged him to explain 
 how it was to be reconciled with what they had just heard. Vir- 
 gil advised him to wait for the explanation till he saw Beatrice, 
 whom, he now said, he should meet at the top of the mountain. 
 Dante, at this information, expressed a desire to hasten their prog- 
 ress ; and Virgil, seeing a spirit looking towards them as they 
 advanced, requested him to acquaint them with the shortest road. 
 
 The spirit, maintaining a lofty and reserved aspect, was as si- 
 lent as if he had not heard the request ; intimating by his man- 
 ner that they might as well proceed without repeating it, and 
 eyeing them like a lion on the watch. Virgil, however, went up 
 to him, and gently urged it ; but the only reply was a question 
 as to who they were and of what country. The Latin poet be- 
 ginning to answer him, had scarcely mentioned the word " Man- 
 tua," when the stranger went as eagerly up to his interrogator 
 as the latter had done to him, and said, " Mantua ! My own 
 country ! My name is Sordello." And the compatriots em- 
 braced. 
 
 O degenerate Italy ! exclaims Dante ; land without affections, 
 without principle, without faith in any one good thing ! here was 
 a man who could not hear the sweet sound of a fellow-citizen's 
 voice without feeling his heart gush towards him, and there are 
 no people now in any one of thy towns that do not hate and tor- 
 ment one another. 
 
 Sordello, in another tone, now exclaimed, " But who are ye ?" 
 
 Virgil disclosed himself, and Sordello fell at his feet.* 
 
 few months she died. Some chroniclers of these remote times report that 
 Nello employed the dagger to hasten her end: she died in the rnarshea 
 in some horrible manner ; but the mode of her death remained a mystery, 
 even to her contemporaries. Nello della Pietra survived, to pass the rest of his 
 days in a silence which was never broken." Hazlitt's Journey through France 
 and Italy, p. 315. 
 
 Sordello was a famous Proven9al poet ; with whose writings the world 
 
 8
 
 98 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 Sordello now undertook to accompany the great Roman poet 
 and his friend to a certain distance on their ascent towards the 
 penal quarters of the mountain ; but as evening was drawing 
 nigh, and the ascent could not be made properly in the dark, he 
 proposed that they should await the dawning of the next day in 
 a recess that overlooked a flowery hollow. The hollow was a 
 lovely spot of ground, enamelled with flowers that surpassed the 
 exquisitest dyes, and green with a grass brighter than emeralds 
 newly broken.* There rose from it also a fragrance of a thou- 
 sand different kinds of sweetness, all mingled into one that was 
 new and indescribable ; and with the fragrance there ascended 
 the chant of the prayer beginning, " Hail, Queen of Heaven,"f 
 which was sung by a multitude of souls that appeared sitting on 
 the flowery sward. 
 
 Virgil pointed them out. They were penitent delayers of pen- 
 itence, of sovereign rank. Among them, however, were spirits 
 who sat mute ; one of whom was the Emperor Rodolph, who 
 ought to have attended better to Italy, the garden of the empire ; 
 and another, Ottocar, king of Bohemia, his enemy, who now com- 
 forted him ; and another, with a small nose,:}: Philip the Third of 
 France, who died a fugitive, shedding the leaves of the lily ; he 
 sat beating his breast ; and with him was Henry the Third of 
 Navarre, sighing with his cheek on his hand. One was the 
 father, and one the father-in-law of Philip the Handsome, the bane 
 of France ; and it was on account of his unworthiness they 
 grieved. 
 
 But among the singers Virgil pointed out the strong-limbed 
 King of Arragon, Pedro ; and Charles, king of Naples, with his 
 masculine nose (these two were singing together) ; and Henry 
 
 has but lately been made acquainted through the researches of M. Raynouard, 
 in his Choix des Poesies des Troubadours, &c. 
 
 * " Fresco smeraldo in 1' ora che si fiacca." 
 An exquisite image of newness and brilliancy. 
 
 t " Salve, Regina :" the beginning of a Roman-Catholic chant to the Virgin. 
 
 t " With nose deprest," says Mr. Cary. But Dante says, literally, "small 
 nose," nasetto. So, further on, he says, " masculine nose," maschio naso. 
 He meant to imply the greater or less determination of character, which the 
 size of that feature is supposed to indicate.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY. 99 
 
 the Third of England, the king of the simple life, sitting by him- 
 self;* and below these, but with his eyes in heaven, Guglielmo 
 marquis of Montferrat. 
 
 It was now the hour when men at sea think longingly of home, 
 and feel their hearts melt within them to remember the day on 
 which they bade adieu to beloved friends ; and now, too, was the 
 hour when the pilgrim, new to his journey, is thrilled with the 
 like tenderness, when he hears the vesper-bell in the distance, 
 which seems to mourn for the expiring day.j- At this hour of 
 the coming darkness, Dante beheld one of the spirits in the flow- 
 ery hollow arise, and after giving a signal to the others to do as 
 
 * An English reader is surprised to find here a sovereign for whom he has 
 been taught to entertain little respect. But Henry was a devout servant of 
 the Church. 
 
 f " Era gia 1' ora che volge '1 desio 
 A' naviganti, e intenerisce '1 cuore 
 Lo di ch' an detto a' dolci amici a Dio ; 
 
 E che lo nuovo peregrin d' amore 
 Punge, se ode squilla di lontano 
 Che paia '1 giorno pianger che si muore." 
 
 A famous passage, untiring in the repetition. It is, indeed, worthy to be the 
 voice of Evening herself. 
 
 'Twas now the hour, when love of home melts through 
 Men's hearts at sea, and longing thoughts portray 
 The moment when they bade sweet friends adieu ; 
 
 And the new pilgrim now, on his lone way, 
 Thrills, if he hears the distant vesper-bell, 
 That seems to mourn for the expiring day. 
 
 Every body knows the line in Gray's Elegy, not unworthily echoed from 
 Dante's 
 
 " The curfew tolls the knell of parting day." 
 Nothing can equal, however, the tone in the Italian original, the 
 " Paia '1 giorno pianger che si mu6re." 
 
 Alas ! why could not the great Tuscan have been superior enough to his per- 
 sonal griefs to write a whole book full of such beauties, and so have left us a 
 work truly to be called Divine ?
 
 100 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 he did, stretch forth both hands, palm to palm, towards the East, 
 and with softest emotion commence the hymn beginning, 
 
 " Thee before the closing light."* 
 
 Upon which all the rest devoutly and softly followed him, keep- 
 ing their eyes fixed on the heavens. At the end of it they re- 
 mained, with pale countenances, in an attitude of humble expec- 
 tation ; and Dante saw the angels issue from the quarter to which 
 they looked, and descend towards them with flaming swords in 
 their hands, broken short of the point. Their wings were as 
 green as the leaves in spring ; and they wore garments equally 
 green, .which the fanning of the wings kept in a state of stream- 
 ing fluctuation behind them as they came. One of them took his 
 stand on a part of the hill just over where the pilgrims stood, and 
 the other on a hill opposite, so that the party in the valley were 
 between them. Dante could discern their heads of hair, notwith- 
 standing its brightness ; but their faces were so dazzling as to be 
 und istinguishable . 
 
 " They come from Mary's bosom," whispered Sordello, " to 
 protect the valley from the designs of our enemy yonder, the 
 Serpent." 
 
 Dante looked in trepidation towards the only undefended side 
 of the valley, and beheld the Serpent of Eve coming softly 
 among the grass and flowers, occasionally turning its head, and 
 licking its polished back. Before he could take off his eyes 
 from the evil thing, the two angels had come down like falcons, 
 and at the whirring of their pinions the serpent fled. The 
 angels returned as swiftly to their stations. 
 
 Aurora was now looking palely over the eastern cliff on the 
 other side of the globe, and the stars of midnight shining over the 
 heads of Dante and his friends, when they seated themselves for 
 rest on the mountain's side. The Florentine, being still in the 
 flesh, lay down for weariness, and was overcome with sleep. In 
 his sleep he dreamt that a golden eagle flashed down like light- 
 ning upon him, and bore him up to the region of fire, where the 
 heat was so intense that it woke him, staring and looking round 
 about with a pale face. His dream was a shadowing of the 
 
 * " Te lucis ante terminum ;" a hymn sung at evening service.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY. 101 
 
 truth. He had actually come to another place, to the entrance 
 of Purgatory itself. Sordello had been left behind, Virgil alone 
 remained, looking him cheerfully in the face. Saint Lucy had 
 come from heaven, and shortened the fatigue of his journey by 
 carrying him upwards as he slept, the heathen poet following 
 them. On arriving where they stood, the fair saint intimated the 
 entrance of Purgatory to Virgil by a glance thither of her beau- 
 tiful eyes, and then vanished as Dante woke.* 
 
 The portal by which Purgatory was entered was embedded in 
 a cliff. It had three steps, each of a different colour ; and on 
 the highest of these there sat, mute and watching, an angel in 
 ash-coloured garments, holding a naked sword, which glanced 
 with such intolerable brightness on Dante, whenever he attempt- 
 ed to look, that he gave up the endeavour. The angel demanded 
 who they were, and receiving the right answer, gently bade them 
 advance. 
 
 Dante now saw, that the lowest step was of marble, so white 
 and clear that he beheld his face in it. The colour of the next 
 was a deadly black, and it was all rough, scorched, and full of 
 cracks. The third was of flaming porphyry, red as a man's 
 blood when it leaps forth under the lancet.f The angel, whose 
 feet were on the porphyry, sat on a threshold which appeared to 
 be rock-diamond. Dante, ascending the steps, with the encour- 
 agement of Virgil, fell at the angel's feet, and, after thrice beat- 
 ing himself on the breast, humbly a*sked admittance. The angel, 
 with the point of his sword, inscribed the first letter of the word 
 peccatum (sin) seven times on the petitioner's forehead ; then, 
 bidding him pray with tears for their erasement, and be cautious 
 how he looked back, opened the portal with a silver and a golden 
 
 * Lucy, Lucia (supposed to be derived from lux, lucis), is the goddess (I 
 was almost going to say) who in Roman Catholic countries may be said to pre- 
 side over light, and who is really invoked in maladies of the eyes. She was 
 Dante's favourite saint, possibly for that reason among others, for he had once 
 hurt his eyes with study, and they had been cured. In her spiritual charac- 
 ter she represents the light of grace. 
 
 t The first step typifies consciousness of sin ; the second, horror of i, ; the 
 third, zeal to amend.
 
 102 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 key.* The hinges roared, as they turned, like thunder ; and the 
 pilgrims, on entering, thought they heard, mingling with the 
 sound, a chorus of voices singing, " We praise thee, O God !"( 
 It was like the chant that mingles with a cathedral organ, when 
 the words that the choristers utter are at one moment to be distin- 
 guished, and at another fade away. 
 
 The companions continued, ascending till they reached a plain. 
 It stretched as far as the eye could see, and was as lonely as 
 roads across deserts. 
 
 This was the first flat, or table-land, of the ascending grada- 
 tions of Purgatory, and the place of trial for the souls of the 
 Proud. It was bordered with a mound, or natural wall, of white 
 marble, sculptured all over with stories of humility. Dante be- 
 held among them the Annunciation, represented with so much 
 life, that the sweet action of the angel seemed to be uttering the 
 very word, " Hail !" and the submissive spirit of the Virgin to 
 be no less impressed, like very wax, in her demeanour. The 
 next story was that of David dancing and harping before the ark, 
 an action in which he seemed both less and greater than a king. 
 Michal was looking out upon him from a window, like a lady full 
 of scorn and sorrow. Next to the story of David was that of the 
 Emperor Trajan, when he did a thing so glorious, as moved St. 
 Gregory to gain the greatest of all his conquests the delivering 
 of the emperor's soul from hell. 
 
 A widow, in tears and mourning, was laying hold of his bridle 
 as he rode amidst his court with a noise of horses and horsemen, 
 while the Roman eagles floated in gold over his head. The mis- 
 erable creature spoke out loudly among them all, crying for ven- 
 geance on the murderers of her sons. The emperor seemed to 
 say, " Wait till I return." 
 
 But she, in the hastiness of her misery, said, " Suppose thou 
 returnest not?" 
 
 " Then my successor will attend to thee," replied the em- 
 peror. 
 
 * The keys of St. Peter. The gold is said by the commentators to mean 
 power to absolve ; the silver, the learning and judgment requisite to use it 
 
 t " Te Deum laudimus," the well-known hymn of St. Ambrose and St 
 Augustine.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY. 103 
 
 " And what hast thou to do with the duties of another man," 
 cried she, " if thou attendest not to thine own ?" 
 
 " Now, be of good comfort," concluded Trajan, " for verily my 
 duty shall be done before I go ; justice wills it, and pity arrests 
 me." 
 
 Dante was proceeding to delight himself further with these 
 sculptures, when Virgil whispered him to look round and see 
 what was coming. He did so, and beheld strange figures ad- 
 vancing, the nature of which he could not make out at first, for 
 they seemed neither human, nor aught else which he could call 
 to mind. They were souls of the proud, bent double under enor- 
 mous burdens. 
 
 " O proud, miserable, woe-begone Christians !" exclaims the 
 poet ; " ye who, in the shortness of your sight, see no reason for 
 advancing in the right path ! Know ye not that we are worms, 
 born to compose the angelic butterfly, provided we throw off the 
 husks that impede our flight ?"* 
 
 The souls came slowly on, each bending down in proportion to 
 his burden. They looked like the crouching figures in architec- 
 ture that are used to support roofs or balconies, and that excite 
 piteous fancies in the beholders. The one that appeared to have 
 the most patience, yet seemed as if he said, " I can endure no 
 further." 
 
 The sufferers, notwithstanding their anguish, raised their voices 
 in a paraphrase on the Lord's Prayer, which they concluded with 
 humbly stating, that they repeated the clause against temptation, 
 not for themselves, but for those who were yet living. 
 
 Virgil, wishing them a speedy deliverance, requested them to 
 shew the best way of going up to the next circle. Who it was 
 that answered him could not be discerned, on account of their all 
 being so bent down ; but a voice gave them the required direction ; 
 the speaker adding, that he wished he could raise his eyes, so as 
 
 * " Nou v' accorgete voi, che uoi siam vermi, 
 Nati a formar 1' angelica farfalla, 
 Che vola a giustizia senza schermi ?" 
 
 Know you not, we are worms 
 Born to compose the angelic butterfly, 
 That flies to heaven when freed from what deform* ?
 
 104 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 to see the living creature that stood near him. He said that his 
 name was Omberto that he came of the great Tuscan race of 
 Aldobrandesco and that his countrymen, the Siennese, murdered 
 him on account of his arrogance. 
 
 Dante had bent down his own head to listen, and in so doing he 
 was recognised by one of the sufferers, who, eyeing him as well 
 as he could, addressed him by name. The poet replied by ex- 
 claiming, " Art thou not Oderisi, the glory of Agubbio, the mas- 
 ter of the art of illumination ?" 
 
 " Ah !" said Oderisi, " Franco of Bologna has all the glory 
 now. His colours make the pages of books laugh with beauty, 
 compared with what mine do.* I could not have owned it while 
 on earth, for the sin which has brought me hither ; but so it is ; 
 and so will it ever be, let a man's fame be never so green and 
 flourishing, unless he can secure a dull age to come after him. 
 Cimabue, in painting, lately kept the field against all comers, and 
 now the cry is ' Giotto.' Thus, in song, a new Guido has de- 
 prived the first of his glory, and he perhaps is born who shall 
 drive both out of the nest.f Fame is but a wind that changes 
 about from all quarters. What does glory amount to at best, that 
 a man should prefer living and growing old for it, to dying in the 
 days of his nurse and his pap-boat, even if it should last him a 
 thousand years ? A thousand years ! the twinkling of an eye. 
 Behold this man, who weeps before me ; his name resounded 
 once over all our Tuscany, and now it is scarcely whispered in 
 his native place. He was lord there at the time that your once 
 
 * " Piii ridon le carte 
 Che penelleggia Franco Bolognese : 
 L' onore e tutto or suo, e raio in parte." 
 
 t The " new Guido" is his friend Guido Cavalcante (now dead) ; the " first" 
 is Guido Guinicelli, for whose writings Dante had an esteem ; and the poet, 
 who is to " chase them from the nest," caccerd di nido (as the not very friend- 
 ly metaphor states it), is with good reason supposed to be himself! He was 
 right ; but was the statement becoming ? It was certainly not necessary. 
 Dante, notwithstanding his friendship with Guido, appears to have had a grudge 
 against both the Cavalcanti, probably for some scorn they had shewn to his 
 superstition ; for they could be proud themselves ; and the son has the repu- 
 tation of scepticism, as well as the father. See the Decameron, Giorn. vi 
 Nov. 9.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY. 105 
 
 proud but now loathsome Florence had such a lesson given to its 
 frenzy at the battle of Arbia." 
 
 " And what is his name ?" inquired Dante. 
 
 " Salvani," returned the limner. " He is here, because he 
 had the presumption to think that he could hold Sienna in the 
 hollow of his hand. Fifty years has he paced in this manner. 
 Such is the punishment for audacity." 
 
 " But why is he here at all," said Dante, " and not in the outer 
 region, among the delayers of repentance ?" 
 
 " Because," exclaimed the other, " in the height of his ascend- 
 ancy he did not disdain to stand in the public place in Sienna, 
 and, trembling in every vein, beg money from the people to ran- 
 som a friend from captivity. Do I appear to thee to speak with 
 mysterious significance ? Thy countrymen shall too soon help 
 thee to understand me."* 
 
 Virgil now called Dante away from Oderisi, and-bade him 
 notice the ground on which they were treading. It was pave- 
 ment, wrought all over with figures, like sculptured tombstones. 
 There was Lucifer among them, struck flaming down from 
 heaven ; and Briareus, pinned to the earth with the thunderbolt, 
 and, with the other giants, amazing the gods with his hugeness ; 
 and Nimrod, standing confounded at the foot of Babel ; and 
 Niobe, with her despairing eyes, turned into stone amidst her 
 children ; and Saul, dead on his own sword in Gilboa ; and 
 Arachne, now half spider, at fault on her own broken web ; and 
 Rehoboanl, for all his insolence, flying in terror in his chariot ; 
 and Alcmseon, who made his mother pay with her life for the or- 
 nament she received to betray his father ; and Sennacherib, left 
 dead by his son in the temple ; and the head of Cyrus, thrown 
 by the motherless woman into the goblet of blood, that it might 
 swill what it had thirsted for ; and Holofernes, beheaded ; and 
 his Assyrians flying at his death ; and Troy, all become cinders 
 
 * This is the passage from which it is conjectured that Dante knew what it 
 was to " tremble in every vein," from the awful necessity of begging. Mr. 
 Gary, with some other commentators, thinks that the " trembling" implies fear 
 of being refused. But does it not rather mean the agony of the humiliation ? 
 In Salvani's case it certainly does ; for it was in consideration of the pang to his 
 pride, that the good deed rescued him from worse punishment
 
 106 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 and hollow places. Oh ! what a fall from pride was there ! 
 Now, maintain the loftiness of your looks, ye sons of Eve, and 
 walk with proud steps, bending not your eyes on the dust ye 
 were, lest ye perceive the evil of your ways.* 
 
 " Behold," said Virgil, " there is an angel coming." 
 
 The angel came on, clad in white, with a face that sent trem- 
 bling beams before it, like the morning star. He shewed the 
 pilgrims the way up to the second circle ; and then, beating his 
 wings against the forehead of Dante, on which the seven initials 
 of sin were written, told him he should go safely, and disap- 
 peared. 
 
 On reaching the new circle, Dante, instead of the fierce wail- 
 ings that used to meet him at every turn in hell, heard voices 
 singing, " Blessed are the poor in spirit. "f As he went, he per- 
 ceived that he walked lighter, and was told by Virgil that the 
 angel had freed him from one of the letters on his forehead. He 
 put his hand up to make sure, as a man does in the street when 
 people take notice of something on his head of which he is not 
 aware ; and Virgil smiled. 
 
 In this new circle the sin of Envy was expiated. After the 
 pilgrims had proceeded a mile, they heard the voices of invisible 
 spirits passing them, uttering sentiments of love and charity ; for 
 it was charity itself that had to punish envy. 
 
 The souls of the envious, clad in sackcloth, sat leaning for 
 
 * The reader will have noticed the extraordinary mixture of Paganism and 
 the Bible in this passage, especially the introduction of such fables as Niobe 
 and Arachne. It would be difficult not to suppose it intended to work out 
 some half sceptical purpose, if we did not call to mind the grave authority given 
 to fables in the poet's treatise on Monarchy, and the whole strange spirit, at once 
 logical and gratuitous, of the learning of his age, when the acuter the mind, 
 the subtler became the reconcilement with absurdity. 
 
 t Beati pauperes spiritu. " Blessed are the poor in spirit ; for theirs is the 
 kingdom of heaven" one of the beautiful passages of the beautiful sermon 
 on the Mount. How could the great poet read and admire such passages, and 
 yet fill his books so full of all which they renounced ? " Oh," say his idola- 
 ters, " he did it out of his very love for them, and his impatience to see them 
 triumph." So said the Inquisition. The evil was continued for the sake of 
 the good which it prevented ! The result in the long-run may be so, but not 
 for the reasons they supposed, or from blindness to the indulgence of their bad 
 passions.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY. 107 
 
 support and humiliation, partly against the rocky wall of the cir- 
 cle, and partly on one another's shoulders, after the manner of 
 beggars that ask alms near places of worship. Their eyes were 
 sewn up, like those of hawks in training, but not so as to hinder 
 them from shedding tears, which they did in abundance ; and 
 they cried, " Mary, pray for us ! Michael, Peter, and all the 
 saints, pray for us !" 
 
 Dante spoke to them ; and one, a female, lifted up her chin as 
 a blind person does when expressing consciousness of notice, and 
 said she was Sapia of Sienna, who used to be pleased at people's 
 misfortunes, and had rejoiced when her countrymen lost the 
 battle of Colle. " Sapia was my name," she said, " but sapient 
 I was not,* for I prayed God to defeat my countrymen ; and 
 when he had done so (as he had willed to do), I raised my bold 
 face to heaven, and cried out to him, ' Now do thy worst, for I 
 fear thee not !' I was like the bird in the fable, who thought the 
 fine day was to last for ever. What I should have done in my 
 latter days to make up for the imperfect amends of my repentance, 
 I know not, if the holy Piero Pettignano had not assisted me with 
 his prayers. But who art thou that goest with open eyes, and 
 breathest in thy talk ?" 
 
 " Mine eyes," answered Dante, " may yet have to. endure the 
 blindness in this place, though for no long period. Far more do 
 I fear the sufferings in the one that I have just left. I seem to 
 feel the weight already upon me."f 
 
 * " S it rid non fui, awegna che Sapia 
 
 Fosse chiamata." 
 
 The pun is poorer even than it sounds in English ; for, though the Italian 
 name may possibly remind its readers of sapienza (sapience), there is the differ- 
 ence of a in the adjective savid, which is also accented on the first syllable. 
 It is almost as bad as if she had said in English, " Sophist I found myself, 
 though Sophia is my name." It is pleasant, however, to see the great satur- 
 nine poet among the punsters. It appears, from the commentators, that Sapia 
 was in exile at the time of the battle, but they do not say for what ; probably 
 from some zeal of faction. 
 
 t We are here let into Dante's confessions. He owns to a little envy, but 
 far more pride : 
 
 " Gli occhi, diss' io, mi fieno ancor qui tolti, 
 Ma picciol tempo ; che poch' e 1' offesa 
 Fatta per esser con invidia volti.
 
 108 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 The Florentine then informed Sapia how he came thither, 
 which, she said, was a great sign that God loved him ; and she 
 begged his prayers. The conversation excited the curiosity of 
 two spirits who overheard it ; and one of them, Guido del Duca, 
 a noble Romagnese, asked the poet of what country he was. 
 Dante, without mentioning the name of the river, intimated that 
 he came from the banks of the Arno ; upon which the other 
 spirit, Rinier da Calboli, asked his friend why the stranger sup- 
 pressed the* name, as though it was something horrible. Guido 
 said he well might ; for the river, throughout its course, beheld 
 none but bad men and persecutors of virtue. First, he said, it 
 made its petty way by the sties of those brutal hogs, the people 
 of Casentino, and then arrived at the dignity of watering the 
 kennels of the curs of Arezzo, who excelled more in barking 
 than in biting ; then, growing unluckier as it grew larger, like 
 the cursed and miserable ditch that it was, it found in Florence 
 the dogs become wolves ; and finally, ere it went into the sea, it 
 passed the den of those foxes, the Pisans, who were full of such 
 cunning that they held traps in contempt. 
 
 " It will be well," continued Guido, " for this man to remem- 
 ber what he hears ;" and then, after prophesying evil to Florence, 
 and confessing to Dante his sin of envy, which used to make him 
 pale when any one looked happy, he added, " This is Rinieri, the 
 glory of that house of Calboli which now inherits not a spark of 
 it. Not a spark of it, did I say, in the house of Calboli ? Where 
 is there a spark in all Romagna ? Where is the good Lizio ? 
 where Manardi, Traversaro, Carpigna ? The Romagnese have 
 all become bastards. A mechanic founds a house in Bologna ! a 
 Bernardin di Fosco finds his dog-grass become a tree in Faenza ! 
 Wonder not, Tuscan, to see me weep, when I think of the noble 
 spirits that we have lived with of the Guides of Prata, and the 
 Ugolins of Azzo of Federigo Tignoso and his band of the 
 
 Troppa e piu la paura ond' e sospcsa 
 L' anima mia del tormento di sotto : 
 Che gia. lo 'ncarco di Id. giu mi pesa." 
 
 The first confession is singularly ingenuous and modest ; the second, affecting. 
 It is curious to guess what sort of persons Dante could have allowed himself to 
 envy probably those who were more acceptable to women.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY. 109 
 
 Traversaros and Anastagios, families now ruined and all the 
 ladies and the cavaliers, the alternate employments and delights 
 which wrapped us in a round of love and courtesy, where now 
 there is nothing but ill-will ! O castle of Brettinoro ! why dost 
 thou not fall ? Well has the lord of Bagnacavallo done, who 
 will have no more children. Who would propagate a race of 
 Counties from such blood as the Castrocaros and the Conios ? Is 
 not the son of Pagani called the demon ? and would it not be 
 better that such a son were swept out of the family ? Nay, let 
 him live to show to what a pitch of villany it has arrived. UbaJ- 
 dini alone is blessed, for his name is good, and he is too old to 
 leave a child after him. Go, Tuscan go ; for I would be left 
 to my tears." 
 
 Dante and Virgil turned to move onward, and had scarcely 
 done so when a tremendous voice met them, splitting the air like 
 peals of thunder, and crying out, " Whoever finds me will slay 
 me !" then dashed apart, like the thunder-bolt when it falls. It 
 was Cain. The air had scarcely recovered its silence, when a 
 second crash ensued from a different quarter near them, like 
 thunder when the claps break swiftly into one another. " I am 
 Aglauros," it said, " that was turned into stone." Dante drew 
 closer to his guide, and there ensued a dead silence.* 
 
 The sun was now in the west, and the pilgrims were journey- 
 ing towards it, when Dante suddenly felt such a weight of splen- 
 dour on his eyes, as forced him to screen them with- both his 
 
 * Aglauros, daughter of Cecrops, king of Athens, was turned to stone by 
 Mercury, for disturbing with her envy his passion for her sister Herse. 
 
 The passage about Cain is one of the sublimest in Dante. Truly wonderful 
 and characteristic is the way in which he has made physical noise and violence 
 express the anguish of the wanderer's mind. We are not to suppose, I conceive, 
 that we see Cain. We know he has passed us, by his thunderous and headlong 
 words. Dante may well make him invisible, for his words are things veritable 
 thunderbolts. 
 
 Cain comes in rapid successions of thunder-claps. The voice of Aglauros 
 is thunder-claps crashing into one another broken thunder. This is exceed- 
 ingly fine also, and wonderful as a variation upon that awful music ; but Cain 
 is the astonishment and the overwhelmingness. If it were not, however, for the 
 second thunder, we should not have had the two silences ; for I doubt whether 
 they are not better even than one. At all events, the final silence is tremen- 
 dous.
 
 110 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 hands. It was an angel coming to shew them the ascent to the 
 next circle, a way that was less steep than the last. While 
 mounting, they heard the angel's voice singing behind them, 
 " Blessed are the merciful ; for they shall obtain mercy !" and on 
 his leaving them to proceed by themselves, the second letter on 
 Dante's forehead was found to have been effaced by the splen- 
 dour. 
 
 The poet looked round in wonder on the new circle, where the 
 sin of Anger was expiated, and beheld, as in a dream, three suc- 
 cessive spectacles illustrative of the virtue of patience. The 
 first was that of a crowded temple, on the threshold of which 
 a female said to her son, in the sweet manner of a mother, " Son, 
 why hast thou thus dealt with us ? Behold, thy father and I 
 have sought thee sorrowing :"* and here she became silent, and 
 the vision ended. The next was the lord of Athens, Pisistratus, 
 calmly reproving his wife for wishing him to put to death her 
 daughter's lover, who, in a transport, had embraced her in public. 
 " If we are to be thus severe," said Pisistratus, " with those that 
 xove us, what is to be done with such as hate ?" The last spec- 
 tacle was that of a furious multitude shouting and stoning to 
 death a youth, who, as he fell to the ground, still kept his face 
 towards heaven, making his eyes the gates through which his 
 soul reached it, and imploring forgiveness for his murderers. f 
 
 The visions passed away, leaving the poet staggering as if but 
 half awake. They were succeeded by a thick and noisome fog, 
 through which he followed his leader with the caution of a blind 
 man, Virgil repeatedly telling him not to quit him a moment. 
 Here they heard voices praying in unison for pardon to the 
 " Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world." They 
 were the spirits of the angry. Dante conversed with one of them 
 on free-will and necessity ; and after quitting him. and issuing by 
 degrees from the cloud, beheld illustrative visions of anger ; such 
 as the impious mother, who was changed into the bird that most 
 delights in singing ; Haman, retaining his look of spite and rage 
 on the cross ; and Lavinia, mourning for her mother, who slew 
 herself for rage at the death of Turnus.ij: 
 
 * St. Luke ii. 48. t The stouing of Stephen. 
 
 t These illustrative spectacles are not among the best inventions of Dante.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY. Ill 
 
 These visions were broken off by a great light, as sleep is 
 broken : and Dante heard a voice out of it saying, " The ascent 
 is here." He then, as Virgil and he ascended into the fourth 
 circle, felt an air on his face, as if caused by the fanning of 
 wings, accompanied by the utterance of the words, " Blessed are 
 the peace-makers ;" and his forehead was lightened of the third 
 letter.* 
 
 In this fourth circle was expiated Lukewarmness, or defect of 
 zeal for good. The sufferers came speeding and weeping round 
 the mountain, making amends for the old indifference by the haste 
 and fire of the new love that was in them. " Blessed Mary made 
 haste," cried one, " to salute Elizabeth." " And Caesar," cried 
 another, " to smite Pompey at Lerida."f " And the disobedient 
 among the Israelites," cried others, " died before they reached the 
 promised land." " And the tired among the Trojans preferred 
 ease in Sicily to glory in Latium." It was now midnight, and 
 Dante slept and had a dream. 
 
 His dream was of a woman who came to him, having a tongue 
 that tried ineffectually to speak, squinting eyes, feet whose distor- 
 tion drew her towards the earth, stumps of hands, and a pallid 
 face. Dante looked earnestly at her, and his look acted upon her 
 like sunshine upon cold. Her tongue was loosened ; her feet 
 made straight ; she stood upright ; her paleness became a lovely 
 rose-colour ; and she warbled so beautifully, that the poet could 
 not have refused to listen had he wished it. 
 
 " I am the sweet Syren," she said, " who made the mariners 
 
 Their introduction is forced, and the instances not always pointed. A murder- 
 ess, too, of her son, changed into such a bird as the nightingale, was not a 
 happy association of ideas in Homer, where Dante found it ; and I am sur- 
 prised he made use of it, intimate as he must have been with the less inconsis- 
 tent story of her namesake, Philomela, in the Metamorphoses. 
 
 * So, at least, I conceive, by what appears afterwards ; and I may here add, 
 once for all, that I have supplied the similar requisite intimations at each suc- 
 cessive step in Purgatory, the poet seemingly having forgotten to do so. It is 
 necessary to what he implied in the outset. The whole poem, it is to be re- 
 membered, is thought to have wanted his final revision. 
 
 1 What an instance to put among those of haste to do good ! But the fame 
 and accomplishments of Ctesar, and his being at the head of our Ghibelline's 
 beloved emperors, fairly overwhelmed Dante's boasted impartiality.
 
 112 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 turn pale for pleasure in the sea. I drew Ulysses out of his 
 course with my song ; and he that harbours with me once, rarely 
 departs ever, so well I pay him for what he abandons." 
 
 Her lips were not yet closed, when a lady of holy and earnest 
 countenance came up to shame her. " O Virgil !" she cried an- 
 grily, "who is this?" Virgil approached, with his eyes fixed 
 on the lady ; and the lady tore away the garments of the woman, 
 and shewed her to be a creature so loathly, that the sleeper awoke 
 with the horror.* 
 
 Virgil said, " I have called thee three times to no purpose. 
 Let us move, and find the place at which we are to go higher." 
 
 It was broad day, with a sun that came warm on the shoulders ; 
 and Dante was proceeding with his companion, when the softest 
 voice they ever heard directed them where to ascend, and they 
 found an angel with them, who pointed his swan-like wings up- 
 ward, and then flapped them against the pilgrims, taking away 
 the fourth letter from the forehead of Dante. " Blessed are they 
 that mourn," said the angel, " for they shall be comforted." 
 
 The pilgrims ascended into the fifth circle, and beheld the ex- 
 piators of Avarice grovelling on the ground, and exclaiming, as 
 loud as they could for the tears that choked them, " My soul hath 
 cleaved to the dust." Dante spoke to one, who turned out to be 
 Pope Adrian the Fifth. The poet fell on his knees ; but Adrian 
 bade him arise and err not. " I am no longer." said he, " spouse 
 of the Church, here ; but fellow-servant with thee and with all 
 others. Go thy ways, and delay not the time of my deliver- 
 ance." 
 
 The pilgrims moving onward, Dante heard a spirit exclaim, in 
 the struggling tones of a woman in child-bed, " O blessed Virgin ! 
 That was a poor roof thou hadst when thou wast delivered of thy 
 sacred burden. O good Fabricius ! Virtue with poverty was 
 thy choice, and not vice with riches." And then it told the story 
 of Nicholas, who, hearing that a father was about to sacrifice the 
 honour of his three daughters for want of money, threw bags of it 
 in at his window, containing portions for them all. 
 
 * A masterly allegory of Worldly Pleasure. But the close of it in the origi- 
 nal has an intensity of the revolting, which outrages the last recesses of feeling, 
 and disgusts us with the denouncer.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY. 113 
 
 Dante earnestly addressed this spirit to know who he was ; and 
 the spirit said it would tell him, not for the sake of help, for which 
 it looked elsewhere, but because of the shining grace that was in 
 his questioner, though yet alive. 
 
 "I was root," said the spirit, "of that evil plant which over- 
 shadows all Christendom to such 'little profit. Hugh Capet was 
 I, ancestor of the Philips and Louises of France, offspring of a 
 butcher of Paris, when the old race of kings was worn out.* We 
 began by seizing the government in Paris ; then plundered in 
 Provence ; then, to make amends, laid hold of Poitou, Normandy, 
 and Gascony ; then, still to make amends, put Conradin to death 
 and seized Naples ; then, always to make amends, gave Saint 
 Aquinas his dismissal to Heaven by poison. I see the time at 
 hand when a descendant of mine will be called into Italy, and the 
 spear that Judas jousted ioitk\ shall transfix the bowels of Flor- 
 ence. Another of my posterity sells his daughter for a sum of 
 money to a Marquis of Ferrara. Another seizes the pope in 
 Alagna, and mocks Christ over again in the person of his Vicar. 
 A fourth rends the veil of the temple, solely to seize its money. 
 
 * The fierce Hugh Capet, soliloquising about- the Virgin in the tones of a 
 lady in child-bed, is rather too ludicrous an association of ideas. It was for 
 calling this prince the son of a butcher, that Francis the First prohibited the 
 admission of Dante's poem into his dominions. Mr. Gary thinks the king might 
 have been mistaken in his interpretation of the passage, and that " butcher" 
 may be simply a metaphorical term for the bloodthirstiness of Capet's father. 
 But when we find the man called, not the butcher, or that butcher, or butcher 
 in reference to his species, but in plain local parlance " a butcher of Paris" (MM 
 beccaio di Parigi), and when this designation is followed up by the allusion to 
 the extinction of the previous dynasty, the ordinary construction of the words 
 appears indisputable. Dante seems to have had no ground for what his aristo- 
 cratical pride doubtless considered a hard blow, and what King Francis, in- 
 deed, condescended to feel as such. He met with the notion somewhere, and 
 chose to believe it, in order to vex the French and their princes. The spirit 
 of the taunt contradicts his own theories elsewhere ; for he has repeatedly said, 
 that the only true nobility is in the mind. But his writings (poetical truth ex- 
 cepted) are a heap of contradictions. 
 
 t Mr. Gary thought he had seen an old romance in which there is a combat 
 of this kind between Jesus and his betrayer. I have an impression to the 
 same effect 
 
 9
 
 114 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 O Lord, how shall I rejoice to see the vengeance which even 
 now thou huggest in delight to thy bosom !* 
 
 " Of loving and liberal things," continued Capet, " we speak 
 while it is light ; such as thou heardest me record, when I ad- 
 dressed myself to the blessed Virgin. But when night comes, we 
 take another tone. Then we denounce Pygmalion,! the traitor, 
 the robber, and the parricide, each the result of his gluttonous 
 love of gold ; and Midas, who obtained his wish, to the laughter 
 of all time ; and the thief Achan, who still seems frightened at 
 the wrath of Joshua ; and Sapphira and her husband, whom we 
 accuse over again before the Apostles ; and Heliodorus, whom 
 we bless the hoofs of the angel's horse for trampling ;:{: and Cras- 
 sus, on whom we call with shouts of derision to tell us the flavour 
 of his molten gold. Thus we record our thoughts in the night- 
 time, now high, now low, now at greater or less length, as each 
 man is prompted by his impulses. And it was thus thou didst 
 hear me recording also by day-time, though I had no respondent 
 near me." 
 
 The pilgririis quitte.d Hugh Capet, and were eagerly pursuing 
 their journey, when, to the terror of Dante, they felt the whole 
 mountain of Purgatory tremble, as though it were about to fall 
 in. The island of Delos shook not so awfully when Latona, 
 hiding there, brought forth the twin eyes of Heaven. A shout 
 then arose on every side, so enormous, that Virgil stood nigher to 
 
 * " O Signer mio, quando sarb io lieto 
 A veder la vendetta che nascosa 
 Fa dolce 1' ira tua nel tuo segreto !" 
 
 The spirit of the blasphemous witticism attributed to another Italian, viz. that 
 the reason why God prohibited revenge to mankind was its being " too delicate 
 a morsel for any but himself," is here gravely anticipated as a positive compli- 
 ment to God by the fierce poet of the thirteenth century, who has been held 
 up as a great Christian divine ! God hugs revenge to his bosom with delight ! 
 The Supreme Being confounded with a poor grinning Florentine ! 
 
 t A ludicrous anti-climax this to modern ears ! The allusion is to the Pyg- 
 malion who was Dido's brother, and who murdered her husband, the priest 
 Sichaeus, for his riches. The term " parricide" is here applied in its secondary 
 sense of the murderer of any one to whom we owe reverence. 
 
 t Heliodorus was a plunderer of the Temple s thus supernaturally punished. 
 The subject has been nobly treated by Raphael.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY. 115 
 
 his companion, and bade him be of good heart. " Glory be to 
 God in the highest," cried the shout ; but Dante could gather the 
 words only from those who were near him. 
 
 It was Purgatory rejoicing for the deliverance of a soul out of 
 its bounds.* 
 
 The soul overtook the pilgrims as they were journeying in 
 amazement onwards ; and it turned out to be that of Statius, 
 who had been converted to Christianity in the reign of Domitian.j- 
 Mutual astonishment led to inquiries that explained who the other 
 Latin poet was ; and Statius fell at his master's feet. 
 
 Statius had expiated his sins in the circle of Avarice, not for 
 that vice, but for the opposite one of Prodigality. 
 
 An angel now, as before, took the fifth letter from Dante's 
 forehead ; and the three poets having ascended into the sixth 
 round of the mountain, were journeying on lovingly together, 
 Dante listening with reverence to the talk of the two ancients, 
 when they came up to a sweet-smelling fruit-tree, upon which 
 a clear stream came tumbling from a rock beside it, and diffusing 
 itself through the branches. The Latin poets went up to. the 
 tree, and were met by a voice which said, "Be chary of the fruit. 
 Mary thought not of herself at Galilee, but of the visitors, when 
 she said, ' They have no wine.' The women of oldest Rome 
 drank water. The beautiful age of gold feasted on acorns. Its 
 thirst made nectar out of the rivulet. The Baptist fed on 
 locusts and wild honey, and became great as you see him in the 
 gospel." 
 
 The poets went on their way ; and Dante was still listening to 
 the others, when they heard behind them a mingled sound of 
 chanting and weeping, which produced an effect at once sad and 
 delightful. It was the psalm, " O Lord, open thou our lips !" 
 and the chanters were expiators of the sin of Intemperance in 
 Meats and Drinks. They were condemned to circuit the moun- 
 tain, famished, and to long for the fruit and waters of the tree in 
 
 * A grand and beautiful fiction. 
 
 t Readers need hardly be told that there is no foundation for this fancy, ex- 
 cept in the invention of the churchmen. Dante, in another passage, not neces- 
 sary to give, confounds the poet Statius who was from Naples, with a rhetori- 
 cian of the same name from Thoulouse.
 
 116 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 vain. They soon came up with the poets a pallid multitude, 
 with hollow eyes, and bones staring through the skin. The 
 sockets of their eyes looked like rings from which the gems had 
 dropped.* One of them knew and accosted Dante, who could 
 not recognise him till he heard him speak. It was Forese Do- 
 nati, one of the poet's most intimate connexions. Dante, who had 
 wept over his face when dead, could as little forbear weeping to 
 see him thus hungering and thirsting, though he had expected to 
 find him in the outskirts of the place, among the delayers of re- 
 pentance. He asked his friend how he had so quickly got higher. 
 Forese said it was owing to the prayers and tears of his good 
 wife Nella ; and then he burst into a strain of indignation against 
 the contrast exhibited to her virtue by the general depravity of 
 the Florentine women, whom he described as less modest than 
 the half-naked savages in the mountains of Sardinia. 
 
 " What is to be said of such creatures ?" continued he. " O 
 my dear cousin ! I see a day at hand, when these impudent 
 women shall be forbidden from the pulpit to go exposing their 
 naked bosoms. What savages or what infidels ever needed that ? 
 Oh ! if they could see what Heaven has in store for them, their 
 mouths would be this instant opened wide for howling."f 
 
 * " Paren 1' occhiaje anella senza gemme." 
 
 This beautiful and affecting image is followed in the original by one of the 
 most fantastical conceits of the time. The poet Bays, that the physiognomist, 
 who " reads the word OMO (homo, man), written in the face of the human be- 
 ing, might easily have seen the letter m in theirs." 
 
 " Chi nel viso de gli uomini legge o m o, 
 Bene avria quivi conosciuto 1' cmmr." 
 
 The meaning is, that the perpendicular lines of the nose and temples form the 
 letter M, and the eyes the two o's. The enthusiast for Roman domination 
 must have been delighted to find that Nature wrote in Latin ! 
 
 t " Se le svergognate fosser certe 
 
 Di quel che 1' ciel veloce loro ammanna, 
 Gia per urlare avrian le bocche aperte." 
 
 This will remind the reader of the style of that gentle Christian, John Knox, 
 who, instead of offering his own " cheek to the smiters," delighted to smite the 
 cheeks of women. Fury was his mode of preaching meekness, and threats of 
 everlasting howling his reproof of a tune on Sundays. But, it will be said, he
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY. 117 
 
 Forese then asked Dante to explain to himself and his aston. 
 ished fellow-sufferers how it was that he stood there, a living body 
 of flesh and blood, casting a shadow with his substance. 
 
 " If thou callest to mind," said Dante, " what sort of life thou 
 and I led together, the recollection may still grieve thee sorely. 
 He that walks here before us took me out of that life ; and through 
 his guidance it is that I have visited in the body the world of the 
 dead, and am now traversing the mountain which leads us to the 
 right path."* 
 
 After some further explanation, Forese pointed out to his friend, 
 among the expiators of intemperance, Buonaggiunta of Lucca, 
 the poet ; and Pope Martin the Fourth, with a face made sharper 
 than the rest for the eels which he used to smother in wine ; and 
 
 looked to consequences. Yes ; and produced the worst himself, both spiritual 
 and temporal. Let the whisky-shops answer him. However, he helped to 
 save Scotland from Purgatory : so we must take good and bad together, and 
 hope the best in the end. 
 
 Forese, like many of Dante's preachers, seems to have been one of those 
 self-ignorant or self-exasperated denouncers, who 
 
 " Compound for sins they are inclined to, 
 By damning those they have no mind to." 
 
 He was a glutton, who could not bear to see ladies too little clothed. The de- 
 facing of " God's image" in his own person he considered nothing. 
 
 * The passage respecting his past life is unequivocal testimony to the fact, 
 confidently disputed by some, of Dante's having availed himself of the license 
 of the time ; though, in justice to such candour, we are bound not to think 
 worse of it than can be helped. The words in the original are : 
 
 " Se ti riduci a mente 
 
 Qual fosti meco, e quale io teco fui, 
 
 Ancor fia grave il memorar presente." 
 
 Literally : " If thou recallest to mind what (sort of person) thou wast with me, 
 and what I was with thee, the recollection may oppress thee still." 
 
 His having been taken out of that kind of life by Virgil (construed in the 
 literal sense, in which, among other senses, he has directed us to construe him), 
 may imply, either that the delight of reading Virgil first made him think of 
 living in a manner more becoming a man of intellect, or (possibly) that the 
 Latin poet's description of ^Eneas's descent into hell turned his thoughts to 
 religious penitence. Be this as it may, his life, though surely it could at no 
 time have been of any very licentious kind, never, if we are to believe Boc- 
 caccio, became spotless.
 
 118 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 Ubaldino of Pila, grinding his teeth on air ; and Archbishop Bon- 
 iface of Ravenna, who fed jovially on his flock ; and Rigogliosi 
 of Forli, who had had time enough to drink in the other world, 
 and yet never was satisfied. Buonaggiunta and Dante eyed one 
 another with curiosity ; and the farmer murmured something 
 about a lady of the name of Gentucca. 
 
 " Thou seemest to wish to speak with me," said Dante. 
 
 " Thou art no admirer, I believe, of my native place," said 
 Buonaggiunta ; " and yet, if thou art he whom I take thee to be, 
 there is a damsel there shall make it please thee. Art thou not 
 author of the poem beginning 
 
 " Ladies, that understand the lore of love ?"* 
 
 " I am one," replied Dante, " who writes as Love would have 
 him, heeding no manner but his dictator's, and uttering simply 
 what he suggests. "{ 
 
 " Ay, that is the sweet new style," returned Buonaggiunta ; 
 " and I now see what it was that hindered the notary, and Guit- 
 tone, and myself, from hitting the right natural point." And 
 here he ceased speaking, looking like one contented to have as- 
 certained a truth4 
 
 
 * The mention of Gentucca might be thought a compliment to the lady, if 
 Dante had not made Beatrice afterwards treat his regard for any one else but 
 herself with so much contempt. (See page 126 of the present volume.) 
 Under that circumstance, it is hardly acting like a gentleman to speak of her 
 at all ; unless, indeed, he thought her a person who would be pleased with the 
 notoriety arising even from the record of a fugitive regard ; and in that case 
 the good taste of the record would still remain doubtful. The probability 
 seems to be, that Dante was resolved, at all events, to take this opportunity of 
 bearding some rumour. 
 
 t A celebrated and charming passage : 
 
 " lo mi son un, che quando 
 Amore spira, noto ; e a quel modo 
 Che detta dentro, vo significando." 
 
 I am one that notes 
 
 When Love inspires ; and what he speaks I tell 
 In his own way, embodying but his thoughts. 
 
 t Exquisite truth of painting ! and a very elegant compliment to the hand- 
 some nature of Buonaggiunta. Jacopo da Lentino, called the Notary, and
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY. 119 
 
 The whole multitude then, except Forese, skimmed away like 
 cranes, swift alike through eagerness and through leanness. 
 Forese lingered a moment to have a parting word with his friend, 
 and to prophesy the violent end of the chief of his family, Corso, 
 run away with and dragged at the heels of his horse faster and 
 faster, till the frenzied animal smites him dead. Having given 
 the poet this information, the prophet speeded after the others. 
 
 The companions now came to a second fruit-tree, to which a 
 multitude were in vain lifting up their hands, just as children lift 
 them to a man who tantalises them with shewing something which 
 he withholds ; but a voice out of a thicket by the road-side 
 warned the travellers not to stop, telling them that the tree was 
 an offset from that of which Eve tasted. ""Call to mind," said 
 the voice, " those creatures of the clouds, the Centaurs, whose 
 feasting cost them their lives. Remember the Hebrews, how they 
 dropped away from the ranks of Gideon to quench their effemi- 
 nate thirst."* 
 
 The poets proceeded, wrapt in thought, till they heard another 
 voice of a nature that made Dante start and shake as if he had 
 been some paltry hackney. 
 
 " Of what value is thought," said the voice, " if it lose its 
 way ? The path lies hither." 
 
 Dante turned toward the voice, and beheld a shape glowing red 
 as in a furnace, with a visage too dazzling to be looked upon. It 
 met him, nevertheless, as he drew nigh, with an air from the fan- 
 ning of its wings fresh as the first breathing of the wind on a 
 May morning, and fragrant as all its flowers ; and Dante lost the 
 sixth letter on his forehead, and ascended with the two other po- 
 ets into the seventh and last circle of the mountain. 
 
 This circle was all in flames, except a narrow path on the edge 
 of its precipice, along which the pilgrims walked. A great wind 
 
 Fra Guittone of Arezzo, were celebrated verse-writers of the day. The lat- 
 ter, in a sonnet given by Mr. Cary in the notes to his translation, says he shall 
 be delighted to hear the trumpet, at the last day, dividing mankind into the 
 happy and the tormented (sufferers under crudel martire), because an inscrip- 
 tion will then be seen on his forehead, shewing that he had been a slave to 
 love ! An odd way for a poet to show his feelings, and a friar his religion ! 
 * Judges vii. 6.
 
 120 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 from outside of the precipice kept the flames from raging beyond 
 the path ; and in the midst of the fire went spirits expiating the 
 sin of Incontinence. They sang the hymn beginning " God of 
 consummate mercy !"* Dante was compelled to divide his atten- 
 tion between his own footsteps and theirs, in order to move with- 
 out destruction. At the close of the hymn they cried aloud, " I 
 know not a man !"f and then recommenced it ; after which they 
 again cried aloud, saying, " Diana ran to the wood, and drove 
 Calisto out of it, because she knew the poison of Venus !" And 
 then again they sang the hymn, and then extolled the memories 
 of chaste women and husbands ; and so they went on without 
 ceasing, as long as their time of trial lasted. 
 
 Occasionally the multitude that went in one direction met an- 
 other which mingled with and passed through it, individuals of 
 both greeting tenderly by the way, as emmets appear to do, when 
 in passing they touch the antennae of one another. These two 
 multitudes parted with loud and sorrowful cries, proclaiming the 
 offences of which they had been guilty ; and then each renewed 
 their spiritual songs and prayers. 
 
 The souls here, as in former circles, knew Dante to be a living 
 creature by the shadow which he cast ; and after the wonted ex- 
 planations, he learned who some of them were. One was his 
 predecessor in poetry, Guido Guinicelli, from whom he could not 
 take his eyes for love and reverence, till the sufferer, who told 
 him there was a greater than himself in the crowd, vanished 
 away through the fire as a fish does in water. The greater one 
 was Arnauld Daniel, the Provencal poet, who, after begging the 
 prayers of the traveller, disappeared in like manner. 
 
 The sun by this time was setting on the fires of Purgatory, 
 
 * Summa Deus dementia. The ancient beginning of a hymn in the 
 Roman Catholic Church ; now altered, say the commentators, to " Summse 
 parens clementise." 
 
 t Virum non cognosco. " Then said Mary unto the angel, How shall this 
 be, seeing I know not a man?" Luke i. 34. 
 
 The placing of Mary's interview with the angel, and Ovid's story of Ca- 
 listo, upon apparently the same identical footing of authority, by spirits in all 
 the sincerity of agonised penitence, is very remarkable. A dissertation, by 
 some competent antiquary, on the curious question suggested by these anoma- 
 lies, would be a welcome novelty in the world of lettem.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY. 121 
 
 when an angel came crossing the road through them, and then, 
 standing on the edge of the precipice, with joy in his looks, and 
 singing, " Blessed are the pure in heart !" invited the three 
 poets to plunge into the flames themselves, and so cross the road 
 to the ascent by which the summit of the mountain was gained. 
 Dante, clasping his hands, and raising them aloft, recoiled in hor- 
 ror. The thought of all that he had just witnessed made him feel 
 as if his own hour of death was come. His companion encour- 
 aged him to obey the angel ; but he could not stir. Virgil said, 
 " Now mark me, son ; this is the only remaining obstacle between 
 thee and Beatrice ;" and then himself and Statius entering the 
 fire, Dante followed them. 
 
 " I could have cast myself," said he, " into molten glass to 
 cool myself, so raging was the furnace." 
 
 Virgil talked of Beatrice to animate him. He said, " Me- 
 thinks I see her eyes beholding us." There was, indeed, a great 
 light upon the quarter to which they were crossing ; and out of 
 the light issued a voice, which drew them onwards, singing, 
 " Come, blessed of my Father ! Behold, the sun is going down, 
 and the night cometh, and the ascent is to be gained." 
 
 The travellers gained the ascent, issuing out of the fire ; and 
 the voice and the light ceased, and night was come. Unable to 
 ascend farther in the darkness, they made themselves a bed, each 
 of a stair in the rock ; and Dante, in his happy humility, felt as 
 if he had been a goat lying down for the night near two shep- 
 herds. 
 
 Towards dawn, at the hour of the rising of the star of love, he 
 had a dream, in which he saw a young and beautiful lady coming 
 over a lea, and bending every now and then to gather flowers ; 
 and as she bound the flowers into a garland, she sang, " I am 
 Leah, gathering flowers to adorn myself, that my looks may seem 
 pleasant to me in the mirror. But my sister Rachel abides be- 
 fore the mirror, flowerless ; contented with her beautiful eyes. 
 To behold is my sister's pleasure, and to work is mine."* 
 
 * An allegory of the Active and Contemplative Life ; not, I think, a hap- 
 py one, though beautifully painted. It presents, apart from its terminating 
 comment, no necessary intellectual suggestion ; is rendered, by the comment 
 itself, hardly consistent with Leah's express love of ornament ; and, if it were
 
 122 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 When Dante awoke, the beams of the dawn were visible ; and 
 they now produced a happiness like that of the traveller, who 
 every time he awakes knows himself to be nearer home. Virgil 
 and Statius were already up ; and all three, resuming their way 
 to the mountain's top, stood upon it at last, and gazed round about 
 them on the skirts of the terrestrial Paradise. The sun was 
 sparkling bright over a green land, full of trees and flowers. 
 Virgil then announced to Dante, that here his guidance terminated, 
 and that the creature of flesh and blood was at length to be mas- 
 ter of his own movements, to rest or to wander as he pleased, the 
 tried and purified lord over himself. 
 
 The Florentine, eager to taste his new liberty, left his compan- 
 ions awhile, and strolled away through the celestial forest, whose 
 thick and lively verdure gave coolness to the senses in the midst 
 of the brightest sun. A fragrance came from every part of the 
 soil ; a sweet unintermitting air streamed against the walker's 
 face ; and as the full-hearted birds, warbling on all sides, wel- 
 comed the morning's radiance into the trees, the trees themselves 
 joined in the concert with a swelling breath, like that which rises 
 among the pines of Chiassi, when Eolus lets loose the south- wind, 
 and the gathering melody comes rolling through the forest from 
 bough to bough.* 
 
 Dante had proceeded far enough to lose sight of the point at 
 which he entered, when he found himself on the bank of a rivu- 
 
 not for the last sentence, might be taken for a picture of two different forms of 
 Vanity. 
 
 * " Tal, qual di ramo in ramo si raccoglie 
 
 Per la pineta in sul lito di Chiassi, 
 
 Quand' Eolo scirocco fuor discioglie." 
 
 " Even as from branch to branch 
 Along the piny forests on the shore 
 Of Chiassi, rolls the gathering melody, 
 When Eolus hath from his cavern loosed 
 The dripping south." Gary. 
 
 " This is the wood," says Mr. Gary, " where the scene of Boccaccio's sub- 
 limest story (taken entirely from Elinaud, as I learn in the notes to the De- 
 cameron, ediz. Giunti, 1573, p. 62) is laid. See Dec., G. 5, N. 8, and Dry- 
 den's Theodore and Honoria. Our poet perhaps wandered in it during his 
 abode with Guido Novello da Polenta." Translation of Dante, ut sup. p. 121.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY. 123 
 
 let, compared with whose crystal purity the limpidest waters on 
 earth were clouded. And yet it flowed under a perpetual depth 
 of shade, which no beam either of sun or moon penetrated. 
 Nevertheless the darkness was coloured with endless diversities 
 of May-blossoms ; and the poet was standing in admiration, 
 looking up at it along its course, when he beheld something that 
 took away every other thought ; to wit, a lady, all alone, on the 
 other side of the water, singing and culling flowers. 
 
 " Ah, lady !" said the poet, " who, to judge by the cordial 
 beauty in thy looks, hast a heart overflowing with love, be pleased 
 to draw thee nearer to the stream, that I may understand the 
 words thou singest. Thou remindest me of Proserpine, of the 
 place she was straying in, and of what sort of creature she 
 looked, when her mother lost her, and she herself lost the spring- 
 time on earth." 
 
 As a lady turns in the dance when it goes smoothest, moving 
 round with lovely self-possession, and scarcely seeming to put 
 one foot before the other, so turned the lady towards the water 
 over the yellow and vermilion flowers, dropping her eyes gently 
 as she came, and singing so that Dante could hear her. Then 
 when she arrived at the water, she stopped, and raised her eyes 
 towards him, and smiled, showing him the flowers in her hands, 
 and shifting them with her fingers into a display of all their 
 beauties. Never were such eyes beheld, not even when Venus 
 herself was in love. The stream was a little stream ; yet Dante 
 felt it as great an intervention between them, as if it had been 
 Leander's Hellespont. 
 
 The lady explained to him the nature of the place, and how 
 the rivulet was the Lethe of Paradise ; Lethe, where he stood, 
 but called Eunoe higher up ; the drink of the one doing away 
 all remembrance of evil deeds, and that of the other restoring all 
 remembrance of good.* It was the region, she said, in which 
 Adam and Eve had lived ; and the poets had beheld it perhaps in 
 their dreams on Mount Parnassus, and hence imagined their 
 golden age ; and at these words she looked at Virgil and Sta- 
 tius, who by this time had come up, and who stood smiling at her 
 kindly words. 
 
 * Lethe, Forgetfulness ; Eunoe, Well-mindedneas.
 
 124 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 Resuming her song, the lady turned and passed up along the 
 rivulet the contrary way of the stream, Dante proceeding at the 
 same rate of time on his side of it ; till on a sudden she cried, 
 " Behold, and listen !" and a light of exceeding lustre came 
 streaming through the woods, followed by a dulcet melody. The 
 poets resumed their way in a rapture of expectation, and saw the 
 air before them glowing under the green boughs like fire. A divine 
 spectacle ensued of holy mystery, with evangelical and apoca- 
 lyptic images, which gradually gave way and disclosed a car 
 brighter than the chariot of the sun. accompanied by celestial 
 nymphs, and showered upon by angels with a cloud of flowers, 
 in the midst of which stood a maiden in a white veil, crowned 
 with olive. 
 
 The love that had never left Dante's heart from childhood told 
 him who it was ; and trembling in every vein, he turned round 
 to Virgil for encouragement. Virgil was gone. At that moment, 
 Paradise and Beatrice herself could not requite the pilgrim for 
 the loss of his friend ; and the tears ran down his cheeks. 
 
 " Dante," said the veiled maiden across the stream, " weep not 
 that Virgil leaves thee. Weep thou not yet. The stroke of a 
 sharper sword is coming, at which it will behove thee to weep." 
 Then assuming a sterner attitude, and speaking in the tone of one 
 who reserves the bitterest speech for the last, she added, " Observe 
 me well. I am, as thou suspectest, Beatrice indeed ; Beatrice, 
 who has to congratulate thee on deigning to seek the mountain 
 at last. And hadst thou so long indeed to learn, that here only 
 can man be happy ?" 
 
 Dante, casting down his eyes at these words, beheld his face 
 in the water, and hastily turned aside, he saw it so full of shame. 
 
 Beatrice had the dignified manner of an offended parent ; such 
 a flavour of bitterness was mingled with her pity. 
 
 She held her peace ; and the angels abruptly began singing, 
 " In thee, O Lord, have I put my trust ;" but went no farther in 
 the psalm than the words, " Thou hast set my feet in a large 
 room." The tears of Dante had hitherto been suppressed ; but 
 when the singing began, they again rolled down his cheeks. 
 
 Beatrice, in a milder tone, said to the angels, " This man, when 
 he proposed to himself in his youth to lead a new life, was of a
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY. 125 
 
 truth so gifted, that every good habit ought to have thrived with 
 him ; but the richer the soil, the greater peril of weeds. For a 
 while, the innocent light of my countenance drew him the right 
 way ; but when I quitted mortal life, he took away his thoughts 
 from remembrance of me, and gave himself to others. When I 
 had risen from flesh to spirit, and increased in worth and beauty, 
 then did I sink in his estimation, and he turned into other paths, 
 and pursued false images of good that never keep their promise. 
 In vain I obtained from Heaven the power of interfering in his 
 behalf, and endeavoured to affect him with it night and day. So 
 little was he concerned, and into such depths he fell, that nothing 
 remained but to show him the state of the condemned ; and there- 
 fore I went to their outer regions, and commended him with tears 
 to the guide that brought him hither. The decrees of Heaven 
 would be nought, if Lethe could be passed, and the fruit beyond 
 it tasted, without any payment of remorse.* 
 
 " O thou," she continued, addressing herself to Dante, " who 
 standest on the other side of the holy stream, say, have I not 
 spoken truth ?" 
 
 Dante was so confused and penitent, that the words failed as 
 they passed his lips. 
 
 " What could induce thee," resumed his monitress, " when I 
 had given thee aims indeed, to abandon them for objects that could 
 end in nothing ?" 
 
 Dante said, " Thy face was taken from me, and the presence 
 of false pleasure led me astray." 
 
 " Never didst thou behold," cried the maiden, " loveliness like 
 mine ; and if bliss failed thee because of my death, how couldst 
 thou be allured by mortal inferiority ? That first blow should 
 have taught thee to disdain all perishable things, and aspire after 
 the soul that had gone before thee. How could thy spirit endure 
 
 * " Senza alcuno scotto 
 Di pentimento." 
 
 Literally, scot-free. " Scotto," scot ; " payment for dinner or supper in a 
 tavern" (says Rubbi, the Petrarchal rather than Dantesque editor of the Par- 
 naso Italiano, and a very summary gentleman) ; " here used figuratively, 
 though it is not a word fit to be employed on serious and grand occasions" (in 
 cose gravi ed illustri). See his " Dante" in that collection, vol. ii. p. 297.
 
 126 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 to stoop to further chances, or to a childish girl, or any other 
 fleeting vanity ? The bird that is newly out of the nest may be 
 twice or thrice tempted by the snare ; but in vain, surely, is the 
 net spread in sight of one that is older."* 
 
 Dante stood as silent and abashed as a sorry child. 
 
 " If but to hear me," said Beatrice, " thus afflicts thee, lift up 
 thy beard, and see what sight can do." 
 
 Dante, though feeling the sting intended by the word " beard," 
 did as he was desired. The angels had ceased to scatter their 
 clouds of flowers about the maiden ; and he beheld her, though 
 still beneath her veil, as far surpassing her former self in love- 
 liness, as that self had surpassed others. The sight pierced him 
 with such pangs, that the more he had loved any thing else, the 
 more he now loathed it ; and he fell senseless to the ground. 
 
 When he recovered his senses, he found himself in the hands 
 of the lady he had first seen in the place, who bidding him keep 
 firm hold of her, drew him into the river Lethe, and so through 
 and across it to the other side, speeding as she went like a weav- 
 er's shuttle, and immersing him when she arrived, the angels all 
 
 * The allusion to the childish girl (pargoletta) or any other fleeting vanity, 
 "O altra vanita con si breve uso," 
 
 is not handsome. It was not the fault of the childish girls that he liked them ; 
 and he should not have taunted them, whatever else they might have been. 
 What answer could they make to the great poet ? 
 
 Nor does Beatrice make a good figure throughout this scene, whether as a 
 woman or an allegory. If she is Theology, or Heavenly Grace, &-c. the 
 sternness of the allegory should not have been put into female shape ; and 
 when she is to be taken in her literal sense (as the poet also tells us she is), 
 her treatment of the poor submissive lover, with leave of Signor Rubbi, is no 
 belter than snubbing ; to say nothing of the vanity with which she pays com- 
 pliments to her own beauty. 
 
 I must, furthermore, beg leave to differ with the poet's thinking it an exalted 
 symptom on his part to hate every thing he had loved before, out of supposed 
 compliment to the transcendental object of his affections and his own awakened 
 merits. All the heights of love and wisdom terminate in charity ; and charity, 
 by very reason of its knowing the- poorness of so many things, hates nothing. 
 Besides, it is any thing but handsome or high-minded to turn round upon ob- 
 jects whom we have helped to lower with our own gratified passions, and pre- 
 tend a right to scorn them.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH PURGATORY. 127 
 
 the while singing, " Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow."* 
 She then delivered him into the hands of the nymphs that had 
 danced about the car, nymphs on earth, but stars and cardinal 
 virtues in heaven ; a song burst from the lips of the angels ; and 
 Faith, Hope, and Charity, calling upon Beatrice to unveil her 
 face, she did so ; and Dante quenched the ten-years thirst of his 
 eyes in her ineffable beauty. f 
 
 After a while he and Statius were made thoroughly regenerate 
 with the waters of Eunoe ; and he felt pure with a new being, 
 and fit to soar into the stars. 
 
 * " Tu asperges me, et mundabor," &c. " Purge me with hyssop, and I 
 shall be clean ; wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow." Psalm li. 7. 
 t Beatrice had been dead ten years.
 
 III. 
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN
 
 Qtrcjttmcnt. 
 
 THE Paradise or Heaven of Daute, in whose time the received system of 
 astronomy was the Ptolemaic, consists of the Seven successive Planets accord- 
 ing to that system, or the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mare, Jupiter, and 
 Saturn ; of the Eighth Sphere beyond these, or that of the Fixed Stare ; of 
 the Primum Mobile, or First Mover of them all round the moveless Earth ; 
 and of the Empyrean, or Region of Pure Light, in which is the Beatific Vision. 
 Each of these ascending spheres is occupied by its proportionate degree of Faith 
 and Virtue ; and Dante visits each under the guidance of Beatrice, receiving 
 many lessons, as he goes, on theological and other subjects (here left out), and 
 being finally admitted, after the sight of Christ and the Virgin, to a glimpse of 
 the Great First Cause.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN. 
 
 IT was evening now on earth, and morning on the top of 
 the hill in Purgatory, when Beatrice having fixed her eyes upon 
 the sun, Dante fixed his eyes upon hers, and suddenly found him- 
 self in Heaven. 
 
 He had been transported by the attraction of love, and Beatrice 
 was by his side. 
 
 The poet beheld from where he stood the blaze of the empy- 
 rean, and heard the music of the spheres ; yet he was only in 
 the first or lowest Heaven, the circle of the orb of the moon. 
 
 This orb, with his new guide, he proceeded to enter. It had 
 seemed, outside, as solid, though as lucid, as Diamond ; yet they 
 entered it, as sunbeams are admitted into water, without dividing 
 the substance. It now appeared, as it enclosed them, like a pearl, 
 through the essence of which they saw but dimly ; and they be- 
 held many faces eagerly looking at them, as if about to speak, 
 but not more distinct from the surrounding whiteness than pearls 
 themselves are from the forehead they adorn.* Dante thought 
 them only reflected faces, and turned round to see to whom they 
 belonged, when his smiling companion set him right ; and he en- 
 tered into discourse with the spirit that seemed the most anxious 
 to accost him. It was Piccarda, the sister of his friend Forese 
 Donati, whom he had met in the sixth region of Purgatory. He 
 did not know her, by reason of her wonderful increase in beauty. 
 
 A curious and happy image. 
 
 " Tornan de' nostri visi le postille 
 Debili si, che perla in bianca fronte 
 Non vien men tosto a le nostre pupillc : 
 
 Tali vid' io piii facce a parlar pronte."
 
 132 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 She and her associates were such as had been Vowed to a Life 
 of Chastity and Religion, but had been Compelled by Others to 
 Break their Vows. This had been done, in Piccarda's instance, 
 by her brother Corso.* On Dante's asking if they did not long 
 for a higher state of Bliss, she and her sister-spirits gently smiled ; 
 and then answered, with faces as happy as first love^ that they 
 willed only what it pleased God to give them, and therefore were 
 truly blest. The poet found by this answer, that every place in 
 Heaven was paradise, though the bliss might be of different de- 
 grees. Piccarda then shewed him the spirit at her side, lustrous 
 with all the glory of the region, Costanza, daughter of the king 
 of Sicily, who hadteen forced out of the cloister to become the 
 wife of the Emperor Henry. Having given him this information, 
 she began singing Ave Maria; and, while singing, disappeared 
 with the rest, as substances disappear in water.:}: 
 
 A loving will transported the two companions, as before, to the 
 next circle of Heaven, where they found themselves in the planet 
 
 * " Rodolfo da Tossignano, Hist. Seraph. Relig. P. i. p. 138, as cited by 
 Lombard!, relates the following legend of Piccarda : ' Her brother Corso, in- 
 flamed with rage against his virgin sister, having joined with him Farinata, an 
 infamous assassin, and twelve other abandoned ruffians, entered the monastery 
 by a ladder, and carried away his sister forcibly to his own house ; and then, 
 tearing off her religious habit, compelled her to go in a secular garment to her 
 nuptials. Before the spouse of Christ came together with her new husband, 
 she knelt down before a crucifix, and recommended her virginity to Christ. 
 Soon after, her whole body was smitten with leprosy, so as to strike grief and 
 horror into the beholders ; and thus, in a few days, through the divine disposal, 
 she passed with a palm of virginity to the Lord. Perhaps (adds the worthy 
 Franciscan), our poet not being able to certify himself entirely of this occur- 
 rence, has chosen to pass it over discreetly, by making Piccarda say, ' God 
 knows how, after that, my life was framed.' " Cory, ut sup. p. 137. 
 
 t A lovely simile indeed. 
 
 " Tanto lieta 
 Ch' arder parea d' amor nel primo foco. 
 
 t Costanza, daughter of Ruggieri, king of Sicily, thus taken out of the 
 monastery, was mother to the Emperor Frederick the Second. " She was 
 fifty years old or more at the time" (says Mr. Gary, quoting from Muratori and 
 others) ; " and because it was not credited that she could have a child at that 
 age, she was delivered in a pavilion ; and it was given out, that any lady who 
 pleased was at liberty to see her. Many came and saw her, and the suspicion 
 ceased." Translation of Dante, ut sup. p. 137.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN. 133 
 
 Mercury, the residence of those who had acted rather out of De- 
 sire of Fame than Love of God. The spirits here, as in the for- 
 mer Heaven, crowded towards them, as fish in a clear pond crowd 
 to the hand that offers them food. Their eyes sparkled with ce- 
 lestial joy ; and the more they thought of their joy, the brighter 
 they grew ; till one of them who addressed the poet became in- 
 distinguishable for excess of splendour. It was the soul of the 
 Emperor Justinian. Justinian told him the whole story of the 
 Roman empire up to his time ; and then gave an account of one 
 of his associates in bliss, Romeo, who had been minister to Ray- 
 mond Beranger, Count of Provence. Four daughters had been 
 born to Raymond Beranger, and every one became a queen ; and 
 all this had been brought about by Romeo, a poor stranger from 
 another country. The courtiers, envying Romeo, incited Ray- 
 mond to demand of him an account of his stewardship, though he 
 had brought his master's treasury twelve fold for every ten it dis- 
 bursed. Romeo quitted the court, poor and old ; " and if the 
 world," said Justinian, " could know the heart such a man must 
 have had, begging his bread as he went, crust by crust praise 
 him as it does, it would praise him a great deal more."* 
 
 " Hosanna, Holy God of Sabaoth, 
 Superillumining with light of light 
 The happy fires of these thy Malahoth !"t 
 
 Thus began singing the soul of the Emperor Justinian ; and 
 then, turning as he sang, vanished with those about him, like 
 sparks of fire. 
 
 Dante now found himself, before he was aware, in the third 
 Heaven, or planet Venus, the abode of the Amorous.:}: He only 
 knew it by the increased loveliness in the face of his com- 
 panion. 
 
 The spirits in this orb, who came and went in the light of it 
 
 * Probably an allusion to Dante's own wanderings, 
 t " Hosanna Sanctus Deus Sabaoth 
 Superillustrans claritate tua 
 Felices ignes horum Malahoth." 
 Malahoth ; Hebrew, kingdoms. 
 
 I The epithet is not too strong, as will be seen by the nature of the inhabi- 
 tants.
 
 134 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 like sparks in fire, or like voices chanting in harmony with voice, 
 were spun round in circles of delight, each with more or less 
 swiftness, according to its share of the beatific vision. Several 
 of them came sweeping out of their dance towards the poet who 
 had sung of Love, among whom was his patron, Charles Martel, 
 king of Hungary, who shewed him the reason why diversities of 
 natures must occur in families ; and Cunizza, sister of the tyrant 
 Ezzelino, who was overcome by this her star when on earth ; and 
 Folco the Troubadour, whose place was next Cunizza in Heaven ; 
 and Rahab the harlot, who favoured the entrance of the Jews 
 into the Holy Land, and whose place was next Folco.* Cunizza 
 said that she did not at all regret a lot which carried her no 
 higher, whatever the vulgar might think of such an opinion. She 
 spoke of the glories of the jewel who was close to her, Folco 
 contrasted his zeal with the inertness of her contemptible coun- 
 trymen and foretold the bloodshed that awaited the latter from 
 wars and treacheries. The Troubadour, meanwhile, glowed in 
 his aspect like a ruby stricken with the sun ; for in heaven joy is 
 expressed by effulgence, as on earth by laughter. He confessed 
 
 * Charles Martel, son of the king of Naples and Sicily, and crowned king 
 of Hungary, seems to have become acquainted with Dante during the poet's 
 youth, when the prince met his royal father in the city of Florence. He was 
 brother of Robert, who succeeded the father, and who was the friend of 
 Petrarch. 
 
 " The adventures of Cunizza, overcome by the influence of her star," says 
 Gary, " are related by the chronicler Rolandino of Padua, lib. i. cap. 3, in Mu- 
 ratori, Rer. Ital. Script, torn. viii. p. 173. She eloped from her first husband, 
 Richard of St. Boniface, in the company of Sordello (see Purg. canto vi. and 
 vii.), with whom she is supposed to have cohabited before her marriage : then 
 lived with a soldier of Trevigi, whose wife was living at the same time in the 
 same city ; and, on his being murdered by her brother the tyrant, was by her 
 brother married to a nobleman of Braganzo : lastly, when he also had fallen by 
 the same hand, she, after her brother's death, was again wedded in Verona." 
 Translation of Dante, ut sup. p. 147. See what Foscolo says of her in the 
 Discorso sul Testa, p. 329. 
 
 Folco, the gallant Troubadour, here placed between Cunizza and Rahab, is 
 no other than Folques, bishop of Thoulouse, the persecutor of the Albigenses. 
 It is of him the brutal anecdote is related, that, being asked, during an indis- 
 criminate attack on that people, how the orthodox and heterodox were to be 
 distinguished, he said, " Kill all : God will know his own." 
 
 For Rahab, see Joshua, chap. ii. and vi. ; and Hebrews xi. 31.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN. 135 
 
 the lawless fires of his youth, as great (he said) as those of Dido 
 or Hercules ; but added, that he had no recollection of them, ex- 
 cept a joyous one, not for the fault (which does not come to mind 
 in heaven), but for the good which heaven brings out of it. Folco 
 concluded with explaining how Rahab had come into the third 
 Heaven, and with denouncing the indifference of popes and car- 
 dinals (those adulterers of the Church) to every thing but ac- 
 cursed money-getting.* 
 
 In an instant, before he could think about it, Dante was in the 
 fourth Heaven, the sun, the abode of Blessed Doctors of the 
 Church. A band of them came encircling him and his guide, 
 as a halo encircles the moon, singing a song, the beauty of which, 
 like jewels too rich to be exported, was not conveyable by ex- 
 pression to mortal fancy. The spirits composing the band were 
 those of St. Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, Gratian the Ben- 
 edictine, Pietro Lombardo, Solomon, Saint Dionysius the Areopa- 
 gite, Paulus Orosius, Boetius, Isidore, the Venerable Bede, Rich- 
 ard of St. Victor, and Sigebert of Gemblours. St. Thomas was 
 the namer of them to Dante. Their song had paused that he 
 might speak ; but when he had done speaking, they began re- 
 suming it, one by one, and circling as they moved, like the wheels 
 of church clocks that sound one after another with a sweet tink- 
 ling, when they summon the hearts of the devout to morning 
 prayer ."I" 
 
 * The reader need not be required to attend to the extraordinary theological 
 disclosures in the whole of the preceding passage, nor yet to consider how 
 much more they disclose, than theology or the poet might have desired. 
 
 t These fifteen personages are chiefly theologians and schoohnen^whose 
 names and obsolete writings are, for the most part, no longer worth mention. 
 The same may be said of the band that comes after them. 
 
 Dante should not have set them dancing. It is impossible (every respect- 
 fulness of endeavour notwithstanding) to maintain the gravity of one's imagi- 
 nation at the thought of a set of doctors of the Church, Venerable Bede inclu- 
 ded, wheeling about in giddy rapture like so many dancing dervises, and keep- 
 ing time to their ecstatic anilities with voices tinkling like church-clocks. You 
 may invest them with as much light or other blessed indistinctness as you 
 pleasej the beards and the old ages will break through. In vain theologians 
 may tell us that our imaginations are not exalted enough. The answer (if 
 such a charge must be gravely met) is, that Dante's whole Heaven itself is not
 
 136 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 Again they stopped, and again St. Thomas addressed the poet. 
 He was of the order of St. Dominic ; but with generous grace 
 he held up the founder of the Franciscans, with his vow of pov- 
 erty, as the example of what a pope should be, and reproved the 
 errors of no order but his own. On the other hand, a new circle 
 of doctors of the Church making their appearance, and enclosing 
 the first as rainbow encloses rainbow, rolling round with it in the 
 unison of a two-fold joy, a voice from the new circle attracted 
 the poet's ear, as the pole attracts the needle, and Saint Buona- 
 ventura, a Franciscan, opened upon the praises of St. Dominic, 
 the loving minion of Christianity, the holy wrestler, benign to 
 his friends and cruel to his enemies ;* and so confined his re- 
 proofs to his own Franciscan order. He then, as St. Thomas had 
 done with the doctors in the inner circle, named those who con- 
 stituted the outer : to wit, Illuminate, and Agostino, and Hugues 
 of St. Victor, and Petrus Comestor, and Pope John the Twenty- 
 first, Nathan the Prophet, Chrysostom, Anselmo of Canterbury, 
 Donatus who deigned to teach grammar, Raban of Mentz, and 
 Joachim of Calabria. The two circles then varied their move- 
 ment by wheeling round one another in counter directions ; and 
 after they had chanted, not of Bacchus or Apollo, but of three 
 Persons in One, St. Thomas, who knew Dante's thoughts by in- 
 tuition, again addressed him, discoursing of mysteries human and 
 divine, exhorting him to be slow in giving assent or denial to 
 
 '< exalted enough, however wonderful and beautiful in parts. The schools, and 
 the forms of Catholic worship, held even his imagination down. There is more 
 heaven in one placid idea of love than in all these dances and tinklings. 
 
 * " Benigno a' suoi, ed a' nimici crudo." 
 
 Crud indeed ; the founder of the Inquisition ! The " loving minion" is Mr. 
 Cary's excellent translation of " amoroso drudo." But what a minion, and 
 how loving ! With fire and sword and devilry, and no wish (of course) to 
 thrust his own will and pleasure, and bad arguments, down other people's 
 throats ! St. Dominic was a Spaniard. So was Borgia. So was Philip the 
 Second. There seems to have been an inherent semi-barbarism in the char- 
 acter of Spain, which it has never got rid of to this day. If it were not for 
 Cervantes, and some modern patriots, it would hardly appear to belong to the 
 right European community. Even Lope de Vega was an inquisitor ; and Men- 
 doza, the entertaining author of Lazarillo de Tormes, a cruel statesman. Cer- 
 vantes, however, is enough to sweeten a whole peninsula.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN. 137 
 
 propositions without examination, and bidding him warn people 
 in general how they presumed to anticipate the divine judgment 
 as to who should be saved and who not.* The spirit of Solomon 
 then related how souls could resume their bodies glorified ; and the 
 two circles uttering a rapturous amen, glowed with such intole- 
 rable brightness, that the eyes of Beatrice only were able to sus- 
 tain it. Dante gazed on her with a delight ineffable, and suddenly 
 found himself in the fifth Heaven. 
 
 It was the planet Mars, the receptacle of those who had Died 
 Fighting for the Cross. In the middle of its ruddy light stood a 
 cross itself, of enormous dimensions, made of light still greater, 
 and exhibiting, first, in the body of it, the Crucified Presence, 
 glittering all over with indescribable flashes like lightning ; and 
 secondly^, in addition to and across the Presence, innumerable 
 sparkles of the intensest mixture of white and red, darting to and 
 fro through the whole extent of the crucifix. The movement was 
 like that of motes in a sunbeam. And as a sweet dinning arises 
 from the multitudinous touching of harps and viols, before the 
 ear distinguishes the notes, there issued in like manner from the 
 whole glittering ferment a harmony indistinct but exquisite, 
 which entranced the poet beyond all he had ever felt. He heard 
 even the words, " Arise and conquer," as one who hears and 
 yet hears not. 
 
 On a sudden, with a glide like a falling star, there ran down 
 from the right horn of the Cross to the foot of it, one of the 
 lights of this cluster of splendours, distinguishing itself, as it 
 went, like flame in alabaster. 
 
 " O flesh of my flesh !" it exclaimed to Dante ; " O super- 
 abounding Divine Grace ! when was the door of Paradise ever 
 twice opened, as it shall have been to thee ?"f 
 
 Dante, in astonishment, turned to Beatrice, and saw such a 
 
 * What a pity the reporter of this advice had not humility enough to apply 
 it to himself! 
 
 t " O sanguis meus, o superinfusa 
 Gratia Dei, sicut tibi, cui 
 Bis unquam coeli janua reclusa?" 
 
 The spirit says this in Latin, as if to veil the compliment to the poet in " the 
 obscurity of a learned language." And in truth it is a little strong.
 
 138 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 rapture of delight in her eyes, that he seemed, at that instant, as 
 if his own had touched the depth of his acceptance and of his 
 heaven.* 
 
 The light resumed its speech, but in words too profound in 
 their meaning for Dante to comprehend. They seemed to be re- 
 turning thanks to God. This rapturous absorption being ended, 
 the speaker expressed in more human terms his gratitude to Bea- 
 trice ; and then, after inciting Dante to ask his name, declared 
 himself thus : 
 
 " O branch of mine, whom I have long desired to behold, I am 
 the root of thy stock ; of him thy great-grandsire, who first 
 brought from his mother the family-name into thy house, and 
 whom thou sawest expiating his sin of pride on the first circle of 
 the mountain. Well it befitteth thee to shorten his long suffering 
 with thy good works. Florence,f while yet she was confined 
 within the ancient boundary which still contains the bell that 
 summons her to prayer, abided in peace, for she was chaste and 
 sober. She had no trinkets of chains then, no head-tires, no 
 gaudy sandals, no girdles more worth looking at than the wear- 
 ers. Fathers were not then afraid of having daughters, for 
 fear they should want dowries too great, and husbands before 
 their time. Families were in no haste to separate ; nor had 
 chamberers arisen to shew what enormities they dared to practise. 
 The heights of Rome had not been surpassed by your tower of 
 Uccellatoio, whose fall shall be in proportion to its aspiring. I 
 saw Bellincion Berti walking the streets in a leathern girdle fas- 
 tened with bone ; and his wife come from her looking-glass with- 
 out a painted face. I saw the Nerlis and the Vecchios contented 
 
 * " Che dentro a gli occhi suoi ardeva un riso 
 Tal, ch' io pensai co' miei toccar lo fondo 
 De la mia grazia e del mio Paradise." 
 
 That is, says Lombard!, " I thought my eyes could not possibly be more fa- 
 voured and imparadised" (Pensai che non potessero gli occhi miei essere gra- 
 ziati ed imparadisati maggiormente') Variorum edition of Dante, Padua, 
 1822, vol. Hi. p. 373. 
 
 1 Here ensues the famous description of those earlier times in ' Florence, 
 which Dante eulogises at the expense of his own. See the original passage, 
 with another version, in the Appendix.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN. 139 
 
 with the simplest doublets, and their good dames hard at work at 
 their spindles. O happy they ! They were sure of burial in 
 their native earth, and none were left desolate by husbands that 
 loved France better than Italy. One kept awake to tend her 
 child in its cradle, lulling it with the household words that had 
 fondled her own infancy. Another, as she sat in the midst of 
 her family, drawing the flax from the distaff, told them stories of 
 Troy, and Fiesole, and Rome. It would have been as great a 
 wonder, then, to see such a woman as Cianghella, or such a man 
 as Lapo Salterello, as it would now be to meet with a Cincinnatus 
 or a Cornelia.* 
 
 " It was at that peaceful, at that beautiful time," continued the 
 poet's ancestor, " when we all lived in such good faith and fellow- 
 ship, and in so sweet a place, that the blessed Virgin vouchsafed 
 the first sight of me to the cries of my mother ; and there, in 
 your old Baptistery, I became, at once, Christian and Cacciaguida. 
 My brothers were called Moronto and Eliseo. It was my wife 
 that brought thee, from Valdipado, thy family name of Alighieri. 
 I then followed the Emperor Conrad, and he made me a knight 
 for my good service, and I went with him to fight against the 
 wicked Saracen law, whose people usurp the fold that remains 
 lost through the fault of the shepherd. There, by that foul crew, 
 was I delivered from the snares and pollutions of the world j and 
 so, from the martyrdom, came to this peace." 
 
 Cacciaguida was silent. But his descendant praying to be told 
 more of his family and of the old state of Florence, the beatified 
 soldier resumed. He would not, however, speak of his own pre- 
 decessors. He said it would be more becoming to say nothing as 
 to who they were, or the place they came from. All he disclosed 
 
 * Bellincion Berti was a noble Florentine, of the house of the Ravignani. 
 Cianghella is said to bave been an abandoned woman, of manners as shame- 
 less as her morals. Lapo Salterelli, one of the co-exiles of Dante, and special- 
 ly hated by him, was a personage who appears to have exhibited the rare com- 
 bination of judge and fop. An old commentator, in recording his attention to his 
 hair, seems to intimate that Dante alludes to it in contrasting him with Ciu- 
 cinnatus. If so, Lapo might have reminded the poet of what Cicero says of 
 his beloved Caesar ; that he once saw him scratching the top of his head with 
 the tip of liia finger, that he might not discompose the locks.
 
 140 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 was, that his father and mother lived near the gate San Piero.* 
 With regard to Florence, he continued, the number of the inhabi- 
 tants fit to carry arms was at that time not a fifth of its present 
 amount ; but then the blood of the whole city was pure. It had 
 not been mixed up with that of Campi, and Certaldo, and Figghine. 
 It ran clear in the veins of the humblest mechanic. 
 
 " Oh, how much better would it have been," cried the soul of 
 
 Q 
 
 the old Florentine, " had my countrymen still kept it as it was, 
 and not brought upon themselves the stench of the peasant knave 
 out of Aguglione, and that other from Signa, with his eye to a 
 bribe ! Had Rome done its duty to the emperor, and so prevented 
 the factions that have ruined us, Simifonte would have kept its 
 beggarly upstart to itself; the Conti would have stuck to their 
 parish of Acone, and perhaps the Buondelmonti to Valdigrieve. 
 Crude mixtures do as much harm to the body politic as to the 
 natural body ; and size is not strength. The blind bull falls 
 with a speedier plunge than the blind lamb. One sword often 
 slashes round about it better than five. Cities themselves perish. 
 See what Ras become of Luni and of Urbisaglia ; and what will 
 soon become of Sinigaglia too, and of Chiusi ! And if cities 
 perish, what is to be expected of families ? In my time the Ughi, 
 the Catellini, the Filippi, were great names. So were the Albe- 
 richi, the Ormanni, and twenty others. The golden sword of 
 
 * " Chi ei si furo, e onde venner quivi, 
 Piii e tacer che ragionare onesto." 
 
 Some think Dante was ashamed to speak of these ancestors, from the lowness 
 of their origin ; others that he did not choose to make them a boast, for the 
 height of it. I suspect, with Lombard!, from his general character, and from 
 the willingness he has avowed to make such boasts (see the opening of canto 
 xvi., Paradiso, in the original), that while he claimed for them a descent from 
 the Romans (see Inferno, canto xv. 73. &c.), he knew them to be poor iu 
 fortune, perhaps of humble condition. What follows, in the text of our ab- 
 stract, about the purity of the old Florentine blood, even in the veins of the 
 humblest mechanic, may seem to intimate some corroboration of this ; and is 
 a curious specimen of republican pride and scorn. This horror of one's neigh- 
 bours is neither good Christianity, nor surely any very good omen of that Ital- 
 ian union, of which " Young Italy" wishes to think Dante such a harbinger. 
 All this too, observe, is said in the presence of a vision of Christ on the 
 Cross !
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN. 141 
 
 knighthood was then to be seen in the house of Galigaio. The 
 Column, Verrey, was then a great thing in the herald's eye. 
 The Galli, the Sacchetti, were great ; so was the old trunk of the 
 Calfucci ; so was that of the peculators who now blush to hear 
 of a measure of wheat ; and the Sizii and the Arrigucci were 
 drawn in pomp to their civic chairs. Oh, how mighty I saw 
 them then, and how low has their pride brought them ! Florence 
 in those days deserved her name. She flourished indeed ; and 
 the balls of gold were ever at the top of the flower.* And now 
 the descendants of these men sit in priestly stalls and grow fat. 
 The over-weening Adimari, who are such dragons when their 
 foes run, and such lambs when they turn, were then of note so 
 little, that Albertino Donato was angry with Bellincion, his father- 
 in-law, for making him brother to one of their females. On the 
 other hand, thy foes, the Amidei, the origin of all thy tears 
 through the just anger which has slain the happiness of thy life, 
 were honoured in those days ; and the honour was partaken by 
 their friends. O Buondelmonte ! why didst thou break thy troth 
 to thy first love, and become wedded to another ? Many who are 
 now miserable would have been happy, had God given thee to 
 the river Ema, when it rose against thy first coming to Florence. 
 But the Arno had swept our Palladium from its bridge, and 
 Florence was to be the victim on its altar. "{ 
 
 Cacciaguida was again silent ; but his descendant begged him 
 to speak yet a little more. He had heard, as he came through 
 the nether regions, alarming intimations of the ill fortune that 
 
 * The Column, Verrey (vair, variegated, checkered with argent and azure), 
 and the Balls or (Palle d' oro), were arms of old families. I do not trouble the 
 reader with notes upon mere family-names, of which nothing else is recorded. 
 
 t An allusion, apparently acquiescent, to the superstitious popular opinion 
 that the peace of Florence was bound up with the statue of Mars on the old 
 bridge, at tho base of which Buondehnoute was slain. 
 
 With this Buondelmonte the dissensions in Florence were supposed to have 
 first begun. Macchiavelli's account of him is, that he was about to marry a 
 young lady of the Amidei family, when a widow of one of the Donati, who 
 had designed her own daughter for him, contrived that he should see her ; the 
 consequence of which was, that he broke his engagement, and was assassina- 
 ted Historic Florentine, lib. ii.
 
 142 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 awaited him, and he was anxious to know, from so high and cer- 
 tain an authority, what it would really be. 
 
 Cacciaguida said, " As Hippolytus was forced to depart from 
 Athens by the wiles of his cruel step-dame, so must even thou 
 depart out of Florence. Such is the wish, such this very mo- 
 ment the plot, and soon will it be the deed, of those, the business 
 of whose lives is to make a traffic of Christ with Rome. Thou 
 shalt quit every thing that is dearest to thee in the world. That 
 is the first arrow shot from the bow of exile. Thou shalt experi- 
 ence how salt is the taste of bread eaten at the expense of others ; 
 how hard is the going up and down others' stairs. But what 
 shall most bow .thee down, is the worthless and disgusting com- 
 pany with whom thy lot must be partaken ; for they shall all turn 
 against thee, the whole mad, heartless, and ungrateful set. Nev- 
 ertheless, it shall not be long first, before themselves, and not 
 thou, shall have cause to hang down their heads for shame. The 
 brutishness of all they do, will shew how well it became thee to 
 be of no party, but the party of thyself.* 
 
 " Thy first refuge thou shalt owe to the courtesy of the great 
 Lombard, who bears the Ladder charged with the Holy Bird.f 
 So benignly shall he regard thee, that in the matter of asking and 
 receiving, the customary order of things shall be reversed be- 
 
 * " Tu lascerai ogni cosa diletta 
 
 Piu caramente ; e questo e quello strale 
 Che 1' arco de 1' esilio pria saetta. 
 
 Tu proverai si come sa di sale 
 Lo pane altrui, e com' e duro calle 
 Lo scendere e '1 salir per 1' altrui scale. 
 
 E quel che piu ti gravera le spalle, 
 Sara la compagnia malvagia e scempia 
 Con la qual tu cadrai in questa valle : 
 
 Che tutta ingrata, tutta matta ed cmpia 
 Si fara contra te : ma poco appresso 
 Ella, non tu, n' avra rossa la tempia. 
 
 Di sua bestialitate il suo processo 
 Fara la pruova, si ch' a te fia bello 
 Averti fatta parte per te stesso." 
 
 t The Roman eagle. These are the arms of the Scaligers of Verona.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN. 143 
 
 tween you two, and the gift anticipate the request. With him 
 thou shalt behold the mortal, born under so strong an influence 
 of this our star, that the nations shall take note of him. They 
 are not aware of him yet, by reason of his tender age ; but ere 
 the Gascon practise on the great Henry, sparkles of his worth 
 shall break forth in his contempt of money and of ease ; and 
 when his munificence appears in all its lustre, his very enemies 
 shall not be able to hold their tongues for admiration.* Look 
 thou to this second benefactor also ; for many a change of the 
 lots of people shall he make, both rich and poor ; and do thou 
 bear in mind, but repeat not, what further I shall now tell thee 
 of thy life." Here the spirit, says the poet, foretold many things 
 which afterwards appeared incredible to their very beholders ; 
 and then added : " Such, my son, is the heart and mystery of the 
 things thou hast desired to learn. The snares will shortly gather 
 about thee ; but wish not to change places with the contrivers ; 
 for thy days will outlast those of their retribution." 
 
 Again was the spirit silent ; and yet again once more did his 
 descendant question him, anxious to have the advice of one that 
 saw so far, and that spoke the truth so purely, and loved him so 
 well. 
 
 " Too plainly, my father," said Dante, " do I see the time com- 
 ing, when a blow is to be struck me, heaviest ever to the man 
 that is not true to himself. For which reason it is fit that I so 
 far arm myself beforehand, that in losing the spot dearest to me 
 on earth, I do not let my verses deprive me of every other refuge. 
 Now I have been down below through the region whose grief is 
 without end ; and I have scaled the mountain from the top of 
 which I was lifted by my lady's eyes ; and I have come thus far 
 through heaven, from luminary to luminary ; and in the course 
 of this my pilgrimage I have heard things which, if I tell again, 
 may bitterly disrelish with many. Yet, on the other hand, if I 
 prove but a timid friend to truth, I fear I shall not survive with 
 the generations by whom the present times will be called times 
 of old." 
 
 The light that enclosed the treasure which its descendant had 
 
 * A prophecy of the renown of Can Grande della Scala, who had received 
 Dante at his court.
 
 144 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 found in heaven, first flashed at this speech like a golden mirror 
 against the sun, and then it replied thus : 
 
 " Let the consciences blush at thy words that have reason to 
 blush. Do thou, far from shadow of misrepresentation, make 
 manifest all which thou hast seen, and let the sore places be 
 galled that deserve it. Thy bitter truths shall carry with them 
 vital nourishment thy voice, as the wind does, shall smite loud- 
 est the loftiest summits ; and no little shall that redound to thy 
 praise. It is for this reason that, in all thy journey, thou hast 
 been shewn none but spirits of note, since little heed would have 
 been taken of such as excite doubt by their obscurity." 
 
 The spirit of Cacciaguida now relapsed into the silent joy of 
 its reflections, and the poet was standing absorbed in the mingled 
 feelings of his own, when Beatrice said to him, " Change the cur- 
 rent of thy thoughts. Consider how near I am in heaven to one 
 that repayeth every wrong." 
 
 Dante turned at the sound of this comfort, and felt no longer 
 any other wish than to look upon her eyes ; but she said, with a 
 smile, " Turn thee round again, and attend. I am not thy only 
 Paradise." And Dante again turned, and saw his ancestor pre- 
 pared to say more. 
 
 Cacciaguida bade him look again on the Cross, and he should 
 see various spirits, as he named them, flash over it like lightning ; 
 and they did so. That of Joshua, which was first mentioned, 
 darted along the Cross in a stream. The light of Judas Macca- 
 beus went spinning, as if joy had scourged it.* Charlemagne 
 and Orlando swept away together, pursued by the poet's eyes. 
 Guglielmof followed, and Rinaldo, and Godfrey of Bouillon, and 
 Robert Guiscard of Naples ; and the light of Cacciaguida him- 
 self darted back to its place, and, uttering another sort of voice, 
 
 * " Letizia era ferza del paUio." 
 
 t Supposed to be one of the early Williams, Princes of Orange ; but it is 
 doubted whether the First, in the time of Charlemagne, or the Second, who 
 followed Godfrey of Bouillon. Mr. Gary thinks the former ; and the mention 
 of his kinsman Rinaldo ( Ariosto's Paladin ?) seems to confirm his opinion ; yet 
 the situation of the name in the text brings it nearer to Godfrey ; and Rinoardo 
 (the name of Rinaldo in Dante) might possibly mean " Raimbaud," the kins- 
 man and associate of the second William. Robert Guiscard is the Norman 
 who conquered Naples.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN. 145 
 
 began showing how sweet a singer he too was amidst the glitter, 
 ing choir. 
 
 Dante turned to share the joy with Beatrice, and, by the lovely 
 paling of her cheek, like a maiden's when it delivers itself of the 
 burden of a blush,* knew that he was in another and whiter star. 
 It was the planet Jupiter, the abode of blessed Administrators of 
 Justice. 
 
 Here he beheld troops of dazzling essences, warbling as they 
 flew, and shaping their flights hither and thither, like birds when 
 they rise from the banks of rivers, and rejoice with one another 
 in new-found pasture. But the figures into which the flights 
 were shaped were of a more special sort, being mystical compo- 
 sitions of letters of the alphabet, now a D, now an i, now an L, 
 and so on, till the poet observed that they completed the whole 
 text of Scripture, which says, Diligite justitiam, qui judicatis ter- 
 ram (Love righteousness, ye that be judges of the earth). The 
 last letter, M, they did not decompose like the rest, but kept it 
 entire for a while, and glowed so deeply within it, that the silvery 
 orb thereabout seemed burning with gold. Other lights, with a 
 song of rapture, then descended like a crown of lilies, on the top 
 of the letter ; and then, from the body of it, rose thousands of 
 sparks, as from a shaken firebrand, and, gradually expanding into 
 the form of an eagle, the lights which had descended like lilies 
 distributed themselves over the whole bird, encrusting it with 
 rubies flashing in the sun. 
 
 But what, says the poet, was never yet heard of, written, or 
 imagined, the beak of the eagle spoke ! It uttered many minds 
 in one voice, just as one heat is given out by many embers ; and 
 proclaimed itself to have been thus exalted, because it united 
 justice and mercy while on earth. 
 
 Dante addressed this splendid phenomenon, and prayed it to 
 ease his mind of the perplexities of its worldly reason respecting 
 
 * Exquisitely beautiful feeling ! 
 
 " Quale 6 il trasmutare in picciol varco 
 Di tempo in bianca donna, quando ! 1 volto 
 Suo si discarchi di vergogna il carco." 
 
 What follows, respecting letters of the alphabet and the Roman eagle, is in a 
 very different taste, though mixed with many beauties. 
 
 11
 
 146 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 the Divine nature and government, and the exclusion from hea- 
 ven of goodness itself, unless within the Christian pale. 
 
 The celestial bird, rousing itself into motion with delight, like 
 a falcon in the conscious energy of its will and beauty, when, 
 upon being set free from its hood, it glances above it into the 
 air, and claps its self-congratulating wings, answered neverthe- 
 less somewhat disdainfully, that it was impossible for man, in his 
 mortal state, to comprehend such things ; and that the astonish- 
 ment he feels at them, though doubtless it would be excusable 
 under other circumstances, must rest satisfied with the affirma- 
 tions of Scripture. 
 
 The bird then bent over its questioner, as a stork does over 
 the nestling newly fed when it looks up at her, and then wheel- 
 ing round, and renewing its warble, concluded it with saying, 
 " As my notes are to thee that understandest them not, so are the 
 judgments of the Eternal to thine earthly brethren. None ever 
 yet ascended into these heavenly regions that did not believe in 
 Christ, either after he was crucified or before it. Yet many, 
 who call Christ ! Christ ! shall at the last day be found less near 
 to him than such as knew him not. What shall the kings of 
 Islam say to your Christian kings, when they see the book of 
 judgment opened, and hear all that is set down in it to their dis- 
 honour ? In that book shall be read the desolation which Albert 
 will inflict on Bohemia :* in that book, the woes inflicted on 
 
 * The emperor Albert the First, when he obtained Bohemia for his son 
 Rodolph. Of the sovereigns that follow, he who adulterated his people's 
 money, and died by the " hog's teeth" (a wild boar in hunting), is the French 
 king, Philip the Fourth ; the quarrelling fools of England and Scotland are 
 Edward the First and Baliol ; the luxurious Spaniard is Ferdinand the Fourth, 
 said to have killed himself in his youth by intemperance ; the effeminate Bo- 
 hemian, Winceslaus the Second ; the " lame wretch of Jerusalem," Charles 
 the Second of Naples, titular king of Jerusalem ; the cowardly warder of the 
 Isle of Fire (Sicily), Frederick of the house of Arragon ; his filthy brother and 
 uncle, James of Arragon and James of Minorca ; the Portuguese (according 
 to the probable guess of Gary), the rebellious son of King Dionysius ; the Nor- 
 wegian, Haco ; and the Dalmatian, Wladislaus, but why thus accused, not 
 known. As to Hungary, its crown was then disputed by rival princes ; Na- 
 varre was thinking of shaking off the yoke of France ; and Nicosia and 
 Famagosta, in Cyprus, were complaining of then- feeble sovereign, Henry the 
 Second.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN. 147 
 
 Paris by that adulterator of his kingdom's money, who shall die 
 by the hog's teeth : in that book, the ambition which makes 
 such mad fools of the Scotch and English kings, that they cannot 
 keep within their bounds : in that book, the luxury of the Span- 
 iard, and the effeminate life of the Bohemian, who neither knows 
 nor cares for any thing worthy : in that book, the lame wretch 
 of Jerusalem, whose value will be expressed by a unit, and his 
 worthlessness by a million : in that book, the avarice and cow- 
 ardice of the warder of the Isle of Fire, in which old Anchises 
 died ; and that the record may answer the better to his abundant 
 littleness, the writing shall be in short-hand ; and his uncle's and 
 his brother's filthy doings shall be read in that book they who 
 have made such rottenness of a good old house and two diadems ; 
 and there also shall the Portuguese and the Norwegian be known 
 for what they are, and the coiner of Dalmatia, who beheld with 
 such covetous eyes the Venetian ducat. O blessed Hungary, 
 if thou wouldst resolve to endure no longer ! O blessed Na- 
 varre, if thou wouldst but keep out the Frenchman with thy moun- 
 tain walls ! May the cries and groans of Nicosia and Famagosta 
 be an earnest of those happier days, proclaiming as they do the 
 vile habits of the beast, who keeps so close in the path of the herd 
 his brethren." 
 
 The blessed bird for a moment was silent ; but as, at the going 
 down of the sun, the heavens are darkened, and then break forth 
 into innumerable stars which the sun lights up,* so the splen- 
 dours within the figure of the bird suddenly became more splen- 
 did, and broke forth into songs too beautiful for mortal to re- 
 member. 
 
 O dulcet love, that dost shew thee forth in smiles, how ardent 
 was thy manifestation in the lustrous sparkles which arose out 
 of the mere thoughts of those pious hearts ! 
 
 After the gems in that glittering figure had ceased chiming 
 their angelic songs, the poet seemed to hear the murmur of a 
 river which comes falling from rock to rock, and shews, by the 
 fulness of its tone, the abundance of its mountain spring ; and as 
 the sound of the guitar is modulated on the neck of it, and the 
 
 * The opinion in the time of Dante.
 
 148 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 breath of the pipe is accordant to the spiracle from which it is- 
 sues, so the murmuring within the eagle suddenly took voice, 
 and, rising through the neck, again issued forth in words. The 
 bird now bade the poet fix his attention on its eye ; because, of 
 all the fires that composed its figure, those that sparkled in the 
 eye were the noblest. The spirit (it said) which Dante beheld 
 in the pupil was that of the royal singer who danced before the 
 ark, now enjoying the reward of his superiority to vulgar dis- 
 cernment. Of the five spirits that composed the eyebrow, the one 
 nearest the beak was Trajan, now experienced above all others in 
 the knowledge of what it costs not to follow Christ, by reason of his 
 having been in hell before he was translated to heaven. Next to 
 Trajan was Hezekiah, whose penitence delayed for him the hour of 
 his death : next Hezekiah, Constantine, though, in letting the pope 
 become a prince instead of a pastor, he had unwittingly brought de- 
 struction on the world : next Constantine, William the Good of Si- 
 cily, whose death is not more lamented than the lives of those who 
 contest his crown : and lastly, next William, Riphoeus the Tro- 
 jan. " What erring mortal," cried the bird, " would believe it 
 possible to find Riphoeus the Trojan among the blest ? but so it 
 is ; and he now knows more respecting the divine grace than 
 mortals do, though even he discerns it not to the depth."* 
 
 The bird again relapsing into silence, appeared to repose on 
 the happiness of its thoughts, like the lark which, after quiver- 
 ing and expatiating through all its airy warble, becomes mute and 
 content, having satisfied its soul to the last drop of its sweetness. } 
 
 * All this part about the eagle, who, it seems, is beheld only in profile, and 
 who bids the poet " mind his eye," in the pupil of which is King David, while 
 the eyebrow consists of orthodox sovereigns, including Riphaeus the Trojan, is 
 irresistibly ludicrous. No consideration can or ought to hinder us from laugh- 
 ing at it. It was mere party-will in Dante to lug it in ; and his perverseness 
 injured his fancy, as it deserved. 
 
 In the next passage the real poet resumes himself, and with what relief to 
 one's feelings ! 
 
 t Most beautiful is this simile of the lark : 
 
 " Qual lodoletta che 'n aere si spazia 
 Prima cantando, e poi tace contenta 
 De 1' ultima dolcezza che la sazia." 
 
 In the Pentameron and Pentalogia, Petrarch is made to say, " All the
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN. 149 
 
 But again Dante could not help speaking, being astonished to 
 find Pagans in Heaven ; and once more the celestial figure in- 
 dulged his curiosity. It told him that Trajan had been delivered 
 from hell, for his love of justice, by the prayers of St. Gregory ; 
 and that Riphseus, for the same reason, had been gifted with a 
 prophetic knowledge of the Redemption ; and then it ended with 
 a rapture on the hidden mysteries of Predestination, and on the 
 joy of ignorance itself when submitting to the divine will. The 
 two blessed spirits, meanwhile, whom the bird mentioned, like 
 the fingers of sweet luteriist to sweet singer, when they quiver to 
 his warble as it goes, manifested the delight they experienced by 
 movements of accord simultaneous as the twinkling of two 
 eyes.* 
 
 Dante turned to receive his own final delight from the eyes of 
 Beatrice, and he found it, though the customary smile on her face 
 was no longer there. She told him that her beauty increased 
 with such intensity at every fresh ascent among the stars, that he 
 would no longer have been able to bear the smile ; and they 
 were now in the seventh Heaven, or the planet Saturn, the re- 
 treat of those who had passed their lives in Holy Contemplation. 
 
 verses that ever were written on the nightingale are scarcely worth the beauti- 
 ful triad of this divine poet on the lark [and then he repeats them]. In the 
 first of them, do you not see the trembling of her wings against the sky? As 
 often as I repeat them, my ear is satisfied, my heart (like hers) contented. 
 
 " Boccaccio. I agree with you in the perfect and unrivalled beauty of the 
 first ; but in the third there is a redundance. Is not contenta quite enough 
 without che la sazia ? The picture is before us, the sentiment within us ; and, 
 behold, we kick when we are full of manna. 
 
 " Petrarch. I acknowledge the correctness and propriety of your remark ; 
 and yet beauties in poetry must be examined as carefully as blemishes, and 
 even more." p. 92. 
 
 Perhaps Dante would have argued that sazia expresses the sa ety itself, so 
 that the very superfluousness becomes a propriety. 
 
 * " E come a buon cantor buon citarista 
 Fa seguitar lo guizzo de la corda 
 In che piu di piacer lo canto acquista ; 
 
 SI, mentre che parl6, mi si ricorda, 
 Ch' io vidi le duo luci benedette, 
 Pur come batter d' occhi si concorda, 
 
 Con le parole muover le fiammette."
 
 150 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 In this crystal sphere, called after the name of the monarch 
 who reigned over the Age of Innocence, Dante looked up, and 
 beheld a ladder, the hue of which was like gold when the sun 
 glisters it, and the height so great that its top was out of sight ; 
 and down the steps of this ladder he saw coming such multitudes 
 of shining spirits, that it seemed as if all the lights of heaven 
 must have been there poured forth ; but not a sound was in the 
 whole splendour. It was spared to the poet for the same reason 
 that he missed the smile of Beatrice. When they came to a cer- 
 tain step in the ladder, some of the spirits flew off it in circles or 
 other careers, like rooks when they issue from their trees in the 
 morning to dry their feathers in the sun, part of them going away 
 without returning, others returning to the point they left, and 
 others contenting themselves with flying round about it. One of 
 them came so near Dante and Beatrice, and brightened with such 
 ardour, that the poet saw it was done in affection towards them, 
 and begged the loving spirit to tell them who it was. 
 
 " Between the two coasts of Italy," said the spirit, " and not 
 far from thine own country, the stony mountains ascend into a 
 ridge so lofty that the thunder rolls beneath it. Catria is its 
 name. Beneath it is a consecrated cell ; and in that cell I was 
 called Pietro Damiano.* I so devoted myself to the service of 
 God, that with no other sustenance than the juice of the olive, I 
 forgot both heat and cold, happy in heavenly meditation. That 
 cloister made abundant returns in its season to these granaries of 
 the Lord ; but so idle has it become now, that it is fit the world 
 should know its barrenness. The days of my mortal life were 
 drawing to a close, when I was besought and drawn into wearing 
 the hat which descends every day from bad head to worse. f St. 
 Peter and St. Paul came lean and barefoot, getting their bread 
 where they could ; but pastors now-a-days must be lifted from 
 
 * A corrector of clerical abuses, who, though a cardinal, and much employed 
 in public affairs, preferred the simplicity of a private life. He has left writings, 
 the eloquence of which, according to Tiraboschi, is " worthy of a better age." 
 Petrarch also makes honourable mention of him. See Gary, ut sup. p. 169. 
 Dante lived a good while in the monastery of Catria, aiid is said to have fin- 
 ished his poem there. Lombardi in loc. vol. iii. p. 547. 
 
 t The cardinal's hat.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN. 151 
 
 the ground, and have ushers going before them, and train-bearers 
 behind them, and ride upon palfreys covered with their spreading 
 mantles, so that two beasts go under one skin.* O Lord, how 
 long !" 
 
 At these words Dante saw more splendours come pouring down 
 the ladder, and wheel round and round, and become at every 
 wheel more beautiful. The whole dazzling body then gathered 
 round "the indignant speaker, and shouted something in a voice so 
 tremendous, that the poet could liken it to nothing on earth. The 
 thunder was so overwhelming, that he did not even hear what 
 they said.f 
 
 Pallid and stunned, he turned in affright to Beatrice, who com- 
 forted him as a mother comforts a child that wants breath to 
 speak. The shout was prophetic of the vengeance about to over- 
 take the Church. Beatrice then directed his attention to a multi- 
 tude of small orbs, which increased one another's beauty by inter- 
 changing their splendours. They enclosed the spirits of those 
 who most combined meditation with love. One of them was 
 Saint Benedict ; and others Macarius and Romoaldo.:}: The light 
 of St. Benedict issued forth from among its companions to ad- 
 dress the poet ; and after explaining how its occupant was unable 
 farther to disclose himself, inveighed against the degeneracy of 
 the religious orders. It then rejoined its fellows, and the whole 
 company clustering into one meteor, swept aloft like a whirlwind. 
 Beatrice beckoned the poet to ascend after them. He did so, 
 
 * " SI che duo bestie van sott' una pelle." 
 
 t " Dintoruo a questa (voce) vennero e fermarsi, 
 E fero un grido di si alto suono, 
 Che non potrebbe qui assomigliarsi : 
 
 Ne io lo 'ntesi, si mi vinse il tuono." 
 
 Around this voice they flocked, a mighty crowd, 
 And raised a shout so huge, that earthly wonder 
 Knoweth no likeness for a peal so loud ; 
 
 Nor could I hear the words, it spoke such thunder. 
 
 If a Longinus had written after Dante, he would have put this passage into his 
 treatise on the Sublime. 
 
 t Benedict, the founder of the order called after his name. Macarius, an 
 Egyptian monk and moralist. Romoaldo, founder of the Camaldoli.
 
 152 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 gifted with the usual virtue by her eyes; and found himself in 
 the twin light of the Gemini, the constellation that presided over 
 his birth. He was now in the region of the fixed stars. 
 
 " Thou art now," said his guide, "so near the summit of thy 
 prayers, that it behoves thee to take a last look at things below 
 thee, and see how little they should account in thine eyes." 
 Dante turned his eyes downwards through all the seven spheres, 
 and saw the earth so diminutive, that he smiled at its miserable 
 appearance. Wisest, thought he, is the man that esteems it least ; 
 and truly worthy he that sets his thoughts on the world to come. 
 He now saw the moon without those spots in it which made him 
 formerly attribute the variation to dense and rare. He sustained 
 the brightness of the face of the sun, and discerned all the signs 
 and motions and relative distances of the planets. Finally, he 
 saw, as he rolled round with the sphere in which he stood, and 
 by virtue of his gifted sight, the petty arena, from hill to harbour, 
 which filled his countrymen with such ferocious ambition ; and 
 then he turned his eyes to the sweet eyes beside him.* 
 
 Beatrice stood wrapt in attention, looking earnestly towards the 
 south, as if she expected some appearance. She resembled the 
 bird that sits among the dewy leaves in the darkness of night, 
 
 * The reader of English poetry will be reminded of a passage in Cowley : 
 
 " Lo, I mount ; and lo, 
 How small the biggest parts of earth's proud title shew ! 
 
 Where shall I find the noble British land ? 
 Lo, I at last a northern speck espy, 
 Which in the sea does lie, 
 And seems a grain o' the sand. 
 For this will any sin, or bleed ? 
 Of civil wars is this the meed ? 
 And is it this, alas, which we, 
 Oh, irony of words ! do call Great Brittanie ?" 
 
 And he afterwards, on reaching higher depths of silence, says very finely, and 
 with a beautiful intimation of the all-inclusiveness of the Deity by the use of 
 a singular instead of a plural verb, 
 
 " Where am I now ? angels and God is here." 
 
 All which follows in Dante, up to the appearance of Saint Peter, is full of 
 grandeur and loveliness.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN. 153 
 
 yearning for the coming of the morning, that she may again be- 
 hold her young, and have light by which to seek the food, that 
 renders her fatigue for them a joy. So stood Beatrice, looking ; 
 which caused Dante to watch in the same direction, with the feel- 
 ings of one that is already possessed of some new delight by the 
 assuredness of his expectation.* 
 
 The quarter on which they were gazing soon became brighter 
 and brighter, and Beatrice exclaimed, " Behold the armies of the 
 triumph of Christ !" Her face appeared all fire, and her eyes 
 so full of love, that the poet could find no words to express them. 
 
 As the moon, when the depths of heaven are serene with her 
 fulness, looks abroad smiling among her eternal handmaids the 
 stars, that paint every gulf of the great hollow with beauty ;j- so 
 brightest, above myriads of splendours around it, appeared a sun 
 \\ Inch gave radiance to them all, even as our earthly sun gives 
 light to the constellations. 
 
 " O Beatrice !" exclaimed Dante, overpowered, " sweet and 
 beloved guide !" 
 
 " Overwhelming," said Beatrice, " is the virtue with which 
 nothing can compare. *What thou hast seen is iheWislom and 
 
 * " Come 1' augello intra 1' amate fronde, 
 Posato al nido de' suoi dolci nati 
 La notte che le cose ci nasconde, 
 
 Che per veder gli aspetti desiati, 
 E per trovar lo cibo onde gli pasca, 
 In che i gravi labor gli sono aggrati, 
 
 Previene '1 tempo in su 1' aperta frasca, 
 E con ardente affetto il sole aspetta, 
 Fiso guardando pur che 1' alba nasca 
 
 Cos! la donna mia si stava eretta 
 ,. E atteiita, involta in ver la plaga 
 
 Sotto la quale il sol mostra men fretta : 
 
 SI che veggendola io sospesa e vaga, 
 Fecimi quale e quei che disiando 
 Altro vorria, e sperando s' appaga." 
 
 t " Quale ne' plenilunii sereni 
 Trivia ride tra le Ninfe eterne, 
 Che dipingono '1 ciel per tutti i seni."
 
 154 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 the Power, by whom the path between heaven and earth has been 
 laid open."* 
 
 Dante's soul like the fire which falls to earth out of the 
 swollen thunder-cloud, instead of rising according to the wont of 
 fire had grown too great for his still mortal nature ; and he 
 could afterwards find within him no memory of what it did. 
 
 " Open thine eyes," said Beatrice, " and see me now indeed. 
 Thou hast beheld things that empower thee to sustain my smiling." 
 
 Dante, while doing as he was desired, felt like one who has 
 suddenly waked up from a dream, and endeavours in vain to rec- 
 ollect it. 
 
 " Never," said he, " can that moment be erased from the book 
 of the past. If all the tongues were granted me that were fed 
 with the richest milk of Polyhymnia and her sisters, they 
 could not express one thousandth part of the beauty of that di- 
 vine smile, or of the thorough perfection which it made of the 
 whole of her divine countenance." 
 
 But Beatrice said, " Why dost thou so enamour thee of this 
 face, and lose the sight of the beautiful gujde, blossoming beneath 
 the beams of Christ ? Behold the rose, in which the Word was 
 made flesh. f Behold the lilies, by whose odour the way of life 
 is tracked." 
 
 Dante looked, and gave battle to the sight with his weak eyes.J 
 
 As flowers on a cloudy day in a meadow are suddenly lit up 
 by a gleam of sunshine, he beheld multitudes of splendours ef- 
 fulgent with beaming rays that smote on them from above, though 
 he could not discern the source of the effulgence. He had in- 
 voked the name of the Virgin when he looked ; and the gracious 
 fountain of the light had drawn itself higher up within the 
 heaven, to accommodate the radiance to his faculties. He then 
 beheld the Virgin herself bodily present, her who is feirest now 
 in heaven, as she was on earth ; and while his eyes were being 
 painted with her beauty, there fell on a sudden a seraphic light 
 
 * He has seen Christ in his own unreflected person. 
 1 The Virgin Mary. 
 
 t " Mi rendei 
 
 A la battaglia de' debili cigli." 
 
 " Ambo le luci mi dipinse."
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN. 155 
 
 from heaven, which, spinning into a circle as it came, formed a 
 diadem round her head, still spinning, and warbling as it spun. 
 The sweetest melody that ever drew the soul to it on earth would 
 have seemed like the splitting of a thunder-cloud, compared with 
 the music that sung around the head of that jewel of Paradise.* 
 
 " I am Angelic Love," said the light, " and I spin for joy of 
 the womb in which our Hope abided ; and ever, O Lady of 
 Heaven, must I thus attend thee, as long as thou art pleased to 
 attend thy Son, journeying in his loving-kindness from sphere to 
 sphere." 
 
 All the other splendours now resounded the name of Mary. 
 The Virgin began ascending to pursue the path of her Son ; 
 and Dante, unable to endure her beauty as it rose, turned his 
 eyes to the angelical callers on the name of Mary, who remained 
 yearning after her with their hands outstretched, as a babe yearns 
 after the bosom withdrawn from his lips. Then rising after her 
 themselves, they halted ere they went out of sight, and sung 
 " O Queen of Heaven" so sweetly, that the delight never- quitted 
 the air. 
 
 A flame now approached and thrice encircled Beatrice, singing 
 all the while so divinely, that the poet could retain no idea ex- 
 pressive of its sweetness. Mortal imagination cannot unfold 
 such wonder. It was Saint Peter, whom she had besought to 
 come down from his higher sphere, in order to catechise and dis- 
 course with her companion on the subject of faith. 
 
 The catechising and the discourse ensued, and were concluded 
 by the Apostle's giving the poet the benediction, and encircling 
 his forehead thrice with his holy light. " So well," says Dante, 
 " was he pleased with my answers."f 
 
 * " Qualunque melodia pib dolce suona 
 Qua gift, e piii a se 1' anirna tira, 
 Parebbe nube che squarciata tuona, 
 Comparata al sonar di quella lira 
 Onde si coronava il bel zaffiro 
 Del quale il ciel piu chiaro a' inzaffira." 
 
 t " Benedicendomi cantando 
 Tre volte cinse me, si com' io tacqui, 
 L* Apostolico lumc, al cui comando 
 Io avea detto ; si ncl dir gli piacqui."
 
 156 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 " If ever," continued the Florentine, " the sacred poem to 
 which " heaven and earth have set their hands, and which for 
 years past has wasted my flesh in the writing, shall prevail 
 against the cruelty that shut me out of the sweet fold in which I 
 slept like a lamb, wishing harm to none but the wolves that beset 
 it, with another voice, and in another guise than now, will I re- 
 turn, a poet, and standing by the fount of my baptism, assume 
 the crown that belongs to me ; for I there first entered on the 
 faith which gives souls to God ; and for that faith did Peter thus 
 encircle my forehead.''* 
 
 A flame enclosing Saint James now succeeded to that of Saint 
 Peter, and after greeting his predecessor as doves greet one an- 
 other, murmuring and moving round, proceeded to examine the 
 mortal visitant on the subject of Hope. The examination was 
 
 It was this passage, and the one that follows it, wliich led Foscolo to suspect 
 that Dante wished to lay claim to a divine mission ; an opinion which has ex- 
 cited great indignation amoug the orthodox. See his Discorso sul Testo, ut 
 sup. pp. 64, 77-fiO and 335-338 ; and the preface of the Milanese Editors to 
 the " Convito" of Dante, Opere Minori, I2mo, vol ii. p. xvii. Foscolo's con- 
 jecture seems hardly borne out by the context ; but I think Dante had bold- 
 ness and self-estimation enough to have advanced any claim whatsoever, 
 had events turned out as lie expected. What man but himself (supposing 
 him the believer he professed to be) would have thought of thus making him- 
 self free of the courts of Heaven, and constituting St. Peter his applauding 
 catechist ! 
 
 * The verses quoted in the preceding note conclude the twenty-fourth canto 
 of Paradise ; and those, of which the passage just given is a translation, com- 
 mence the twenty-fifth : 
 
 " Se mai continga, che '1 poema sacro 
 
 Al quale ha posto mano e cielo e terra 
 
 S\ che m' ha fatto per piii anni macro, 
 
 Vinca la crudelta che fuor mi serra 
 Del bello ovile ov' io dormi' agnello 
 Nimico a' lupi che gli danno guerra ; 
 
 Con altra voce omai, con altro vello 
 Ritornero poeta, ed in sul fonte 
 Del mio battesmo prender6 '1 capello : 
 
 Perocche lie la fede che fa conte 
 L' anime a Dio, quiv' entra' io, e poi 
 Pietro per lei si mi gir6 la fronte."
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN. 157 
 
 closed amidst resounding anthems of " Let their hope be in 
 thee ;"* and a third apostolic flame ensued, enclosing Saint John, 
 who completed the catechism with the topic of Charity. Dante 
 acquitted himself with skill throughout ; the spheres resounded 
 with songs of " Holy, holy," Beatrice joining in the warble ; and 
 the poet suddenly found Adam beside him. The parent of the 
 human race knew by intuition what ffis descendant wished to 
 learn of him ; and manifesting his assent before he spoke, as an 
 animal sometimes does by movements and quiverings of the flesh 
 within its coat, corresponding with its good-will,^ told him, that 
 his fall was not owing to the fruit which he tasted, but to the vio- 
 lation of the injunction not to taste it ; that he remained in the 
 Limbo on hell-borders upwards of five thousand years ; and that 
 the language he spoke had become obsolete before the days of 
 Nimrod. 
 
 The gentle fire of Saint Peter now began to assume an awful 
 brightness, such as the planet Jupiter might assume, if Mars and 
 it were birds, and exchanged the colour of their plumage. J Si- 
 lence fell upon the celestial choristers j and the Apostle spoke 
 thus : 
 
 " Wonder not if thou seest me change colour. Thou wilt see, 
 while I speak, all which is round about us colour in like manner. 
 He who usurps my place on earth, my place, I say, ay, mine, 
 
 * " Sperent in te." Psalm ix. 10. The English version says, " And they 
 that know thy name will put their trust in thee." 
 
 t " Tal volta un animal coverto broglia 
 SI che 1' affetto convien che si paia 
 Per lo seguir che face a lui la 'nvoglia." 
 
 A natural, but strange, and surely not sufficiently dignified image for the occa- 
 sion. It is difficult to be quite content with a former one, in which the greet- 
 ings of St. Peter and St. James are compared to those of doves murmuring 
 and sidling round about one another ; though Christian sentiment may warrant 
 it, if we do not too strongly present the Apostles to one's imagination. 
 
 t " Tal ne la sembianza sua divenne, 
 Qual diverebbe Giove, s' egli e Marte 
 Fossero augelli e camblassersi penne." 
 
 Nobody who opened the Commedia for the first time at this fantastical image 
 would suppose the author was a great poet, or expect the tremendous passage 
 that ensues !
 
 158 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 which before God is now vacant, has converted the city in 
 which my dust lies buried into a common-sewer of filth and 
 blood ; so that the fiend who fell from hence rejoices himself down 
 there." 
 
 At these words of the Apostle the whole face of Heaven was 
 covered with a blush, red as dawn or sunset ; and Beatrice 
 changed colour, like a maiden that shrinks in alarm from the re- 
 port of blame in another. The eclipse was like that which took 
 place when the Supreme died upon the Cross. 
 
 Saint Peter resumed with a voice not less awfully changed 
 than his appearance : 
 
 " Not for the purpose of being sold for money was the spouse 
 of Christ fed and nourished with my blood, and with the blood of 
 Linus, the blood of Cletus. Sextus did not bleed for it, nor 
 Pius, nor Callixtus, nor Urban ; men, for whose deaths all Chris- 
 tendom wept. They died that souls might be innocent and go to 
 Heaven. Never was it intention of ours, that the sitters in the 
 holy chair should divide one half of Christendom against the 
 other ; should turn my keys into ensigns of war against the faith- 
 ful j and stamp my very image upon mercenary and lying docu- 
 ments, which make me, here in Heaven, blush and turn cold to 
 think of. Arm of God, why sleepest thou ? Men out of Gas- 
 cony and Cahors are even now making ready to drink our blood. 
 
 lofty beginning, to what vile conclusion must thou come ! But 
 the high Providence, which made Scipio the sustainer of the Ro- 
 man sovereignty of the world, will fail not its timely succour. 
 And thou, my son, that for weight of thy mortal clothing must 
 again descend to earth, see thou that thou openest thy mouth, and 
 hidest not from others what has not been hidden from thyself." 
 
 As white and thick as the snows go streaming athwart the air 
 when the sun is in Capricorn, so the angelical spirits that had 
 been gathered in the air of Saturn streamed away after the Apos- 
 tle, as he turned with the other saints to depart ; and the eyes of 
 Dante followed them till they became viewless.* 
 
 * In spite of the unheavenly nature of invective, of something of a lurking 
 conceit in the making an eclipse out of a blush, and in the positive bathos, and 
 
 1 fear almost indecent irrelevancy of the introduction of Beatrice at all on 
 such an occasion, much more under the feeble aspect of one young lady blush-
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN. 159 
 
 The divine eyes of Beatrice recalled him to herself; and at 
 the same instant the two companions found themselves in the ninth 
 Heaven or Primum Mobile, the last of the material Heavens, and 
 the mover of those beneath it. 
 
 Here he had a glimpse of the divine essence, in likeness of a 
 point of inconceivably sharp brightness enringed with the angelic 
 hierarchies. All earth, and heaven, and nature, hung from it. 
 Beatrice explained many mysteries to him connected with that 
 sight ; and then vehemently denounced the false and foolish teach- 
 ers that quit the authority of the Bible for speculations of their 
 own, and degrade the preaching of the gospel with ribald jests, 
 and legends of Saint Anthony and his pig.* 
 
 Returning, however, to more celestial thoughts, her face be- 
 came so full of beauty, that Dante declares he must cease to en- 
 deavour to speak of it, and that he doubts whether the sight can 
 ever be thoroughly enjoyed by any save its Maker.f Her look 
 carried him upward as before, and he was now in the Empyrean, 
 or region of Pure Light ; of light made of intellect full of 
 love ; love of truth, full of joy ; joy, transcendant above all 
 sweetness. 
 
 Streams of living radiance came rushing and flashing round 
 about him, swathing him with light, as the lightning sometimes 
 enwraps and dashes against the blinded eyes ; but the light was 
 love here, and instead of injuring, gave new power to the object 
 it embraced. 
 
 ing for another, this scene altogether is a very grand one ; and the violence 
 itself of the holy invective awful. 
 
 A curious subject for reflection is here presented. What sort of pope would 
 Dante himself have made ? Would he have taken to the loving or the hating 
 side of his genius ? To the St. John or the St. Peter of his own poem ? St. 
 Francis or St. Dominic? I am afraid, all things considered, we should have 
 had in him rather a Gregory the Seventh or Julius the Second, than a Bene- 
 dict the Eleventh or a Ganganelli. What fine Church-hymns he would have 
 written ! 
 
 * She does not see (so blind is even holy vehemence !) that for the same 
 reason the denouncement itself is out of its place. The preachers brought St. 
 Anthony and his pig into their pulpits ; she brings them into Heaven ! 
 
 t " Certo io credo 
 
 Che solo il BUO fattor tutta la goda."
 
 160 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 With this new infusion of strength into his organs of vision, 
 Dante looked, and saw a vast flood of it, effulgent with flashing 
 splendours, and pouring down like a river between banks painted 
 with the loveliest flowers. Fiery living sparkles arose from it 
 on all sides, and pitched themselves into the cups of the flowers, 
 where they remained awhile, like rubies set in gold ; till inebri- 
 ated with the odours, they recast themselves into the bosom of the 
 flood ; and ever as one returned, another leaped forth. Beatrice 
 bade him dip his eyes into the light, that he might obtain power 
 to see deeper into its nature ; for the river, and the jewels that 
 sprang out of it to and fro, and the laughing flowers on the banks, 
 were themselves but shadows of the truth which they included ; 
 not, indeed, in their essential selves, but inasmuch as without fur- 
 ther assistance the beholder's eyes could not see them as they 
 were. Dante rushed to the stream as eagerly as the lips of an 
 infant to the breast, when it has slept beyond its time ; and his 
 eyelashes had no sooner touched it, than the length of the river 
 became a breadth and a circle, and its real nature lay unveiled 
 before him, like a face when a mask is taken off. It was the 
 whole two combined courts of Heaven, the angelical and the 
 human, in circumference larger than would hold the sun, and all 
 blazing beneath a light, which was reflected downwards in its 
 turn upon the sphere of the Primum Mobile below it, the mover 
 of the universe. And as a green clifFby the water's side seems 
 to delight in seeing itself reflected from head to foot with all its 
 verdure and its flowers ; so, round about on all sides, upon 
 thousands of thrones, the blessed spirits that once lived on earth 
 sat beholding themselves in the light. And yet even all these 
 together formed but the lowest part of the spectacle, which as- 
 cended above them, tier upon tier, in the manner of an immeasur- 
 able rose, all dilating itself, doubling still and doubling, and all 
 odorous with the praises of an ever-vernal sun. Into the base 
 of it, as into the yellow of the flower, with a dumb glance that 
 yet promised to speak, Beatrice drew forward her companion, and 
 said, " Behold the innumerable assemblage of the white gar- 
 ments ! Behold our city, how large its circuit ! Behold our 
 seats, which are, nevertheless, so full, that few comers are want- 
 ed to fill them ! On that lofty one at which thou art looking, sur-
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN. 161 
 
 mounted with the crown, and which shall be occupied before thou 
 joinest this bridal feast, shall be seated the soul of the great 
 Henry, who would fain set Italy right before she is prepared for 
 it.* The 'blind waywardness of which ye are sick renders ye 
 like the bantling who, while he is dying of hunger, kicks away 
 his purse. And Rome is governed by one that cannot walk in 
 the same path with such a man, whatever be the road.'j' But 
 God will not long endure him. He will be thrust down into the 
 pit with Simon Magus ; and his feet, when he arrives there, will 
 thrust down the man of Alagna still lower. " 
 
 In the form, then, of a white rose the blessed multitude of hu- 
 man souls lay manifest before the eyes of the poet ; and now he 
 observed, that the winged portion of the blest, the angels, who 
 fly up with their wings nearer to Him that fills them with love, 
 came to and fro upon the rose like bees ; now descending into its 
 bosom, now streaming back to the source of their affection. 
 Their faces were all fire, their wings golden, their garments whiter 
 than snow. Whenever they descended on the flower, they went 
 from fold to fold, fanning their loins, and communicating the 
 peace and ardour which they gathered as they gave. Dante be- 
 held all, every flight and action of the whole winged multitude, 
 without let or shadow ; for he stood in the region of light it- 
 self, and light has no obstacle where it is deservedly vouchsafed. 
 
 " Oh," cries the poet, " if the barbarians that came from the 
 north stood dumb with amazement to behold the magnificence of 
 Rome, thinking they saw unearthly greatness in the Lateran, 
 what must I have thought, who had thus come from human to 
 divine, from time to eternity, from the people of Florence to 
 beings just and sane ?" 
 
 Dante stood, without a wish either to speak or to hear. He felt 
 like a pilgrim who has arrived within the place of his devotion, 
 
 * The Emperor Henry of Luxembourg, Dante's idol ; at the close of whose 
 brief and inefficient appearance in Italy, his hopes of restoration to his country 
 were at an end. 
 
 t Pope Clement the Fifth. Dante's enemy, Boniface, was now dead, and 
 of course in Tartarus, in the red-hot tomb which the poet had prepared for him. 
 
 t Boniface himself. Pope Clement's red-hot feet are to thrust down Pope 
 Boniface into a gulf still hotter. So says the gentle Beatrice in Heaven, and 
 in the face of all that is angelical ! 
 
 12
 
 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 and who looks round about him, hoping some day to relate what 
 he sees. He gazed upwards and downwards, and on every side 
 round about, and saw movements graceful with every truth of in- 
 nocence, and faces full of loving persuasion, rich in their own 
 smiles and in the light of the smiles of others. 
 
 He turned to Beatrice, but she was gone ; gone, as a messen- 
 ger from herself told him, to resume her seat in the blessed rose, 
 which the messenger accordingly pointed out. She sat in the 
 third circle from the top, as far from Dante as the bottom of the 
 sea is from the region of thunder ; and yet he saw her as plainly 
 as if she had been close at hand. He addressed words to her of 
 thanks for all she had done for him, and a hope for her assistance 
 after death ; and she looked down at him and smiled. 
 
 The messenger was St. Bernard. He bade the poet lift his 
 eyes higher ; and Dante beheld the Virgin Mary sitting above 
 the rose, in the centre of an intense redness of light, like another 
 dawn. Thousands of angels were hanging buoyant around her, 
 each having its own distinct splendour and adornment, and all 
 were singing, and expressing heavenly mirth ; and she smiled 
 on them with such loveliness, that joy was in the eyes of all the 
 blessed. 
 
 At Mary's feet was sitting Eve, beautiful she that opened the 
 wound which Mary closed ; and at the feet of Eve was Rachel, 
 with Beatrice ; and at the feet of Rachel was Sarah, and then 
 Judith, then Rebecca, then Ruth, ancestress of him out of whose 
 penitence came the song of the Miserere ;* and so other Hebrew 
 women, down all the gradations of the flower, dividing, by the 
 line which they made, the Christians who lived before Christ from 
 those who lived after ; a line which, on the opposite side of the 
 rose, was answered by a similar one of Founders of the Church, 
 at the top of whom was John the Baptist. The rose also was di- 
 vided horizontally by a step which projected beyond the others, 
 and underneath which, known by the childishness of their looks 
 and voices, were the souls of such as were too young to have at- 
 tained Heaven by assistance of good works. 
 
 St. Bernard then directed his companion to look again at the 
 
 David.
 
 THE JOURNEY THROUGH HEAVEN. 163 
 
 Virgin, and gather from her countenance the power of beholding 
 the face of Christ as God. Her aspect was flooded with gladness 
 from the spirits around her ; while the angel who had descended 
 to her on earth now hailed her above with " Ave, Maria !" sing- 
 ing till the whole host of Heaven joined in the song. St. Bernard 
 then prayed to her for help to his companion's eyesight. Bea- 
 trice, with others of the blest, was seen joining in the prayer, 
 their hands stretched upwards ; and the Virgin, after benignly 
 looking on the petitioners, gazed upwards herself, shewing the 
 way with her own eyes to the still greater vision. Dante then 
 looked also, and beheld what he had no words to speak, or memory 
 to endure. 
 
 He awoke as from a dream, retaining only a sense of sweetness 
 that ever trickled to his heart. 
 
 Earnestly praying afterwards, however, that grace might be so 
 far vouchsafed to a portion of his recollection, as to enable him to 
 convey to his fellow-creatures ono smallest glimpse of the glory 
 of what he saw, his ardour was so emboldened by help of the very 
 mystery at whose sight he must have perished had he faltered, 
 that his eyes, unblasted, attained to a perception of the Sum of 
 Infinitude. He beheld, concentrated in one spot written in one 
 volume of Love all which is diffused, and can become the sub- 
 ject of thought and study throughout the universe all substance 
 and accident and mode all so compounded that they become one 
 light. He thought he beheld at one and the same time the one- 
 ness of this knot, and the universality of all which it implies ; 
 because, when it came to his recollection, his heart dilated, and 
 in the course of one moment he felt ages of impatience to speak 
 of it. 
 
 But thoughts as well as words failed him ; and though ever af- 
 terwards he could no more cease to yearn towards it, than he 
 could take defect for completion, or separate the idea of happiness 
 from the wish to attain it, still the utmost he could say of what 
 he remembered would fall as short of right speech as the sounds 
 of an infant's tongue while it is murmuring ovef the nipple ; for 
 the more he had looked at that light, the more he found in it to 
 amaze him, so that his brain toiled with the succession of the as- 
 tonishments. He saw, in the deep but clear self-subsistence,
 
 164 THE ITALIAN PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. 
 
 three circles of three different colours of the same breadth, one 
 of them reflecting one of the others as rainbow does rainbow, 
 and the third consisting of a fire equally breathing from both.* 
 
 O eternal Light ! thou that dwellest in thyself alone, thou alone 
 understandest thyself, and art by thyself understood, and, so un- 
 derstanding, thou laughest at thyself, and lovest. 
 
 The second, or reflected circle, as it went round, seemed to 
 be painted by its own colours with the likeness of a human face.f 
 
 But how this was done, or how the beholder was to express it, 
 threw his mind into the same state of bewilderment as the mathe- 
 matician experiences when he vainly pores over the circle to dis- 
 cover the principle by which he is to square it. 
 
 He did, however, in a manner discern it. A flash of light was 
 vouchsafed him for the purpose ; but the light left him no power 
 to impart the discernment ; nor did he feel any longer impatient 
 for the gift. Desire became absorbed in submission, moving in 
 as smooth unison as the particles of a wheel, with the Love 
 that is the' mover of the sun and the stars. J 
 
 * The Trinity. t The Incarnation. 
 
 t In the Variorum edition of Dante, ut sup. vol. iii. p. 845, we are informed 
 thai a gentleman of Naples, the Cavaliere Giuseppe de Cesare, was the first to 
 notice (not long since, I presume) the curious circumstance of Dante's having 
 terminated the three portions of his poem with the word " stars." He thinks 
 that it was done as a happy augury of life and renown to the subject. The 
 literal intention, however, seems to have been to shew us, how all his aspira- 
 tions terminated.
 
 PULCI: 
 
 Critical Notice of l)is ife an& <2knin0.
 
 CRITICAL NOTICE 
 
 PULCI'S LIFE AND GENIUS. 
 
 PULCI, who is the first genuine romantic poet, in point of time, 
 after Dante, seems, at first sight, in the juxtaposition, like farce 
 after tragedy ; and indeed, in many parts of his poem, he is not 
 only what he seems, but follows his saturnine countryman with a 
 peculiar propriety of contrast, much of his liveliest banter being 
 directed against the absurdities of Dante's theology. But hasty 
 and most erroneous would be the conclusion that he was nothing 
 but a banterer. He was a true poet of the mixed order, grave 
 as well as gay ; had a reflecting mind, a susceptible and most 
 affectionate heart ; and perhaps was never more in earnest than 
 when he gave vent to his dislike of bigotry in his most laughable 
 sallies. 
 
 Luigi Pulci, son of Jacopo Pulci and Brigida de' Bardi, was 
 of a noble family, so ancient as to be supposed to have come from 
 France into Tuscany with his hero Charlemagne. He was born 
 in Florence on the 3d of December, 1431, and was the youngest 
 of three brothers, all possessed of a poetical vein, though it did 
 not flow with equal felicity. Bernardo, the eldest, was the ear- 
 liest translator of the Eclogues of Virgil ; and Lucca wrote a 
 romance called the Cirijfo Cahaneo, and is commended for his 
 Heroic Epistles, Little else is known of these brothers ; and not 
 much more of Luigi himself, except that he married a lady of 
 the name of Lucrezia degli Albizzi ; journeyed in Lombardy 
 and elsewhere ; was one of the most intimate friends of Lorenzo 
 de Medici and his literary circle ; and apparently led a life the
 
 168 PULCI. 
 
 most delightful to a poet, always meditating some composition, 
 and buried in his woods and gardens. Nothing is known of his 
 latter days. An unpublished work of little credit (Zilioli On the 
 Italian Poets'), and an earlier printed book, which, according to 
 Tiraboschi, is of not much greater (Scardeone De Anliquitalilus 
 Urbis Patavina), say that he died miserably in Padua, and was 
 refused Christian burial on account of his impieties. It is not 
 improbable that, during the eclipse of the fortunes of the Medici 
 family, after the death of Lorenzo, Pulci may have partaken of 
 its troubles ; and there is certainly no knowing how badly his or 
 their enemies may have treated him ; but miserable ends are a 
 favourite allegation with theological opponents. The Calvinists 
 affirm of their master, the burner of Servetus, that he died like 
 a saint ; but I have seen a biography in Italian, which attributed 
 the most horrible death-bed, not only to the atrocious Genevese, 
 but to the genial Luther, calling them both the greatest villains 
 (sceleratissimi) ; and adding, that one of them (I forget which) 
 was found dashed on the floor of his bedroom, and torn limb from 
 limb. 
 
 Pulci appears to have been slender in person, with small eyes 
 and a ruddy face. I gather this from the caricature of him in 
 the poetical paper-war carried on between him and his friend 
 Matteo Franco, a Florentine canon, which is understood to have 
 been all in good humour sport to amuse their friends a peril- 
 ous speculation. Besides his share in these verses, he is sup- 
 posed to have had a hand in his brother's romance, and was 
 certainly the author of some devout poems, and of a burlesque 
 panegyric on a country damsel, La Beca, in emulation of the 
 charming poem La Nencia, the first of its kind, written by that 
 extraordinary person, his illustrious friend Lorenzo, who, in the 
 midst of his cares and glories as the balancer of the power of 
 Italy, was one of the liveliest of the native wits, and wrote songs 
 for the people to dance to in Carnival time. 
 
 The intercourse between Lorenzo and Pulci was of the most 
 familiar kind. Pulci was sixteen years older, but of a nature 
 which makes no such differences felt between associates. He 
 had known Lorenzo from the latter's youth, probably from his 
 birth is spoken of in a tone of domestic intimacy by his wife
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 169 
 
 and is enumerated by him among his companions in a very spe- 
 cial and characteristic manner in his poem on Hawking (La Cac- 
 cia col Falcone), when, calling his fellow-sportsmen about him, 
 and missing Luigi, one of them says that he has strolled into a 
 neighbouring wood, to put something which has struck his fancy 
 into a sonnet : 
 
 " ' Luigi Pulci ov' e, che non si sente T 
 
 1 Egli se n' ando dianzi in quel boschetto, 
 Che qualche fantasia ha per la mente ; 
 Vorr a fantastical forse un sonetto.' " 
 
 " And where's Luigi Pulci ? I saw him" 
 " Oh, in the wood there. Gone, depend upon it, 
 
 To vent some fancy in his brain some whim, 
 That will not let him rest till it's a sonnet" 
 
 In a letter written to Lorenzo, when the future statesman, then 
 in his seventeenth year, was making himself personally acquaint- 
 ed with the courts of Italy, Pulci speaks of himself as struggling 
 hard to keep down the poetic propensity in his friend's absence. 
 " If you were with me," he says, " I should produce heaps of 
 sonnets as big as the clubs they make of the cherry-blossoms for 
 May-day. I am always muttering some verse or other betwixt 
 my teeth ; but I say to myself, ' My Lorenzo is not here he 
 who is my only hope and refuge ;' and so I suppress it." Such 
 is the first, and of a like nature are the latest accounts we pos- 
 sess of the sequestered though companionable poet. He prefer- 
 red one congenial listener who understood him, to twenty critics 
 that were puzzled with the vivacity of his impulses. Most of the 
 learned men patronised by Lorenzo probably quarrelled with him 
 on account of it, plaguing him in somewhat the same spirit, though 
 in more friendly guise, as the Delia Cruscans and others after- 
 wards plagued Tasso ; so he banters them in turn, and takes 
 refuge from their critical rules and common-places in the larger 
 indulgence of his friend Politian and the laughing wisdom of 
 Lorenzo. 
 
 " So che andar dirtito mi bisogna, 
 Ch' io non ci mescolassi una bugia, 
 Che questa non e storia da menzogna ; 
 } Che come io esco un passo de la via,
 
 170 PULCI. 
 
 Chi gracchia, chi riprende, e chi rampogna : 
 Ognun poi mi riesce la pazzia ; 
 Tanto ch' eletto ho solitaria vita, 
 Che la turba di questi e infinita. 
 
 La mia Accademia uu tempo, o mia Ginnasia, 
 E stata volentier ne' miei boschetti ; ^ 
 
 E puossi ben veder 1' Aflrica e 1' Asia : 
 Vengon le Ninfe con lor canestretti, 
 E portanmi o narciso o colocasia ; 
 E cosi fuggo mille urban dispetti : 
 Si ch' io non torno a' vostri Areopaghi, 
 Gente pur sempre di mal dicer vaghi." 
 
 " I know I ought to make no dereliction 
 
 From the straight path to this side or to that ; 
 I know the story I relate's no fiction, 
 
 And that the moment that I quit some flat, 
 Folks are all puff, and blame, and contradiction, 
 
 And swear I never know what I'd be at ; 
 In short, such crowds, I find, can mend one's poem, 
 I live retired, on purpose not to know 'em. 
 
 Yes, gentlemen, my only ' Academe,' 
 
 My sole ' Gymnasium,' are my woods and bowers ; 
 
 Of Afric and of Asia there I dream ; 
 
 And the Nymphs bring me baskets full of flowers, 
 
 Arums, and sweet narcissus from the stream ; 
 And thus my Muse escapeth your town-hours 
 
 And town-disdains ; and I eschew your bites, 
 
 Judges of books, grim Areopagites." 
 
 He is here jesting, as Foscolo has observed, on the academy in- 
 stituted jay Lorenzo for encouraging the Greek language, doubt- 
 less with the laughing approbation of the founder, who was some- 
 times not a little troubled himself with the squabbles of his 
 literati. 
 
 Our author probably had good reason to call his illustrious 
 friend his " refuge." The Morgante Maggiore, the work which 
 has rendered the name~of~Pulci renowned, was an attempt to 
 elevate the popular and homely narrative poetry chanted in the 
 streets into the dignity of a production that should last. The 
 age was in a state of transition on all points. The dogmatic 
 authority of the schoolmen in matters of religion, which pre-
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 171 
 
 vailed in the time of Dante, had come to nought before the ad- 
 vance of knowledge in general, and the indifference of the court 
 of Rome. The Council of Trent, as Crescimbeni advised the 
 critics, had not then settled what Christendom was to believe ; 
 and men, provided they complied with forms, and admitted cer- 
 tain main articles, were allowed to think, and even in great 
 measure talk, as they pleased. The lovers of the Platonic phi- 
 losophy took the opportunity of exalting some of its dreams to an 
 influence, which at one time was supposed to threaten Christian- 
 ity itself, and which in fact had already succeeded in affecting 
 Christian theology to an extent which the scorners of Paganism 
 little suspect. Most of these Helenists pushed their admiration 
 of Greek literature to an excess. They were opposed by the 
 Virgilian predilections of Pulci's friend, Politian, who had never- 
 theless universality enough to sympathise with the delight the 
 other took in their native Tuscan, and its liveliest and most idio- 
 matic effusions. From all these circumstances in combination 
 arose, first, Pulci's determination to write a poem of a mixed or- 
 der, which should retain for him the ear of the many, and at the 
 same time give rise to a poetry of romance worthy of higher 
 auditors ; second, his banter of what he considered unessential 
 and injurious dogmas of belief, in favour of those principles of 
 the religion of charity which inflict no contradiction on the heart 
 and understanding ; third, the trouble which seems to have been 
 given him by critics, " sacred and profane," in consequence of 
 these originalities ; and lastly, a doubt which has strangely ex- 
 isted with some, as to whether he intended to write a serious or 
 a comic poem, or on any one point was in earnest at all. One 
 writer thinks he cannot have been in earnest, because he opens 
 every canto with some pious invocation ; another asserts that the 
 piety itself is a banter ; a similar critic is of opinion, that to mix 
 levities with gravities proves the gravities to have been nought, 
 and the levities all in all ; a fourth allows him to have been seri- 
 ous in his description of the battle of Roncesvalles, but says he 
 was laughing in all the rest of his poem ; while a fifth candidly 
 gives up the question, as one of those puzzles occasioned by the 
 caprices of the human mind, which it is impossible for reasonable 
 people to solve. Even Sismondi, who was well acquainted with
 
 172 PULCI. 
 
 the age in which Pulci wrote, and who, if not a profound, is gen- 
 erally an acute and liberal critic, confesses himself to be thus 
 confounded. " Pulci," he says, " commences all his cantos by 
 a sacred invocation ; and the interests of religion are constantly 
 intermingled with the adventures of his story, in a manner capri- 
 cious and little instructive. We know not how to reconcile this 
 monkish spirit with the semi-pagan character of society under 
 Lorenzo di Medici, nor whether we ought to accuse Pulci of 
 gross bigotry or of profane derision."* Sismondi did not con- 
 sider that the lively and impassioned people of the south take 
 what may be called household-liberties with the objects of their 
 worship greater than northerns can easily conceive ; that levity 
 of manner, therefore, does not always imply the absence of the 
 gravest belief; that, be this as it may, the belief may be as grave 
 on some points as light on others, perhaps the more so for that 
 reason ; and that, although some poems, like some people, are 
 altogether grave, or the reverse, there really is such a thing as 
 tragi-comedy both in the world itself and in the representations 
 of it. A jesting writer may be quite as much in earnest when 
 he professes to be so, as a pleasant companion who feels for his 
 own or for other people's misfortunes, and who is perhaps obliged 
 to affedt or resort to his very pleasantry sometimes, because he 
 feels more acutely than the gravest. The sources of tears and 
 smiles lie close to, ay and help to refine one another. If Dante 
 had been capable of more levity, he would have been guilty of 
 less melancholy absurdities. If Rabelais had been able to weep 
 
 * Literature of the South of Europe, Thomas Roscoe's Translation, vol. ii. 
 p. 54. For the opinions of other writers, here and elsewhere alluded to, see 
 Tiraboschi (who is quite frightened at him), Storia della Poesia Ilaliana, cap. 
 V. sect 25 ; Gravina, who is more so, Delia Ragion Poetica (quoted in Gin- 
 gu^ne", as below) ; Crescimbeni, Commentari Intorno all' Istoria della Poesia, 
 &c. lib. vi. cap. 3 (Mathias's edition), and the biographical additions to the 
 same work, 4to, Rome, 1710, vol. ii. part ii. p. 151, where he says that Pulci 
 was perhaps the " modestest and most temperate writer" of his age (" il pid 
 modesto e moderate") ; Ginguene", Histoire. Litteraire d'ltalie, torn iv. p. 214 ; 
 Foscolo, in the Quarterly Review, as further on ; Panizzi on the Romantic 
 Poetry of the Italians, ditto ; Stebbing, Lives of the Italian Poets, second 
 edition, vol. i. ; and the first volume of Lives of Literary and Scientific Men, 
 in Lardner's Cyclopadia.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 173 
 
 as well as to laugh, and to love as well as to be licentious, he 
 would have had faith and therefore support in something earnest, 
 and not have been obliged to place the consummation of all things 
 in a wine-bottle. People's every-day experiences might explain 
 to them the greatest apparent inconsistencies of Pulci's muse, if 
 habit itself did not blind them to the illustration. Was nobody 
 ever present in a well-ordered family, when a lively conversation 
 having been interrupted by the announcement of dinner, the com- 
 pany, after listening with the greatest seriousness to a grace de- 
 livered with equal seriousness, -perhaps by a clergyman, resumed 
 it the instant afterwards in all its gaiety, with the first spoonful 
 of soup ? Well, the sacred invocations at the beginning of Pul- 
 ci's cantos were compliances of the like sort with a custom. 
 They were recited and listened to just as gravely at Lorenzo di 
 Medici's table ; and yet neither compromised the reciters, nor 
 were at all associated with the enjoyment of the fare that ensued. 
 So with regard to the intermixture of grave and gay throughout 
 the poem. How many campaigning adventures have been writ- 
 ten by gallant officers, whose animal spirits saw food for gaiety 
 in half the circumstances that occurred, and who could crack a 
 jest and a helmet perhaps with almost equal vivacity, and yet be 
 as serious as the gravest at a moment's notice, mourn heartily 
 over the deaths of their friends, and shudder with indignation 
 and horror at the outrages committed in a captured city ? It is 
 thus that Pulci writes, full no less of feeling than of whim and 
 mirth. And the whole honest round of humanity not only war- 
 rants his plan, but in the twofold sense of the word embraces it. 
 
 If any thing more were necessary to shew the gravity with 
 which our author addressed himself to his subject, it is the fact, 
 related by himself, of its having been recommended to him by 
 Lorenzo's mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, a good and earnest wo- 
 man, herself a poetess, who wrote a number of sacred narratives, 
 and whose virtues he more than once records with the greatest 
 respect and tenderness. ^b_Jtfo'gtt^.-..CO n ^' lflAa with a ad- 
 dress respecting this lady to the Virgjn, and with a hope that her 
 " devout and sincere" spirit may obtain peace for him in Para- 
 dise. These are the last words in the book. Is it credible that 
 expressions of this kind, and employed on such an occasion,
 
 174 PULCI. 
 
 could have had no serious meaning ? or that Lorenzo listened to 
 such praises of his mother as to a jest ? 
 
 I have no doubt that, making allowance for the age in which 
 he lived, Pulci was an excellent Christian. His orthodoxy, it is 
 true, was not the orthodoxy of the times of Dante or St. Dominic, 
 nor yet of that of the Council of Trent. His opinions respect- 
 ing the mystery of the Trinity appear to have been more like 
 those of Sir Isaac Newton than of Archdeacon Travis. And as- 
 suredly he agreed with Origen respecting eternal punishment, 
 rather than with Calvin and Mr. Toplady. But a man may ac- 
 cord with Newton, and yet be thought not unworthy of the 
 " starry spheres." He may think, with Origen, that God in- 
 tends all his creatures to be ultimately happy,* and yet be con- 
 sidered as loving a follower of Christ as a " dealer of damnation 
 round the land," or the burner of a fellow-creature. 
 
 Pulci was in advance of his time on more subjects than one. 
 He pronounced the existence of a new and inhabited world, be- 
 fore the appearance of Columbus. f He made the conclusion, 
 doubtless, as Columbus did, from the speculations of more scien- 
 tific men, and the rumours of seamen ; but how rare are the 
 minds that are foremost to throw aside even the most innocent 
 prejudices, and anticipate the enlargements of the public mind ! 
 How many also are calumniated and persecuted for so doing, 
 whose memories, for the same identical reason, are loved, perhaps 
 adored, by the descendants of the calumniators ! In a public li- 
 brary, in Pulci's native place, is preserved a little withered relic, 
 to which the attention of the visitor is drawn with reverential 
 complacency. It stands, pointing upwards, under a glass-case, 
 looking like a mysterious bit of parchment ; and is the finger of 
 Galileo ; of that Galileo, whose hand, possessing that finger, is 
 supposed to have been tortured by the Inquisition for writing 
 what every one now believes. He was certainly persecuted and 
 imprisoned by the Inquisition. Milton saw and visited him un- 
 der the restraint of that scientific body in his own house. Yet 
 Galileo did more by his disclosures of the stars towards elevating 
 
 * Canto xxv. The passage will be found in the present volume, 
 t Id. And this also.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 175 
 
 our ideas of the Creator, than all the so-called saints and polemics 
 that screamed at one another in the pulpits of East and West. 
 
 Like the Commedia of Dante, Pulci's " Commedia" (for such 
 also in regard to its general cheerfulness,* and probably to its 
 mediocrity of style, he calls it) is a representative in great mea- 
 sure of the feeling and knowledge of his time ; and though not 
 entirely such in a learned arid eclectic sense, and not to be com- 
 pared to that sublime monstrosity in point of genius and power, 
 is as superior to it in liberal opinion and in a certain pervading 
 lovingness, as the author's affectionate disposition, and his coun- 
 try's advance in civilisation, combined to render it. The editor 
 of the Parnaso Italiano had reason to notice this engaging per- 
 sonal character in our author's work. He says, speaking of the 
 principal romantic poets of Italy, that the reader will " admire 
 Tasso, will adore Ariosto, but will love Pulci."f And all minds, 
 in which lovingness produces love, will agree with him. 
 
 The Morgante Maggiore is a history of the fabulous exploits 
 and death of Orlando, the great hero of Italian romance, and of 
 the wars and calamities brought on his fellow Paladins and their 
 sovereign Charlemagne by the envy, ambition, and treachery of 
 the misguided monarch's favourite, Gan of Maganza (Mayence), 
 Count of Poictiers. It is founded on the pseudo-history of Arch- 
 bishop Turpin, which, though it received the formal sanction of 
 the Church, is a manifest forgery, and became such a jest with 
 the wits, that they took a delight in palming upon it their most 
 incredible fictions. The title (Morgante the Great) seems to have 
 been either a whim to draw attention to an old subject, or the re- 
 sult of an intention to do more with the giant so called than took 
 place ; for though he is a conspicuous actor in the earlier part of 
 the poem, he dies when it is not much more than half completed. 
 
 * Canto xxvii. stanza 2. 
 
 " S' altro ajuto qui non si dimostra, 
 Sara pur tragedia la istoria nostra. 
 
 Ed io pur commedia pensato avea 
 Iscriver del mio Carlo finalmente, 
 Ed Alcuin cosi mi promettea," &c. 
 
 t ' In fine tu adorerai 1' Ariosto, tu ammirerei il Tasso, ma tu amerai il 
 Pulci." Parn. Ital. vol. ix. p. 344.
 
 176 PULCI. 
 
 Orlando, the champion of the faith, is the real hero of it, and 
 Gan the anti-hero or vice. Charlemagne, the reader hardly 
 need be told, is represented, for the most part, as a very different 
 person from what he appears in history. In truth, as Ellis and 
 Panizzi have shewn, he is either an exaggeration (still misrepre- 
 sented) of Charles Martel, the Armorican chieftan, who conquer- 
 ed the Saracens at Poictiers, or a concretion of all the Charleses 
 of the Carlovingian race, wise and simple, potent and weak.* 
 
 The story may be thus briefly told. Orlando quits the court 
 of Charlemagne in disgust, but is always ready to return to it 
 when the emperor needs his help. The best Paladins follow, to 
 seek him. He meets with and converts the giant Morgante, 
 whose aid he receives in many adventures, among which is the 
 taking of Babylon. The other Paladins, his cousin Rinaldo es- 
 pecially, have their separate adventures, all more or less mixed 
 up with the treacheries and thanklessness of Gan (for they assist 
 even him), and the provoking trust reposed in him by Charle- 
 magne ; and at length the villain crowns his infamy by luring 
 Orlando with most of the Paladins into the pass of Roncesvalles, 
 where the hero himself and almost all his companions are slain 
 by the armies of Gan's fellow-traitor, Marsilius, king of Spain. 
 They die, however, victorious ; and the two royal and noble scoun- 
 drels, by a piece of prosaical justice better than poetical, are des- 
 patched like common malefactors with a halter. 
 
 There is, perhaps, no pure invention in the whole of this en- 
 largement of old ballads and chronicles, except the characters of 
 another giant, and of a rebel angel ; for even Morgante 's history, 
 though told in a very different manner, has its prototype in the 
 fictions of the pretended archbishop.f The Paladins are well dis- 
 
 * Ellis's Specimens of Early English Poetical Romances, vol. ii. p. 287 ; 
 and Panizzi's Essay on the Romantic Narrative Poetry of the Italians, in his 
 edition of Boiardo and Ariosto, vol. i. p. 1 13. 
 
 t De Vita Caroli Magni et Rolandi Historia, &c. cap. xviii. p. 39 (Ciam- 
 pi's edition). The giant in Turpin is named Ferracutus, or Fergus. He was 
 of the race of Goliath, had the strength of forty men, and was twenty cubits 
 high. During the suspension of a mortal combat with Orlando, they discuss 
 the mysteries of the Christian faith, which its champion explains by a variety 
 of similes and the most beautiful beggings of the question ; after which the 
 giant stakes the credit of their respective beliefs on the event of their encounter.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 177 
 
 tinguished from one another ; Orlando as foremost alike in prow- 
 ess and magnanimity, Rinaldo by his vehemence, Ricciardetto by 
 his amours, Astolfo by an ostentatious rashness and self-commit- 
 tal ; but in all these respects they appear to have been made to 
 the author's hand. Neither does the poem exhibit any prevailing 
 force of imagery, or of expression, apart from popular idiomatic 
 phraseology; still less, though it has plenty of infernal magic, 
 does it present us with any magical enchantments of the alluring 
 order, as in Ariosto ; or with love stories as good as Boiardo's, or 
 even with any of the luxuries of landscape and description that 
 are to be found in both of those poets ; albeit, in the fourteenth 
 canto, there is a long catalogue raisonne of the whole animal crea- 
 tion, which a lady has worked for Rinaldo on a pavilion of silk 
 and gold. 
 
 To these negative faults must be added the positive ones of too 
 many trifling, unconnected, and uninteresting incidents (at least 
 to readers who cannot taste the flavour of the racy Tuscan 
 idiom) ; great occasional prolixity, even in the best as well as 
 worst passages, not excepting Orlando's dying speeches ; harsh- 
 ness in spite of his fluency (according to Foscolo), and even bad 
 grammar ; too many low or over- familiar forms of speech (so 
 the graver critics allege, though, perhaps, from want of animal 
 spirits or a more comprehensive discernment) ; and lastly (to say 
 nothing of the question as to the gravity or levity of the theol- 
 ogy), the strange exhibition of whole* successive stanzas, contain- 
 ing as many questions or affirmations as lines, and commencing 
 each line with the same words. They meet the eye like palisa- 
 does, or a file of soldiers, and turn truth and pathos itself into a 
 jest. They were most likely imitated from the popular ballads. 
 The following is the order of words in which a young lady thinks 
 fit tu complain of a desert, into which she has been carried away 
 by a giant. After seven initiatory O's addressed to her friends 
 and to life in general, she changes the key into E : 
 
 ; E' questa la raia patria dov 5 io nacqui? 
 E % questo il mio palagio e '1 mio castello ? 
 E % questo il nido ov' alcun tempo giacqui ? 
 E' questo il padre e '1 mio dolce fratello? 
 13
 
 178 PULCI. 
 
 . f 
 
 E % questo il popol dov' io tanto piacqui ? 
 E' questo il regno giusto antico e bello ? 
 E' questo il porto do la mia salute ? 
 E' questo il premio d' ogui mia virtute ? 
 
 Ove son or le mie purpuree veste ? 
 
 Ove son or le gemme e le ricchezze ? 
 
 Ove son or gia le nottume feste ? 
 
 Ove son or le mie delicatezze ? 
 
 Ove son or le mie compagne onesle ? 
 
 Ove son or le fuggite dolcezze ? 
 
 Ove son or le damigelle mie ? 
 
 Ove son, dico? ome, non son gia quie."* 
 
 Is this the country, then, where I was born ? 
 Is this my palace, and my castle this ? 
 Is this the nest I woke in, every morn ? 
 Is this my father's and my brother's kiss? 
 Is this the land they bred me to adorn ? 
 Is this the good old bovver of all my bliss? 
 lathis the haven of my youth and beauty ? 
 Is this the sure reward of all my duty ? 
 
 Where now are all my wardrobes and their treasures ? 
 Where now arc all my riches and my rights ? 
 Where now are all the midnight feasts and measures? 
 Where now are all the delicate delights ? 
 Where now are all the partners of my pleasures ? 
 Where now are all the sweets of sounds and sights ? 
 Where now are all my maidens ever near ? 
 Where, do I say ? Alas, alas, not here ! 
 
 There are seven more " where nows," including lovers, and 
 " proffered husbands," and " romances," and ending with the 
 startling question and answer. the counterpoint of the former 
 close, 
 
 " Ove son 1' aspre selve e i lupi adesso 
 
 E gli orsi, e i draghi, e i tigri ? Son qui presso." 
 
 Where now are all the woods and forests drear, 
 Wolves, tigers, bears, and dragons ? Alas, here ! 
 
 These are all very natural thoughts, and such, no doubt, as 
 would actually pass through the mind of the young lady, in the 
 
 * Canto xix. st. 21.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 179 
 
 candour of desolation ; but the mechanical iteration of her mode 
 of putting them renders them irresistibly ludicrous. It reminds 
 us of the wager laid by the poor queen in the play of Richard 
 the Second, when she overhears the discourse of the gardener : 
 
 " My wretchedness unto a row of pins, 
 They'll talk of state." 
 
 Did Pulci expect his friend Lorenzo to keep a grave face during 
 the recital of these passages ? Or did he flatter himself that the 
 comprehensive mind of his hearer could at one and the same 
 time be amused with the banter of some old song and the pathos 
 of the new one ?* 
 
 * When a proper name happens to be a part of the tautology, the look is 
 still more extraordinary. Orlando is remonstrating with Rinaldo on his being 
 unseasonably in love : 
 
 " Ov* e, Rinaldo, la tua gagliardia ? 
 Ov' e, Rinaldo, il tuo sommo potere ? 
 Ov' e, Rinaldo, il tuo senno di pria ? 
 Ov' e, Rinaldo, il tuo antivedere? 
 Ov' e, Rinaldo, la tua fantasia ? 
 Ov' e, Rinaldo, 1' arme e '1 tuo destriere ? 
 Ov* e, Rinaldo, la tua gloria e fama? 
 Ov* e, Rinaldo, il tuo core ? a la dama." 
 
 Canto xvi. st. 50. 
 
 Oh where, Rinaldo, is thy gagliardize ? 
 Oh where, Rinaldo, is thy might indeed ? 
 Oh where, Rinaldo, thy repute for wise ? 
 Oh where, Rinaldo, thy sagacious heed ? 
 Oh where, Rinaldo, thy free-thoughted eyes ? 
 Oh where, Rinaldo, thy good arms and steed? 
 Oh where, Rinaldo, thy renown and glory ? 
 Oh where, Rinaldo, thou ? In a love-story. 
 
 The incessant repetition of the names in the burdens of modern songs is hardly 
 so bad as this. The single line questions and answers in the Greek drama 
 were nothing to it. Yet there is a still more extraordinary play upon words in 
 canto xxiii. st. 49, consisting of the description of a hermitage. It is the only 
 one of the kind which I remember in the poem, and would have driven some 
 of our old hunters after alliteration mad with envy : 
 
 La casa cosa parea bretta e bruit a, 
 Vinta dal vcnio ; e la natta e la nolle
 
 180 PULCI. 
 
 The want both of good love-episodes and of descriptions of 
 external nature, in the Morgante, is remarkable ; for Pulci's ten- 
 derness of heart is constantly manifest, and he describes himself 
 as being almost absorbed in his woods. That he understood love 
 well in all its force and delicacy is apparent from a passage con- 
 nected with this pavilion. The fair embroiderer, in presenting it 
 to her idol Rinaldo, undervalues it as a gift which his great heart, 
 nevertheless, will not disdain to accept ; adding, with the true 
 lavishment of the passion, that " she wishes she could give him 
 the sun ;" and that if she were to say, after all, that it was her 
 own hands which had worked the pavilion, she should be wrong, 
 for Love himself did it. Rinaldo wishes to thank her, but is so 
 struck with her magnificence and affection, that the words die on 
 his lips. The way also in which another of these loving ad- 
 mirers of Paladins conceives her affection for one of them, and 
 persuades a vehemently hostile suitor quietly to withdraw his 
 claims by presenting him with a ring and a graceful speech, is in 
 
 Stilla le stelle, ch' a tetto era tutto . 
 Del pane appena ne dette ta' dotte : 
 Pere avea pure, e qualche fratta frutta ; 
 E sfina e si-ena di botto una botte : 
 Poscia per pesci lasche prese a Z' esca : 
 Ma il letto allotta a la frasca fu fresco." 
 
 This holy hole was a vile thin-built thing, 
 
 Blown by the blast ; the night nought else o'erhead 
 
 But staring stars the rude roof entering ; 
 
 Their sup of supper was no splendid spread ; 
 
 Poor pears their fare, and such-Zt&e libelling 
 
 Of quantum suff. ; their butt all but ; bad bread ; 
 
 A flash of fish instead of flush of flesh ; 
 
 Their bed a. frisk al-fresco, freezing fresh. 
 
 Really, if Sir Philip Sidney and other serious and exquisite gentlemen had not 
 sometimes taken a positively grave interest in the like pastimes of paronomasia, 
 one should hardly conceive it possible to meet with them even in tragi-comedy. 
 Did Pulci find these also in his ballad-authorities ? If his Greek-loving critics 
 made objections here, they had the advantage of him : unless indeed they too, 
 hi their Alexandrian predilections, had a sneaking regard for certain shapings 
 of verse into altars and hatchets, such as have been charged upon Theocritus 
 himself, and which might be supposed to warrant any other conceit on occa- 
 sion.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 181 
 
 a taste as high as any thing in Boiardo, and superior to the more 
 animal passion of the love in their great successor.* Yet the 
 tenderness of Pulci rather shews itself in the friendship of the 
 Paladins for one another, and in perpetual little escapes of gene- 
 rous and affectionate impulse. This is one of the great charms 
 of the Morgante. The first adventure in the book is Orlando's 
 encounter with three giants in behalf of a good abbot, in whom 
 he discovers a kinsman ; and this goodness and relationship com- 
 bined move the Achilles of Christendom to tears. Morgante, one 
 of these giants, who is converted, becomes a sort of squire to his 
 conqueror, and takes such a liking to him, that, seeing him one 
 day deliver himself not without peril out of the clutches of a 
 devil, he longs to go and set free the whole of the other world 
 from devils. Indeed there is no end to his affection for him. Ri- 
 naldo and other Paladins, meantime, cannot rest till they have 
 set out in search of Orlando. They never meet or part with 
 him without manifesting a tenderness proportionate to their valour, 
 the old Homeric candour of emotion. The devil Ashtaroth 
 himself, who is a great and proud devil, assures Rinaldo, for 
 whom he has conceived a regard, that there is good feeling (gen- 
 tilezza) even in hell ; and Rinaldo, not to hurt the feeling, an- 
 swers that he has no doubt of it, or of the capability of " friend- 
 ship" in that quarter ; and he says he is as " sorry to part with 
 him as with a brother." The passage will be found in our ab- 
 stract. There are no such devils as these in Dante ; though 
 Milton has something like them : 
 
 " Devil with devil damn'd 
 Firm concord holds : men only disagree." 
 
 It is supposed that the character of Ashtaroth, which is a very 
 
 * See, in the original, the story of Meridiana, canto vii. King Manfredonio 
 has come in loving hostility against her to endeavour to win her affection by 
 his prowess. He finds her assisted by the Paladins, and engaged by her own 
 heart to Uliviero ; and in the despair of his discomfiture, expresses a wish to 
 die by her hand. Meridiana, with graceful pity, begs his acceptance of a 
 jewel, and recommends him to go home with his army ; to which he griev- 
 ingly consents. Thus indeed is beautiful ; and perhaps I ought to have given 
 an abstract of it, as a specimen of what Pulci could have done in this way, had 
 he chosen.
 
 182 PULCI. 
 
 new and extraordinary one, and does great honour to the daring 
 goodness of Pulci's imagination, was not lost upon Milton, who 
 was not only acquainted with the poem, but expressly intimates 
 the pleasure he took in it.* Rinaldo advises this devil, as Burns 
 did Lucifer, to " take a thought and mend." Ashtaroth, who 
 had been a seraph, takes no notice of the advice, except with a 
 waving of the recollection of happier times. He bids the hero 
 farewell, and says he has only to summon him in order to receive 
 his aid. This retention of a sense of his former angelical dig- 
 nity has been noticed by Foscolo and Panizzi, the two best 
 writers on these Italian poems. f A Calvinist would call the ex- 
 pression of the sympathy " hardened." A humanist knows it to 
 be the result of a spirit exquisitely softened. An unbounded ten- 
 derness is the secret of all that is beautiful in the serious portion 
 of our author's genius. Orlando's good-natured giant weeps 
 even for the death of the scoundrel Margutte ; and the awful 
 hero himself, at whose death nature is convulsed and the heav- 
 ens open, begs his dying horse to forgive him if ever he has 
 wronged it. 
 
 A charm of another sort in Pulci, and yet in most instances, 
 perhaps, owing the best part of its charmingness to its being 
 connected with the same feeling, is his wit. Foscolo, it is true, 
 says it is, in general, more severe than refined ; and it is perilous 
 
 * " Perhaps it was from that same politic drift that the devil whipt St Je- 
 rome in a lenten dream for reading Cicero ; or else it was a fantasm bred by 
 the fever which had then seized him. For had an angel been his discipliner, 
 unless it were for dwelling too much upon Ciceronianisms, and had chastised 
 the reading and not the vanity, it had been plainly partial ; first to correct him 
 for grave Cicero, and not for scurrile Plautus, whom he confesses to have been 
 reading not long before ; next, to correct him only, and let so many more an- 
 cient fathers wax old in those pleasant and florid studies without the lash of 
 such a tutoring apparition ; insomuch that Basil teaches how some good use 
 may be made of Margites, a sportful poem, not now extant, writ by Homer ; 
 and why not then of Morgante, an Italian romance much to the same pur- 
 pose?" Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, Prose 
 Works, folio, 1697, p. 378. I quote the passage as extracted by Mr. Meri- 
 vale in the preface to his " Orlando in Roncesvalles," Poems, vol. ii. p. 41. 
 
 t Ut sup. p. 222. Foscolo's remark is to be found in his admirable article 
 on the Narrative and Romantic Poems of the Italians, in the Quarterly Re- 
 view, voL xxi. p. 525.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 183 
 
 to differ with such a critic on such a point ; for much of it, un- 
 fortunately, is lost to a foreign reader, in consequence of its de- 
 pendance on the piquant old Tuscan idiom, and on popular say- 
 ings and allusions. Yet I should think it impossible for Pulci in 
 general to be severe at the expense of some more agreeable qual- 
 ity; and I am sure that the portion of his wit most obvious to a 
 foreigner may claim, if not to have originated, at least to have 
 been very like the style of one who was among its declared ad- 
 mirers, and who was a very polished writer, Voltaire. It con- 
 sists in treating an absurdity with an air as if it were none ; or 
 as if it had been a pure matter of course, erroneously mistaken 
 for an absurdity. Thus the good abbot, whose monastery is 
 blockaded by the giants (for the virtue and simplicity of his char- 
 acter must be borne in mind), after observing that the ancient 
 fathers in the desert had not only locusts to eat, but manna, which 
 he has no doubt was rained down on purpose from heaven, la- 
 ments that the " relishes" provided for himself and his brethren 
 should have consisted of " showers of stones." The stones, 
 while the abbot is speaking, come thundering down, and he ex- 
 claims, " For God's sake, knight, come in, for the manna is fall- 
 ing !" This is exactly in the style of the Dictionnaire Philoso- 
 phique. So when Margutte is asked what he believes in, and says 
 he believes in " neither black nor blue," but in a good capon, 
 " whether roast or boiled," the reader is forcibly reminded of 
 Voltaire's Traveller, Scarmentado, who, when he is desired by 
 the Tartars to declare which of their two parties he is for, the 
 party of the black-mutton or the white-mutton, answers, that the 
 dish is " equally indifferent to him, provided it is tender." Vol- 
 taire, however, does injustice to Pulci, when he pretends that in 
 matters of belief he is like himself, a mere scoffer. The friend 
 of Lucrezia Tornabuoni has evidently the tenderest veneration 
 for all that is good and lovely in the Catholic faith ; and what- 
 ever liberties he might have allowed himself in professed extrav- 
 aganzas, when an age without Church-authority encouraged them, 
 and a reverend canon could take part in those (it must be ac- 
 knowledged) unseemly " high jinks," he never, in the Morgante, 
 when speaking in his own person, and not in that of the worst 
 characters, intimates disrespect towards any opinion which he did
 
 184 PULCI. 
 
 not hold to be irrelevant to a right faith. It is observable that 
 his freest expressions are put in the mouth of the giant Margutte, 
 the lowest of these characters, who is an invention of the author's, 
 and a most extraordinary personage. He is the first unmitigated 
 blackguard in fiction, and is the greatest as well as first. Pulci 
 is conjectured, with great probability, to have designed him as a 
 caricature of some real person ; for Margutte is a Greek who, in 
 point of morals, has been horribly brought up, and some of the 
 Greek refugees in Italy were greatly disliked for the cynicism 
 of their manners and the grossness of their lives. Margutte is a 
 glutton, a drunkard, a liar, a thief, and a blasphemer. He boasts 
 of having every vice, and no virtue except fidelity ; which is 
 meant to reconcile Morgante to his company ; but though the lat- 
 ter endures and even likes it for his amusement, he gives him to 
 understand that he looks on his fidelity as only securable by the 
 bastinado, and makes him the subject of his practical jokes. The 
 respectable giant Morgante dies of the bite of a crab, as if to 
 shew on what trivial chances depends the life of the strongest. 
 Margutte laughs himself to death at sight of a monkey putting 
 his boots on and ofF; as though the good-natured poet meant at 
 once to express his contempt of a merely and grossly anti-serious 
 mode of existence, and his consideration, nevertheless, towards 
 the poor selfish wretch who had had no better training. 
 
 To this wit and this pathos let the reader add a style of singu- 
 lar ease and fluency, rhymes often the most unexpected, but 
 never at a loss, a purity of Tuscan acknowledged by every 
 body, and ranking him among the authorities of the language, 
 and a modesty in speaking of his own pretensions equalled only 
 by his enthusiastic extolments of genius in others ; and the read- 
 er has before him the lively and affecting, hopeful, charitable, 
 large-hearted Luigi Pulci, the precursor, and in some respects 
 exemplar, of Ariosto, and, in Milton's opinion, a poet worth read- 
 ing for the " good use" that may be made of him. It has been 
 strangely supposed that his friend Politian, and Ficino the Platon- 
 ist, not merely helped him with their books (as he takes a pride in 
 telling us), but wrote a good deal of the latter part of the Mor- 
 gante, particularly the speculations in matters of opinion. As if 
 (to say nothing of the difference of style) a man of genius, how-
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 185 
 
 ever lively, did not go through the gravest reflections in the 
 course of his life, or could not enter into any theological or met- 
 aphysical question, to which he chose to direct his attention. 
 Animal spirits themselves are too often but a counterbalance to 
 the most thoughtful melancholy ; and one fit of jaundice or hyp- 
 ochondria might have enabled the poet to see more visions of the 
 unknown and the inscrutable in a single day, than perhaps ever 
 entered the imagination of the elegant Latin scholar, or even the 
 disciple of Plato.
 
 HUMOURS OF GIANTS,
 
 HUMOURS OF GIANTS. 
 
 TWELVE Paladins had the Emperor Charlemagne in his court ; 
 and the most wise and famous of them was Orlando. It is of 
 him I am about to speak, and of his friend Morgante, and of Gan 
 the traitor, who beguiled him to his death in Roncesvalles, where 
 he sounded his horn so mightily after the dolorous rout. 
 
 It was Easter, and Charles had all his court with him in Paris, 
 making high feast and triumph. There was Orlando, the first 
 among them, and Ogier the Dane, and Astolfo the Englishman, 
 and Ansuigi ; and there came Angiolin of Bayonne, and Ulivie- 
 ro, and the gentle Berlinghieri ; and there was also Avolio and 
 Avino, and Otho of Normandy, and Richard, and the wise Namo, 
 and the aged Salamon, and Walter of Monlione, and Baldwin 
 who was the son of the wretched Gan. The good emperor was 
 too happy, and oftentimes fairly groaned for joy at seeing all his 
 Paladins together. 
 
 But Fortune stands watching in secret to baffle our designs. 
 While Charles was thus hugging himself with delight, Orlando 
 governed every thing at court, and this made Gan burst with 
 envy ; so that he began one day talking with Charles after the 
 following manner : " Are we always to have Orlando for our 
 master ? I have thought of speaking to you about it a thousand 
 times. Orlando has a great deal too much presumption. Here 
 are we, counts, dukes, and kings, at your service, but not at his ; 
 and we have resolved not to be governed any longer by one so 
 much younger than ourselves. You began in Aspramont to give 
 him to understand how valiant he was, and that he did great 
 things at that fountain ; whereas, if it had not been for the good 
 Gerard, I know very well where the victory would have been. 
 The truth is, he has an eye upon the crown. This, Charles, is
 
 190 HUMOURS OF GIANTS. 
 
 the worthy who has deserved so much ! All your generals are 
 afflicted at it. As for me, I shall repass those mountains over 
 which I came to you with seventy -two counts. Do you take him 
 for a Mars ?" 
 
 Orlando happened to hear these words as he sat apart, and it 
 displeased him with the lord of Pontiers that he should speak so, 
 but much more that Charles should believe him. He would have 
 killed Gan, if Uliviero had not prevented him and taken his 
 sword out of his hand ; nay, he would have killed Charlemagne ; 
 but at last he went from Paris by himself, raging with scorn and 
 grief. He borrowed, as he went, of Ermillina the wife of Ogier, 
 the Dane's sword Cortana and his horse Rondel, and proceeded 
 on his way to Brava. His wife, Alda the Fair, hastened to em- 
 brace him ; but while she was saying, " Welcome, my Orlando," 
 he was going to strike her with his sword, for his head was be- 
 wildered, and he took her for the traitor. The fair Alda marvel- 
 led greatly, but Orlando recollected himself, and she took hold of 
 the bridle, and he leaped from his horse, and told her all that had 
 passed, and rested himself with her for some days. 
 
 He then took his leave, being still carried away by his disdain, 
 and resolved to pass over into Heathendom ; and as he rode, he 
 thought, every step of the way, of the traitor Gan ; and so, riding 
 on wherever the road took him, he reached the confines between 
 the Christian countries and the Pagan, and came upon an abbey, 
 situate in a dark place in a desert. 
 
 Now above the abbey was a great mountain, inhabited by three 
 fierce giants, one of whom was named Passamonte, another Ala- 
 bastro, and the third Morgante ; and these giants used to disturb 
 the abbey by throwing things down upon it from the mountain 
 with slings, so that the poor little monks could not go out to fetch 
 wood or water. Orlando knocked, but nobody would open till 
 the abbot was spoken to. At last the abbot came himself, and 
 opening the door bade him welcome. The good man told him 
 the reason of the delay, and said that since the arrival of the 
 giants they had been so perplexed that they did not know what 
 to do. " Our ancient fathers in the desert," quoth he, " were 
 rewarded according to their holiness. It is not to be supposed 
 that they lived only upon locusts j doubtless, it also rained man-
 
 HUMOURS OF GIANTS. 191 
 
 na upon them from heaven ; but here one is regaled with stones, 
 which the giants pour on us from the mountain. These are our 
 nice bits and relishes. The fiercest of the three, Morgante, 
 plucks up pines and other great trees by the roots, and casts 
 them on us." While they were talking thus in the cemetery, 
 there came a stone which seemed as if it would break Rondel's 
 back. 
 
 " For God's sake, cavalier," said the abbot, " come in, for the 
 manna is falling." 
 
 " My dear Abbot," answered Orlando, " this fellow, methinks, 
 does not wish to let my horse feed ; he wants to cure him of be- 
 ing restive ; the stone seems as if it came from a good arm." 
 
 " Yes," replied the holy father, " I did not deceive you. I 
 think, some day or other, they will cast the mountain itself 
 on us." 
 
 Orlando quieted his horse, and then sat down to a meal ; after 
 which he said, " Abbot, I must go and return the present that 
 has been made to my horse." The abbot with great tenderness 
 endeavoured to dissuade him, but in vain ; upon which he crossed 
 him on the forehead, and said, " Go, then ; and the blessing of 
 God be with you." 
 
 Orlando scaled the mountain, and came where Passamonte 
 was, who, seeing him alone, measured him with his eyes, and 
 asked him if he would stay with him for a page, promising to 
 make him comfortable. "Stupid Saracen," said Orlando,"! 
 come to you, according to the will of God, to be your death, and 
 not your foot-boy. You have displeased his servants here, and 
 are no longer to be endure"d, dog that you are !" 
 
 The giant, finding himself thus insulted, ran in a fury to his 
 weapons ; and returning to Orlando, slung at him a large stone, 
 which struck him on the head with such force, as not only made 
 his helmet ring again, but felled him to the earth. Passamonte 
 thought he was dead. " What could have brought that paltry 
 fellow here ?" said he, as he turned away. 
 
 But Christ never forsakes his followers. While Passamonte 
 was going away, Orlando recovered, and cried aloud, " How 
 now, giant ? do you fancy you have killed me ? Turn back, 
 for unless you have wings, your escape is out of the question,
 
 192 HUMOURS OF GIANTS. 
 
 dog of a renegade !" The giant, greatly marvelling, turned 
 back ; and stooping to pick up a stone, Orlando, who had Cor- 
 tana naked in his hand, cleft his skull ; upon which, cursing 
 Mahomet, the monster tumbled, dying and blaspheming, to the 
 ground. Blaspheming fell the sour-hearted and cruel wretch ; 
 but Orlando, in the mean while, thanked the Father and the 
 Word. 
 
 The Paladin went on, seeking for Alabastro, the second giant ; 
 who, when he saw him, endeavoured to pluck up a greal piece 
 of stony earth by the roots. " Ho, ho !" cried Orlando, " you 
 too are for throwing stones, are you ?" Then Alabastro took 
 his sling, and flung at him so large a fragment as forced Orlando 
 to defend himself, for if it had struck him, he would no more 
 have needed a surgeon ;* but collecting his strength, he thrust 
 his sword into the giant's breast, and the loggerhead fell dead. 
 
 Now Morgante, the only surviving brother, had a palace made, 
 after giant's fashion, of earth, and boughs, and shingles, in which 
 he shut himself up at night. Orlando knocked, and disturbed 
 him from his sleep, so that he came staring to the door like a 
 madman, for he had had a bewildering dream. 
 
 " Who knocks there ?" quoth he. 
 
 " You will know too soon," answered Orlando; " I am come to 
 make you do penance for your sins, like your brothers. Divine 
 Providence has sent me to avenge the wrongs of the monks upon 
 the whole set of you. Doubt it not ; for Passamonte and Ala- 
 bastro are already as cold as a couple of pilasters." 
 
 " Noble knight," said Morgante, " do me no ill ; but if you 
 are a Christian, tell me in courtesy who you are." 
 
 " I will satisfy you of my faith," replied Orlando ; " I adore 
 Christ ; and if you please, you may adore him also." 
 
 " I have had a strange vision," replied Morgante, with a low 
 voice : " I was assailed by a dreadful serpent, and called upon 
 Mahomet in vain j then I called upon your God who was cruci- 
 
 * A common pleasantry in the old romances. " Galaor went in, and then 
 the halberders attacked him on one side, and the knight on the other. He 
 snatched an axe from one, and turned to the knight and smote him, so that he 
 had no need of a surgeon." Southey'e Amadis of Gaul, vol. i. p. 146.
 
 HUMOURS OF GIANTS. 193 
 
 fied, and he succoured me, and I was delivered from the serpent j 
 BO I am disposed to become a Christian." 
 
 " If you keep in this mind," returned Orlando, " you shall 
 worship the true God, and come with me and be my companion, 
 and I will love you with perfect love. Your idols are false and 
 vain ; the true God is the God of the Christians. Deny the un- 
 just and villanous worship of your Mahomet, and be baptised in 
 the name of my God, who alone is worthy." 
 
 " I am content," said Morgante. 
 
 Then Orlando embraced him, and said, " I will lead you to 
 the abbey." 
 
 " Let us go quickly," replied Morgante, for he was impatient 
 to make his peace with the monks. 
 
 Orlando rejoiced, saying, " My good brother, and devout with- 
 al, you must ask pardon of the abbot ; for God has enlightened 
 you, and accepted you, and he would have you practise hu- 
 mility." 
 
 " Yes," said Morgante, " thanks to you, your God shall hence- 
 forth be my God. Tell me your name, and afterwards dispose 
 of me as you will." And he told him that he was Orlando. 
 
 " Blessed Jesus be thanked," said the giant, " for I have al- 
 ways heard you called a perfect knight ; and as I said, I will 
 follow you all my life long." 
 
 And so conversing, they went together towards the abbey ; and 
 by the way Orlando talked with Morgante of the dead giants, and 
 sought to comfort him, saying they had done the monks a thousand 
 injuries, and "our Scripture says the good shall be rewarded and 
 the evil punished, and we must submit to the will of God. The 
 doctors of our Church," continued he, " are all agreed, that if 
 those who are glorified in heaven were to feel pity for their mise- 
 rable kindred who lie in such horrible confusion in hell, their 
 beatitude would come to nothing ; and this, you see, would plainly 
 be unjust on the part of God. But such is the firmness of their 
 faith, that what appears good to him appears good to them. Do 
 what he may, they hold it to be done well, and that it is impossi- 
 ble for him to err; so that if their very fathers and mothers 
 are suffering everlasting punishment, it does not disturb them 
 
 14
 
 194 HUMOURS OF GIANTS. 
 
 an atom. This is the custom, I assure you, in the choirs 
 bore.*** 
 
 " A word to the wise," said Morgante ; " you shall see if I 
 grieve for my brethren, and whether or no I submit to the will of 
 God, and behave myself like an angel. So dust to dust ; and 
 now let us enjoy ourselves. I will cut off their hands, all four 
 of them, and take them to these holy monks, that they may be 
 sure they are dead, and not fear to go out alone into the desert. 
 They will then be certain also that the Lord has purified me, and 
 taken me out of darkness, and assured to me the kingdom of 
 
 * " Sons! i nostri dottori accordati, 
 Pigliando tutti una conclusions, 
 Che que' che son nel ciel glorificati, 
 S' avessin nel pensier compassione 
 De' miseri parent! che danuati 
 Son ne lo inferno in gran confusione, 
 La lor feliciti nulla sarebbe : 
 E vedi che qui ingiusto Iddio parebbe. 
 
 Ma egli anno posto in Gesii ferma spene ; 
 E tanto pare a lor, quanto a lui pare : 
 AfFerman cio ch' e' fa, che facci bene, 
 E che non possi in iiessun modo errare : 
 Se padre o madre e ne 1' eterne pene, 
 Di questo non si po?son conturbare : 
 Che quel che piace a Dio, sol piace a loro : 
 Questo s' osserva ne 1' eterno coro. 
 
 Al savio suol bastar poche parole, 
 Disse Morgante : tu il potrai vedere, 
 De' miei fratelli, Orlando, se mi duole, 
 E s' io m' accorder6 di Dio al volere, 
 Come tu di che in ciel servar si suole : 
 Morti co" morti ; or pensiam di godere : 
 Io vo' tagliar le mani a tutti quanti, 
 E porterolle a que' monaci santi." 
 
 This doctrine, which is horrible blasphemy in the eyes of natural feeling, is 
 good reasoning in Catholic and Calvinistic theology. They first make the 
 Deity's actions a necessity from more barbarous assumption, then square them 
 according to a dictum of the Councils, then compliment him by laying all that 
 he has made good and kindly within us mangled and mad at his feet. Mean- 
 tune they think themselves qualified to denounce Moloch and Jugghanaut !
 
 HUMOURS OF GIANTS. 19$ 
 
 heaven." So saying, the giant cut off the hands of his brethren, 
 and left their bodies to the beasts and birds. 
 
 They went to the abbey, where the abbot was expecting Orlan- 
 do in great anxiety ; but the monks not knowing what had hap- 
 pened, ran to the abbot in great haste and alarm, saying, " Will 
 you suffer this giant to come in ?" And when the abbot saw 
 the giant, he changed countenance. Orlando, perceiving him 
 thus disturbed, made haste and said, " Abbot, peace be with you ! 
 The giant is a Christian ; he believes in Christ, and has renoun- 
 ced his false prophet, Mahomet." And Morgante shewing the 
 hands in proof of his faith, the abbot thanked Heaven with great 
 contentment of mind. 
 
 The abbot did much honour to Morgante, comparing him with 
 St. Paul ; and they rested there many days. One day, wander- 
 ing over the house, they entered a room where the abbot kept a 
 quantity of armour ; and Morgante saw a bow which pleased 
 him, and he fastened it on. Now there was in the place a great 
 scarcity of water ; and Orlando said, like his good brother, 
 " Morgante, I wish you would fetch us some water." " Com- 
 mand me as you please," said he ; and placing a great tub on 
 his shoulders, he went towards a spring at which he had been ac- 
 customed to drink, at the foot of the mountain. Having reached 
 the spring, he suddenly heard a great noise in the forest. He 
 took an arrow from the quiver, placed it in the bow, and raising 
 his head, saw a great herd of swine rushing towards the spring 
 where he stood. Morgante shot one of them clean through the 
 head, and laid him sprawling. Another, as if in revenge, ran to- 
 wards the giant, without giving him time to use a second arrow ; 
 so he lent him a cuff on the head which broke the bone, and 
 killed him also ; which stroke the rest seeing fled in haste through 
 the valley. Morgante then placed the tub full of water upon one 
 of his shoulders, and the two porkers on the other, and returned 
 to the abbey which was at some distance, without spilling a 
 drop. 
 
 The monks were delighted to see the fresh water, but still 
 more the pork ; for there is no animal to whom food comes amiss. 
 They let their breviaries therefore go to sleep a while, and fell
 
 196 HUMOURS OF GIANTS. 
 
 heartily to work, so that the cats and dogs had reason to lament 
 the polish of the bones. 
 
 " But why do we stay here doing nothing ?" said Orlando one 
 day to Morgante ; and he shook hands with the abbot, and told 
 him he must take his leave. " I must go," said he, " and make 
 up for lost time. I ought to have gone long ago, my good father ; 
 but I cannot tell you what I feel within me, at the content I have 
 enjoyed here in your company. I shall bear in mind and in 
 heart with me for ever the abbot, the abbey, and this desert, so 
 great is the love they have raised in me in so short a time. The 
 great God, who reigns above, must thank you for me, in his own 
 abode. Bestow on us your benediction, and do not forget us in 
 your prayers." 
 
 When the abbot heard the County Orlando talk thus, his heart 
 melted within him for tenderness, and he said, " Knight, if we 
 have failed in any courtesy due to your prowess and great gen- 
 tleness (and indeed what we have done has been but little), pray 
 put it to the account of our ignorance, and of the place which we 
 inhabit. We are but poor men of the cloister, better able to re- 
 gale you with masses and orisons and paternosters, than with din- 
 ners and suppers. You have so taken this heart of mine by the 
 many noble qualities I have seen in you, that I shall be with you 
 still wherever you go ; and, on the other hand, you will always 
 be present here with me. This seems a contradiction, but you 
 are wise, and will take my meaning discreetly. You have saved 
 the very life and spirit within us ; for so much perplexity had 
 those giants cast about our place, that the way to the Lord among 
 us was blocked up. May He who sent you into these woods re- 
 ward the justice and piety by which we are delivered from our 
 trouble. Thanks be to him and to you. We shall all be discon- 
 solate at your departure. We shall grieve that we cannot detain 
 you among us for months and years ; but you do not wear these 
 weeds ; you bear arms and armour ; and you may possibly 
 merit as well in carrying those, as in wearing this cap. You 
 read your Bible, and your virtue has been the means of shewing 
 the giant the way to heaven. Go in peace then, and prosper, 
 whoever you may be. I do not seek your name ; but if ever I 
 am asked who it was that came among us, I shall say that it was
 
 HUMOURS OF GIANTS. 197 
 
 an angel from God. If there is any armour or other thing that 
 you would have, go into the room where it is, and take it." 
 
 " If you have any armour that would suit my companion," 
 replied Orlando, " that I will accept with pleasure." 
 
 " Come and see," said the abbot ; and they went to a room 
 that was full of armour. Morgante looked all about, but could 
 find nothing large enough, except a rusty breast-plate, which 
 fitted him marvellously. It had belonged to an enormous giant, 
 who was killed there of old by Orlando's father, Milo of Angrante. 
 There was a painting on the wall which told the whole story : 
 how the giant had laid cruel and long siege to the abbey ; and 
 how he had been overthrown at last by the great Milo. Orlando 
 seeing this, said within himself: "O God, unto whom all things 
 are known, how came Milo here, who destroyed this giant?" 
 And reading certain inscriptions which were there, he could no 
 longer keep a firm countenance, but the tears ran down his 
 cheeks. 
 
 When the abbot saw Orlando weep, and his brow redden, and 
 the light of his eyes become child-like for sweetness, he asked 
 him the reason ; but, finding him still dumb with emotion, he 
 said, " I do not know whether you are overpowered by admira- 
 tion of what is painted in this chamber. You must know that I 
 am of high descent, though not through lawful wedlock. I be- 
 lieve I may say I am nephew or sister's son to no less a man 
 than that Rinaldo, who was so great a Paladin in the world, 
 though my own father was not of a lawful mother. Ansuigi 
 was his name ; my own, out in the world, was Chiaramonte ; 
 and this Milo was my father's brother. Ah, gentle baron, for 
 blessed Jesus' sake, tell me what name is yours !" 
 
 Orlando, all glowing with affection, and bathed in tears, re- 
 plied, " My dear abbot and cousin, he before you is your Orlan- 
 do." Upon this, they ran for tenderness into each other's arms, 
 weeping on both sides with a sovereign affection, too high to be 
 expressed. The abbot was so overjoyed, that he seemed as if 
 he would never have done embracing Orlando. " By what for- 
 tune," said the knight, " do I find you in this obscure place ? 
 Tell me, my dear abbot, how was it you became a monk, and 
 did not follow arms, like myself and the rest of us ?"
 
 198 HUMOURS OF GIANTS. 
 
 " It is the will of God," replied the abbot, hastening to give 
 his feelings utterance. <; Many and divers are the paths he 
 points out for us by which to arrive at his city ; some walk it 
 with the sword some with pastoral staff. Nature makes the 
 inclination different, and therefore there are different ways for 
 us to take : enough if we all arrive safely at one and the same 
 place, the last as well as the first. We are all pilgrims through 
 many kingdoms. We all wish to go to Rome, Orlando ; but we 
 go picking out our journey through different roads. Such is the 
 trouble in body and soul brought upon us by that sin of the old 
 apple. Day and night am I here with my book in hand day 
 and night do you ride about, holding your sword, and sweating 
 oft both in sun and shadow ; and all to get round at last to the 
 home from which we departed I say, all out of anxiety and 
 hope to get back to our home of old." And the giant hearing 
 them talk of these things, shed tears also. 
 
 The Paladin and the giant quitted the abbey, the one on horse- 
 back and the other on foot, and journeyed through the desert till 
 they came to a magnificent castle, the door of which stood open. 
 They entered, and found rooms furnished in the most splendid 
 manner beds covered with cloth of gold, and floors rejoicing in 
 variegated marbles. There was even a feast prepared in the 
 saloon, but nobody to eat it, or to speak to them. 
 
 Orlando suspected some trap, and did not quite like it ; but 
 Morgante thought nothing worth considering but the feast. 
 " Who cares for the host," said he, " when there's such a din- 
 ner ? Let us eat as much as we can, and bear off the rest. I 
 always do that when I have the picking of castles." 
 
 They accordingly sat down, and being very hungry with their 
 day's journey, devoured heaps of the good things before them, 
 eating with all the vigour of health, and drinking to a pitch of 
 weakness.* They sat late in this manner enjoying themselves, 
 and then retired for the night into rich beds. 
 
 * " E furno al here infermi, al mangiar sani." 
 
 I am not sure that I am right in my construction of this passage. Perhaps 
 Pulci means to say, that they had the appetites of men in health, and the 
 thirst of a fever.
 
 HUMOURS OF GIANTS. 199 
 
 But what was their astonishment in the morning at finding that 
 they could not get out of the place ! There was no door. All 
 the entrances had vanished, even to any feasible window. 
 
 " We must be dreaming," said Orlando. 
 
 " My dinner was no dream, I'll swear," said the giant. " As 
 for the rest, let it be a dream if it pleases." 
 
 Continuing to search up and down, they at length found a 
 vault with a tomb in it ; and out of the tomb came a voice, say- 
 ing, "You must encounter with me, or stay here for ever. Lift, 
 therefore, the stone that covers me." 
 
 " Do you hear that ?" said Morgante ; " I'll have him out, if 
 it's the devil himself. Perhaps it's two devils, Filthy-dog and 
 Foul-mouth, or Itching and Evil-tail."* 
 
 " Have him out," said Orlando, " whoever he is, even were it 
 as many devils as were rained out of heaven into the centre." 
 
 Morgante lifted up the stone, and out leaped, surely enough, a 
 devil in the likeness of a dried-up dead body, black as a coal. 
 Orlando seized him, and the devil grappled with Orlando. Mor- 
 gante was for joining him, but the Paladin bade him keep back. 
 It was a hard struggle, and the devil grinned and laughed, till the 
 giant, who was a master of wrestling, could bear it no longer : so 
 he doubled him up, and, in spite of all his efforts, thrust him back, 
 into the tomb. 
 
 " You'll never get out," said the devil, " if you leave me shut 
 up." 
 
 " Why not ?" inquired the Paladin. 
 
 " Because your giant's baptism and my deliverance must go 
 together," answered the devil. " If he is not baptised, you can 
 have no deliverance ; and if I am not delivered, I can prevent it 
 still, take my word for it." 
 
 Orlando baptised the giant. The two companions then issued 
 forth, and hearing a mighty noise in the house, looked back, and 
 saw it all vanished. _.- . 
 
 "I could find it in my heart," said Morgante, "to go down to 
 those same regions below, and make all the devils disappear in 
 like manner. Why shouldn't we do it ? We'd set free all the 
 
 * Cagnazzo, Farfarello, Libicocco, and Malacoda ; names of devils in Dante.
 
 200 HUMOURS OF GIANTS. 
 
 poor souls there. Egad, I'd cut off Minos's tail I'd pull out 
 Charon's beard by the roots make a sop of Phlegyas, and a sup 
 of Phlegethon unseat Pluto, kill Cerberus and the Furies with 
 a punch of the face a-piece and set Beelzebub scampering like 
 a dromedary." 
 
 " You might find more trouble than you wot of," quoth Orlando, 
 ' and get worsted besides. Better keep the straight path, than 
 thrust your head into out-of-the-way places." 
 
 Morgante took his lord's advice, and went straightforward with 
 him through many great adventures, helping him with loving 
 good-will as often as he was permitted, sometimes as his pioneer, 
 and sometimes as his finisher of troublesome work, such as a 
 slaughter of some thousands of infidels. Now he chucked a spy 
 into a river now felled a rude ambassador to the earth (for he 
 didn't stand upon ceremony) now cleared a space round him in 
 battle with the clapper of an old bell which he had found at the 
 monastery now doubled up a king in his tent, and bore him 
 away, tent and all, and a Paladin with him, because he would not 
 let the Paladin go. 
 
 In the course of these services, the giant was left to take care 
 of a lady, and lost his master for a time ; but the office being at 
 an end, he set out to rejoin him, and, arriving at a cross-road, met 
 with a very extraordinary personage. 
 
 This was a giant huger than himself, swarthy-faced, horrible, 
 brutish. He came out of a wood, and appeared to be journeying 
 somewhere. Morgante, who had the great bell-clapper in his 
 hand above-mentioned, struck it on the ground with astonishment, 
 as much as to say, " Who the devil is this ?" and then set him- 
 self on a stone by the way-side to observe the creature. 
 
 " What's your name, traveller ?" said Morgante, as it came 
 up. 
 
 " My name's Margutte," said the phenomenon. " I intended 
 to be a giant myself, but altered my mind, you see, and stopped 
 half-way ; so that I am only twenty feet or so." 
 
 " I'm glad to see you," quoth his brother-giant. " But tell me, 
 are you Christian or Saracen ? Do you believe in Christ or in 
 Apollo .?" 
 
 " To tell you the truth," said the other, " I believe neither in
 
 HUMOURS OF GIANTS. 201 
 
 black nor blue, but in a good capon, whether it be roast or boiled. 
 I believe sometimes also in butter, and, when I can get it, in new 
 wine, particularly the rough sort ; but, above all, I believe in 
 wine that's good and old. Mahomet's prohibition of it is all 
 moonshine. I am the son, you must know, of a Greek nun and 
 a Turkish bishop ; and the first thing I learned was to play the 
 fiddle. I used to sing Homer to it. I was then concerned in a 
 brawl in a mosque, in which the old bishop somehow happened to 
 be killed ; so I tied a sword to my side, and went to seek my 
 fortune, accompanied by all the possible sins of Turk and Greek. 
 People talk of the seven deadly sins ; but I have seventy-seven 
 that never quit me, summer or winter; by which you may judge 
 of the amount of my venial ones. I am a gambler, a cheat, a 
 ruffian, a highwayman, a pickpocket, a glutton (at beef or blows) ; 
 have no shame whatever ; love to let every body know what I 
 can do ; lie, besides, about what I can't do ; have a particular 
 attachment to sacrilege ; swallow perjuries like figs ; never give 
 a farthing to any body, but beg of every body, and abuse them 
 into the bargain ; look upon not spilling a drop of liquor as the 
 chief of all the cardinal virtues ; but must own I am not much 
 given to assassination, murder being inconvenient ; and one thing 
 I am bound to acknowledge, which is, that I never betrayed a 
 messmate." 
 
 " That's as well," observed Morgante ; " because you see, as 
 you don't believe in any thing else, I'd have you believe in this 
 bell-clapper of mine. So now, as you have been candid with me, 
 and I am well instructed in your ways, we'll pursue our journey 
 together." 
 
 The best of giants, in those days, were not scrupulous in their 
 modes of living ; so that one of the best and one of the worst got 
 on pretty well together, emptying the larders on the road, and 
 paying nothing but douses on the chops. When they could find 
 no inn, they hunted elephants and crocodiles. Morgante, who was 
 the braver of the two, delighted to banter, and sometimes to cheat, 
 Margutte ; and he ate up all the fare ; which made the other, 
 notwithstanding the credit he gave himself for readiness of wit 
 and tongue, cut a very sorry figure, and seriously remonstrate : 
 " I reverence you, said Margutte, " in other matters ; but in eat-
 
 202 HUMOURS OF GIANTS. 
 
 ing, you really don't behave well. He who deprives me of my 
 share at meals is no friend ; at every mouthful of which he robs 
 me, I seem to lose an eye. I'm for sharing every thing to a nicety, 
 even if it be no better than a fig." 
 
 " You are a fine fellow," said Morgante ; " you gain upon me 
 very much. You are ' the master of those who know.' "* 
 
 So saying, he made him put some wood on the fire, and per- 
 form a hundred other offices to render every thing snug ; and 
 then he slept : and next day he cheated his great scoundrelly com- 
 panion at drink, as he had done the day before at meat ; and 
 the poor shabby devil complained ; and Morgante laughed till 
 he was ready to burst, and again and again always cheated him. 
 
 There was a levity, nevertheless, in Margutte, which restored 
 his spirits on the slightest glimpse of good fortune ; and if he real- 
 ised a hearty meal, he became the happiest, beastliest, and most 
 confident of giants. The companions, in the course of their jour- 
 ney, delivered a damsel from the clutches of three other giants. 
 She was the daughter of a great lord ; and when she got home, 
 she did honour to Morgante as to an equal, and put Margutte into 
 the kitchen, where he was in a state of bliss. He did nothing but 
 swill, stufF, surfeit, be sick, play at dice, cheat, filch, go to sleep, 
 guzzle again, laugh, chatter, and tell a thousand lies. 
 
 Morgante took leave of the young lady, who made him rich 
 presents. Margutte, seeing this, and being always drunk and im- 
 pudent, daubed his face like a Christmas clown, and making up 
 to her with a frying-pan in his hand, demanded " something for 
 the cook." The fair hostess gave him a jewel : and the vaga- 
 bond shewed such a brutal eagerness in seizing it with his filthy 
 hands, and making not the least acknowledgment, that when they 
 got out of the house, Morgante was ready to fell him to the earth. 
 He called him scoundrel and poltroon, and said he had disgraced 
 him for ever. 
 
 " Softly !" said the brute-beast. " Didn't you take me with 
 you, knowing what sort of fellow I was 1 Didn't I tell you I had 
 every sin and shame under heaven ; and have I deceived you by 
 the exhibition of a single virtue ?" 
 
 * " H maestro di color che sanno." A jocose application of Dante's praise 
 of Aristotle.
 
 HUMOURS OF GIANTS. 203 
 
 Morgante could not help laughing at a candour of this excess- 
 ive nature. So they went on their way till they came to a wood, 
 where they rested themselves by a fountain, and Margutte fell 
 fast asleep. He had a pair of boots on, which Morgante felt 
 tempted to draw off, that he might see what he would do on wa- 
 king. He accordingly did so, and threw them to a little distance 
 among the bushes. The sleeper awoke in good time, and, look- 
 ing and searching round about, suddenly burst into roars of laugh- 
 ter. A monkey had got the boots, and sat pulling them on and 
 off, making the most ridiculous gestures. The monkey busied 
 himself, and the light-minded drunkard laughed ; and at every 
 fresh gesticulation of the new boot- wearer, the laugh grew louder 
 and more tremendous, till at length it was found impossible to 
 be restrained. The glutton had a laughing fit. In vain he 
 tried to stop himself; in vain his fingers would have loosened the 
 buttons of his doublet, to give his lungs room to play. They 
 couldn't do it ; so he laughed and roared till he burst. The snap 
 was like the splitting of a cannon. Morgante ran up to him, but 
 it was of no use. He was dead. 
 
 Alas ! it was not the only death ; it was not even the most trivial 
 cause of a death. Giants are big fellows, but Death's a bigger, 
 though he may come in a little shape. Morgante had succeeded 
 in joining his master. He helped him to take Babylon ; he kill- 
 ed a whale for him at sea that obstructed his passage j he played 
 the part of a main-sail during a storm, holding out his arms and a 
 great hide ; but on coming to shore, a crab bit him in the heel ; 
 and behold the lot of the great giant he died ! He laughed, and 
 thought it a very little thing, but it proved a mighty one. " He 
 made the East tremble," said Orlando j " and the bite of a crab 
 has slain him !" 
 
 O life of ours, weak, and a fallacy !* 
 
 Orlando embalmed his huge friend, and had him taken to Bab- 
 ylon, and honourably interred ; and after many an adventure, in 
 which he regretted him, his own days were closed by a far baser, 
 though not so petty a cause. 
 
 How shall I speak of it ? exclaims the poet. How think of 
 
 * " O vita nostra, debole e fallace !"
 
 204 HUMOURS OF GIANTS. 
 
 the horrible slaughter about to fall on the Christians and their 
 greatest men, so that not a dry eye shall be left in France ? How 
 express my disgust at the traitor Gan, whose heart a thousand 
 pardons from his sovereign, and the most undeserved rescues of 
 him by the warrior he betrayed, could not shame or soften? 
 How mourn the weakness of Charles, always deceived by him, 
 and always trusting ? How dare to present to my mind the good, 
 the great, the ever-generous Orlando, brought by "the traitor into 
 the doleful pass of Roncesvalles and the hands of myriads of his 
 enemies, so that even his superhuman strength availed not to deliver 
 him out of the slaughter-house, and he blew the blast with his 
 dying breath, which was the mightiest, the farthest heard, and 
 the most melancholy sound that ever came to the ears of the un- 
 deceived ? 
 
 Gan was known well to every body but his confiding sove- 
 reign. The Paladins knew him well ; and in their moments of 
 indignant disgust often told him so, though they spared him the 
 consequences of his misdeeds, and even incurred the most frightful 
 perils to deliver him out of the hands of his enemies. But he 
 was brave ; he was in favour with the sovereign, who was also 
 their kinsman ; and they were loyal and loving men, and knew 
 that the wretch envied them for the greatness of their achieve- 
 ments, and might do the state a mischief; so they allowed them- 
 selves to take a kind of scornful pleasure in putting up with him. 
 Their cousin Malagigi, the enchanter, had himself assisted Gan, 
 though he knew him best of all, and had prophesied that the in- 
 numerable endeavours of his envy to destroy his king and coun- 
 try would bring some terrible evil at last to all Christendom. 
 The evil, alas ! is at hand. The doleful time has come. It will 
 be followed, it is true, by a worse fate of the wretch himself; but 
 not till the valleys of the Pyrenees have run rivers of blood, and 
 all France is in mourning.
 
 WILEY AND PUTNAM'S 
 
 LIBRARY OF 
 
 CHOICE READING, . 
 STORIES FROM THE ITALIAN POETS, 
 
 PART II.
 
 STORIES 
 
 FROM THE 
 
 ITALIAN POETS: 
 
 BEING A SUMMARY IN PROSE 
 
 OP THE 
 
 POEMS OF DANTE, PULCI, BOIARDO, ARIOSTO AND TASSO; 
 
 WITH COMMENTS THROUGHOUT, 
 OCCASIONAL PASSAGES VERSIFIED, 
 
 AND 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICES OF THE LIVES AND GENIUS OF THE AUTHORS. 
 BY LEIGH HUNT. 
 
 IN THREE PARTS. 
 PART II. 
 
 NEW YORK : 
 WILEY AND PUTNAM, 161 BROADWAY. 
 
 1846.
 
 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES.
 
 Notice. 
 
 THIS is the 
 
 " sad and fearful story 
 Of the Roncesvalles fight ;" 
 
 an event which national and religious exaggeration impressed deeply on the 
 popular mind of Europe. Hence Italian romances and Spanish ballads : hence 
 the famous passage in Milton, 
 
 " When Charlemain with all his peerage fell 
 By Fontarabbia :" 
 
 hence Dante's record of the dolorosa rotta (dolorous rout) in the Inferno, where 
 he compares the voice of Nimrod with the horn sounded by the dying Orlando : 
 hence the peasant in Cervantes, who is met by Don Quixote singing the bat- 
 tle as he comes along the road in the morning : and hence the song of Roland 
 actually thundered forth by the army of William the Conqueror as they ad- 
 vanced against the English. 
 
 But Charlemagne did not "fall," as Milton has stated. Nor does Pulci 
 make him do so. In this respect, if in little else, the Italian poet adhered to 
 the fact. The whole story is a remarkable instance of what can be done by 
 poetry and popularity towards misrepresenting and aggrandising a petty though 
 striking adventure. The simple fact was the cutting off the rear of Charle- 
 magne's army by the revolted Gascons, as he returned from a successful expe- 
 dition into Spain. Two or three only of his nobles perished, among whom was 
 his nephew Roland, the obscure warden of his marches of Brittany. But Charle- 
 magne was the temporal head of Christendom ; the poets constituted his 
 nephew its champion ; and hence all the glories and superhuman exploits of 
 the Orlando of Pulci and Ariosto. The whole assumption of the wickedness 
 of the Saracens, particularly of the then Saracen king of Spain, whom Pulci's 
 authority, the pseudo- Archbishop, Turpin, strangely called Marsilius, was noth- 
 ing but a pious fraud ; the pretended Marsilius having been no less a person 
 than the great and good Abdoulrahmaun the First, who wrested the dominion 
 of that country out of the hands of the usurpers of his family-rights. Yet so 
 potent and long-lived are the most extravagant fictions, when genius has put 
 its heart into them, that to this day we read of the devoted Orlando and his 
 friends not only with gravity, but with the liveliest emotion.
 
 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 
 
 A MISERABLE man am 1, cries the poet ; for Orlando, beyond a 
 doubt, died in Roncesvalles ; and die therefore he must in my 
 verses. Altogether impossible is it to save him. I thought to 
 make a pleasant ending of this my poem, so that it should be hap- 
 pier somehow, throughout, than melancholy ; but though Gan 
 will die at last, Orlando must die before him, and that makes a 
 tragedy of all. I had a doubt, whether, consistently with the 
 truth, I could give the reader even that sorry satisfaction ; for at 
 the beginning of the dreadful battle, Orlando's cousin, Rinaldo, 
 who is said to have joined it before it was over, and there, as well 
 as afterwards, to have avenged his death, was far away from the 
 seat of slaughter, in Egypt j and how was I to suppose that he 
 could arrive soon enough in the valleys of the Pyrenees ? But 
 an angel upon earth shewed me the secret, even Angelo Poli- 
 ziano, the glory of his age and country. He informed me how 
 Arnauld, the Provencal poet, had written of this very matter, and 
 brought the Paladin from Egypt to France by means of the won- 
 derful skill in occult science possessed by his cousin Malagigi 
 a wonder to the ignorant, but not so marvellous to those who 
 know that all the creation is full of wonders, and who have differ- 
 ent modes of relating the same events. By and by, a great many 
 things will be done in the world, of which we have no conception 
 now, and people will be inclined to believe them works of the 
 devil, when, in fact, they will be very good works, and contribute 
 to angelical effects, whether the devil be forced to have a hand in 
 them or not ; for evil itself can work only in subordination to 
 good. So listen when the astonishment comes, and reflect and 
 think the best. Meantime, we must speak of another and more
 
 208 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 
 
 truly devilish astonishment, and of the pangs of mortal flesh and 
 blood. 
 
 The traitor Gan, for the fiftieth time, had secretly brought the 
 infidels from all quarters against his friend and master, the Em- 
 peror Charles ; and Charles, by the help of Orlando, had con- 
 quered them all. The worst of them, Marsilius, king of Spain, 
 had agreed to pay the court of France tribute ; and Gan, in spite 
 of all the suspicions he excited in this particular instance, and his 
 known villahy at all times, had succeeded in persuading his cre- 
 dulous sovereign to let him go ambassador into Spain, where he 
 put a final seal to his enormities, by plotting the destruction of his 
 employer, and the special overthrow of Orlando. Charles was 
 now old and white-haired, and Gan was so too ; but the one was 
 only confirmed in his credulity, and the other in his crimes. The 
 traitor embraced Orlando over and over again at taking leave, 
 praying him to write if he had anything to say before the ar- 
 rangements with Marsilius, and taking such pains to seem loving 
 and sincere, that his villany was manifest to every one but the 
 old monarch. He fastened with equal tenderness on Uliviero, 
 who smiled contemptuously in his face, and thought to himself, 
 " You may make as many fair speeches as you choose, but you 
 lie." All the other Paladins who were present thought the same, 
 and they said as much to the emperor ; adding, that on no account 
 should Gan be sent ambassador to Marsilius. But Charles was 
 infatuated. His beard and his credulity had grown old together. 
 
 Gan was received with great honour in Spain by Marsilius. 
 The king, attended by his lords, came fifteen miles out of Sara- 
 gossa to meet him, and then conducted him into the city amid 
 tumults of delight. There was nothing for several days but 
 balls, and games, and exhibitions of chivalry, the ladies throwing 
 flowers on the heads of the French knights, and the people shout- 
 ing " France ! France ! Mountjoy and St. Denis !" 
 
 Gan made a speech, " like a Demosthenes," to King Marsilius 
 in public ; but he made him another in private, like nobody but 
 himself. The king and he were sitting in a garden ; they were 
 traitors both, and began to understand, from one another's looks, 
 that the real object of the ambassador was yet to be discussed. 
 Marsilius accordingly assumed a more than usually cheerful and
 
 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 209 
 
 confidential aspect ; and, taking his visitor by the hand, said, 
 " You know the proverb, Mr. Ambassador ' At dawn, the moun. 
 tain ; afternoon, the fountain.' Different things at different 
 hours. So here is a fountain to accommodate us." 
 
 ' It was a very beautiful fountain, so clear that you saw your 
 face in it as in a mirror ; and the spot was encircled with fruit- 
 trees that quivered with the fresh air. Gan praised it very 
 much, contriving to insinuate, on one subject, his satisfaction 
 with the glimpses he got into another. Marsilius understood 
 him ; and as he resumed the conversation, and gradually en- 
 couraged a mutual disclosure of their thoughts, Gan, without 
 appearing to look him in the face, was enabled to do so by con- 
 templating the royal visage in the water, where he saw its ex- 
 pression become more and more what he desired. Marsilius, 
 meantime, saw the like symptoms in the face of Gan. By de- 
 grees, he began to touch on that dissatisfaction with Charlemagne 
 and his court, which he knew was in both their minds : he 
 lamented, not as to the ambassador, but as to the friend, the inju- 
 ries which he said he had received from Charles in the repeated 
 attacks on his dominions, and the emperor's wish to crown 
 Orlando king of them ; till at length he plainly uttered his belief, 
 that if that tremendous Paladin were but dead, good men would 
 get their rights, and his visitor and himself have all things at 
 their disposal. 
 
 Gan heaved a sigh, as if he was unwillingly compelled to 
 allow the force of what the king said ; but, unable to contain 
 himself long, he lifted up his face, radiant with triumphant wick- 
 edness, and exclaimed, " Every word you utter is truth. Die he 
 must ; and die also must Uliviero, who struck me that foul blow 
 at court. Is it treachery to punish affronts like those ? I have 
 planned every thing I have settled every thing already with 
 their besotted master. Orlando could not be expected to be 
 brought hither, where he has been accustomed to look for a 
 crown ; but he will come to the Spanish borders to Ronces- 
 valles for the purpose of receiving the tribute. Charles will 
 await him, at no great distance, in St. John Pied de Port. Or- 
 lando will bring but a small band with him ; you, when you 
 
 15
 
 210 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 
 
 meet him, will have secretly your whole army at your back. 
 You surround him ; and who receives tribute then ?" 
 
 The new Judas had scarcely uttered these words, when the 
 delight of him and his associate was interrupted by a change in 
 the face of nature. The sky was suddenly overcast ; it thun- 
 dered and lightened ; a laurel was split in two from head to foot ; 
 the fountain ran into burning blood ; there was an earthquake, 
 and the carob-tree under which Gan was sitting, and which was 
 of the species on which Judas Iscariot hung himself, dropped 
 some of its fruit on his head. The hair of the head rose in 
 horror. 
 
 Marsilius, as well as Gan, was appalled at this omen ; but on 
 assembling his soothsayers, they came to the conclusion that the 
 laurel-tree turned the omen against the emperor, the successor of 
 the Caesars ; though one of them renewed the consternation of 
 Gan, by saying that he did not understand the meaning of the 
 tree of Judas, and intimating that perhaps the ambassador could 
 explain it. Gan relieved his consternation with anger ; the habit 
 of wickedness prevailed over all considerations ; and the king 
 prepared to march for Roncesvalles at the head of all his forces. 
 
 Gan wrote to Charlemagne, to say how humbly and properly 
 Marsilius was coming to pay the tribute into the hands of Orlando, 
 and how handsome it would be of the emperor to meet him half 
 way, as agreed upon, at St. John Pied de Port, and so be ready 
 to receive him, after the payment, at his footstool. He added a 
 brilliant account of the tribute and its accompanying presents. 
 They included a crown in the shape of a garland which had a 
 carbuncle in it that gave light in darkness ; two lions of an " im- 
 measurable length, and aspects that frightened every body ;" 
 some " lively buffalos," leopards, crocodiles, and giraffes ; arms 
 and armour of all sorts ; and apes and monkeys seated among the 
 rich merchandise that loaded the backs of the camels. This im- 
 aginary treasure contained, furthermore, two enchanted spirits, 
 called " Floro and Faresse," who were confined in a mirror, and 
 were to tell the emperor wonderful things, particularly Floro 
 (for there is nothing so nice in its details as lying) ; and Or- 
 lando was to have heaps of caravans full of Eastern wealth, and 
 a hundred white horses, all with saddles and bridles of gold.
 
 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 211 
 
 There was a beautiful vest, too, for Uliviero, all over jewels, 
 worth ten thousand " seraffi," or more. 
 
 The good emperor wrote in turn to say how pleased he was 
 with the ambassador's diligence, and that matters were arranged 
 precisely as he wished. His court, however, had its suspicions 
 still. Nobody could believe that Gan had not some new mischief 
 in contemplation. Little, nevertheless, did they imagine, after the 
 base endeavours he had but lately made against them, that he had 
 immediately plotted a new and greater one, and that his object in 
 bringing Charles into the neighbourhood of Roncesvalles was to 
 deliver him more speedily into the hands of TVIarsilius, in the event 
 of the latter's destruction of Orlando. 
 
 Orlando, however, did as his lord and sovereign desired. He 
 went to Roncesvalles, accompanied by a moderate train of war- 
 riors, not dreaming of the atrocity that awaited him. Gan him- 
 self, meantime, had hastened on to France before Marsilius, in 
 order to shew himself free and easy in the presence of Charles, 
 and secure the success of his plot ; while Marsilius, to make as- 
 surance doubly sure, brought into the passes of Roncesvalles no 
 less than three armies, who were successively to fall on the Pa- 
 ladin, in case of the worst, and so extinguish him with numbers. 
 He had also, by Gan's advice, brought heaps of wine and good 
 cheer to be set before his victims in the first instance ; " for that," 
 said the traitor, " will render the onset the more effective, the feast- 
 ers being unarmed ; and, supposing prodigies of valour to await 
 even the attack of your second army, you will have no trouble 
 with your third. One thing, however, I must not forget," added 
 he ; " my son Baldwin is sure to be with Orlando ; you must 
 take care of his life for my sake." 
 
 " I give him this vest off my own body," said the king ; " let 
 him wear it in the battle, and have no fear. My soldiers shall 
 be directed not to touch him." 
 
 Gan went away rejoicing to France. He embraced the court 
 and his sovereign all round, with the air of a man who had 
 brought them nothing but blessings ; and the old king wept for 
 very tenderness and delight. 
 
 " Something is going on wrong, and looks very black," thought 
 Malagigi, the good wizard ; " and Rinaldo is not here, and it is in-
 
 212 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 
 
 dispensably necessary that he should be. I must find out where 
 he is, and Ricciardetto too, and send for them with all speed, and 
 at any price." 
 
 Malagigi called up, by his art, a wise, terrible, and cruel spirit, 
 named Ashtaroth ; no light personage to deal with no little spirit, 
 such as plays tricks with you like a fairy. A much blacker vis- 
 itant was this. 
 
 " Tell me, and tell me truly of Rinaldo," said Malagigi to the 
 spirit. 
 
 Hard looked the demon at the Paladin, and said nothing. His 
 aspect was clouded and violent. He wished to see whether his 
 summoner retained all the force of his art. 
 
 The enchanter, with an aspect still cloudier, bade Ashtaroth 
 lay down that look. While giving this order, he also made signs 
 indicative of a disposition to resort to angrier compulsion ; and 
 the devil, apprehending that he would confine him in some hateful 
 place, loosened his tongue, and said, " You have not told me what 
 you desire to know of Rinaldo." 
 
 " I desire to know what he has been doing, and where he is," 
 returned the enchanter. 
 
 " He has been conquering and baptising the world, east and 
 west," said the demon, " and is now in Egypt with Ricciardetto." 
 
 " And what has Gan been plotting with Marsilius," inquired 
 Malagigi, " and what is to come of it ?" 
 
 " On neither of those points can I enlighten you," said the 
 devil. " I was not attending to Gan at the time, and we fallen 
 spirits know not the future. Had we done so, we had not been 
 so willing to incur the danger of falling. All I discern is, 
 that, by the signs and comets in the heavens, something dreadful 
 is about to happen something very strange, treacherous, and 
 bloody ; and that Gan has a seat ready prepared for him in hell." 
 
 " Within three days," cried the enchanter, loudly, " fetch Ri- 
 naldo and Ricciardetto into the pass of Roncesvalles. Do it, and 
 I hereby undertake never to summon thee more." 
 
 " Suppose they will not trust themselves with me," said the 
 spirit. 
 
 " Enter Rinaldo's horse, and bring him, whether he trust thee 
 or not."
 
 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 213 
 
 " It shall be done," returned the demon ; " and my serving, 
 devil Foul-Mouth, or Fire-Red, shall enter the horse of Ricciar- 
 detto. Doubt it not. Am I not wise, and thyself powerful ?" 
 
 There was an earthquake, and Ashtaroth disappeared. 
 
 Marsilius has now made his first movement towards the de- 
 struction of Orlando, by sending before him his vassal-king Blan- 
 chardin with his presents of wines and other luxuries. The 
 temperate but courteous hero took them in good part, and distrib- 
 uted them as the traitor wished ; and then Blanchardin, on pre- 
 tence of going forward to salute Charlemagne at St. John Pied de 
 Port, returned and put himself at the head of the second army, 
 which was the post assigned him by his liege lord. The device 
 on his flag was an " Apollo" on a field azure. King Falseron, 
 whose son Orlando had slain in battle, headed the first army, the 
 device of which was a black figure of the devil Belphegor on a 
 dapple-grey field. The third army was under King Balugante, 
 and had for ensign a Mahomet with golden wings in a field of 
 red. Marsilius made a speech to them at night, in which he con- 
 fessed his ill faith, but defended it on the ground of Charles's 
 hatred of their religion, and of the example of "Judith and Holo- 
 fernes." He said that he had not come there to pay tribute, and 
 sell his countrymen for slaves, but to make all Christendom pay 
 tribute to them as conquerors ; and he concluded by recommend- 
 ing to their good-will the son of his friend Gan, whom they would 
 know by the vest he had sent him, and who was the only soul 
 among the Christians they were to spare. 
 
 This son of Gan, meantime, and several of the Paladins who 
 were disgusted with Charles's credulity, and anxious at all events 
 to be with Orlando, had joined the hero in the fated valley ; so 
 that the little Christian host, considering the tremendous valour 
 of their lord and his friends, and the comparative inefficiency of 
 that of the infidels, were at any rate not to be sold for nothing. 
 Rinaldo, alas ! the second thunderbolt of Christendom, was des- 
 tined not to be there in time to save their lives. He could only 
 avenge the dreadful tragedy, and prevent still worse consequences 
 to the whole Christian court and empire. The Paladins had in 
 vain begged Orlando to be on his guard against treachery, and 
 send for a more numerous body of men. The great heart of the
 
 214 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 
 
 Champion of the Faith was unwilling to think the worst as long 
 as he could help it. He refused to summon aid that might be 
 superfluous ; neither would he do any thing but what his liege 
 lord had desired. And yet he could not wholly repress a misgiv- 
 ing. A shadow had fallen on his heart, great and cheerful as it 
 was. The anticipations of his friends disturbed him, in spite of 
 the face with which he met them. I am not sure that he did not, 
 by a certain instinctive foresight, expect death itself; but he felt 
 bound not to encourage the impression. Besides, time pressed ; 
 the moment of the looked-for tribute was at hand ; and little 
 combinations of circumstances determine often the greatest events. 
 
 King Blanchardin had brought Orlando's people a luxurious 
 supper ; King Marsilius was to arrive early next day with the 
 tribute ; and Uliviero accordingly, with the morning sun, rode 
 forth to reconnoitre, and see if he could discover the peaceful 
 pomp of the Spanish court in the distance. Guottibuoffi was with 
 him, a warrior who had expected the very worst, and repeatedly 
 implored Orlando to believe it possible. Uliviero and he rode up 
 the mountain nearest them, and from the top of it beheld the first 
 army of Marsilius already forming in the passes. 
 
 " O Guottibuoffi !" exclaimed he, " behold thy prophecies come 
 true ! behold the last day of the glory of Charles ! Every where 
 I see the arms of the traitors around us. I feel Paris tremble all 
 the way through France, to the ground beneath my feet. O 
 Malagigi, too much in the right wert thou ! O devil Gan, this 
 then is the consummation of thy good offices !" 
 
 Uliviero put spurs to his horse, and galloped back down the 
 mountain to Orlando. 
 
 " Well," cried the hero, " what news ?" 
 
 " Bad news," said his cousin ; " such as you would not hear 
 of yesterday. Marsilius is here in arms, and all the world has 
 come with him." 
 
 The Paladins pressed round Orlando, and entreated him to 
 sound his horn, in token that he needed help. His only answer 
 was, to mount his horse, and ride up the mountain with San- 
 sonetto. 
 
 As soon, however, as he cast forth his eyes and beheld what 
 was round about him, he turned in sorrow, and looked down into
 
 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 215 
 
 Roncesvalles, and said, " valley, miserable indeed ! the blood 
 that is shed in thee this day will colour thy name for ever." 
 
 Many of the Paladins had ridden after him, and they again 
 pressed him to sound his horn, if only in pity to his own people. 
 He said, " If Caesar and Alexander were here, Scipio and Han- 
 nibal, and Nebuchadnezzar with all his flags, and Death stared 
 me in the face with his knife in his hand, never would I sound 
 my horn for the baseness of fear." 
 
 Orlando's little camp we're furious against the Saracens. They 
 armed themselves with the greatest impatience. There was 
 nothing but lacing of helmets and mounting of horses ; and good 
 Archbishop Turpin went from rank to rank, exhorting and en- 
 couraging the warriors of Christ. Accoutrements and habili- 
 ments were put oji the wrong way ; words and deeds mixed in 
 confusion ; men running against one another out of very absorp- 
 tion in themselves ; all the place full of cries of " Arm ! arm ! 
 the enemy !" and the trumpets clanged over all against the 
 mountain-echoes. 
 
 Orlando and his captains withdrew for a moment to consulta- 
 tion. He fairly groaned for sorrow, and at first had not a word 
 to say ; so wretched he felt at having brought his people to die 
 in Roncesvalles. 
 
 Uliviero spoke first. He could not resist the opportunity of 
 comforting himself a little in his despair, with referring to his 
 unheeded advice. 
 
 " You see, cousin," said he, " what has come at last. Would 
 to God you had attended to what I said ; to what Malagigi said ; 
 to what we all said ! I told you Marsilius was nothing but an 
 anointed scoundrel. Yet forsooth, he was to bring us tribute ! 
 and Charles is this moment expecting his mummeries at St. John 
 Pied de Port ! Did ever any body believe a word that Gan said, 
 but Charles ? And now you see this rotten fruit has come to a 
 head ; this medlar has got its crown." 
 
 Orlando said nothing in answer to Uliviero ; for in truth he had 
 nothing to say. He broke away to give orders to the camp ; 
 bade them take refreshment ; and then addressing both officers 
 and men, he said, " I confess, that if it had entered my heart to 
 conceive the king of Spain to be such a villain, never would you
 
 216 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 
 
 have seen this day. He has exchanged with me a thousand 
 courtesies and good words ; and 1 thought that the worse ene- 
 mies we had been before, the better friends we had become now. 
 I fancied every human being capable of this kind of virtue on a 
 good opportunity, saving, indeed, such base-hearted wretches as 
 can never forgive their very forgivers ; and of these I certainly 
 did not suppose him to be one. Let us die, if we must die, like 
 honest and gallant men ; so that it shall be said of us, it was only 
 our bodies that died. It becomes our souls to be invincible, and 
 our glory immortal. Our motto must be, ' A good heart and no 
 hope.' The reason why I did not sound the horn was, partly be- 
 cause I thought it did not become us, and partly because our liege 
 lord could be of little use, even if he heard it. Let Gan have 
 his glut of us like a carrion crow ; but let him find us under 
 heaps of his Saracens, an example for all time. Heaven, my 
 friends, is with us, if earth is against us. Methinks I see it open 
 this moment, ready to receive our souls amidst crowns of glory ; 
 and therefore, as the champion of God's church, I give you my 
 benediction ; and the good archbishop here will absolve you ; 
 and so, please God, we shall all go to Heaven and be happy." 
 
 And with these words Orlando sprang to his horse, crying, 
 " Away against the Saracens !" but he had no sooner turned his 
 face than he wept bitterly, and said, " O holy Virgin, think not 
 of me, the sinner Orlando, but have pity on these thy servants." 
 
 Archbishop Turpin did as Orlando said, giving the whole band 
 his benediction at once, and absolving them from their sins, so 
 that every body took comfort in the thought of dying for Christ, 
 and thus they embraced one another, weeping ; and then lance 
 was put to thigh, and the banner was raised that was won>in the 
 jousting at Aspramont. 
 
 And now with a mighty dust, and an infinite sound of horns, 
 and tambours, and trumpets, which came filling the valley, the 
 first army of the infidels made its appearance, horses neighing, 
 and a thousand pennons flying in the air. King Falseron led 
 them on, saying to his officers, " Now, gentlemen, recollect what 
 I said. The first battle is for the leaders only ; and, above all, 
 let nobody dare to lay a finger on Orlando. He belongs to my-
 
 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 217 
 
 self. The revenge of my son's death is mine. I will cut the 
 man down that comes between us." 
 
 " Now, friends," said Orlando, " every man for himself, and 
 St. Michael for us all. There is no one here that is not a perfect 
 knight." 
 
 And he might well say it.; for the flower of all France was 
 there, except Rinaldo and Ricciardetto ; every man a picked man 
 all friends and constant companions of Orlando. There was 
 Richard of Normandy, and Guottibuoffi, and Uliviero, and Count 
 Anselm, and Avolio, and Avino, and the gentle Berlinghieri, and 
 his brother, and Sansonetto, and the good Duke Egibard, and As- 
 tolfo the Englishman, and Angiolin of Bayona, and all the other 
 Paladins of France, excepting those two whom I have mentioned. 
 And so the captains of the little troop and of the great array sat 
 looking at one another, and singling one another out, as the latter 
 came on ; and then either side began raising their war-cries, and 
 the mob of the infidels halted, and the knights put spear in rest, 
 and ran for a while, two and two in succession, each one against 
 the other. 
 
 Astolfo was the first to move. He ran against Arlotto of Soria ; 
 and Angiolin then ran against Malducco ; and Mazzarigi the 
 Renegade came against Avino ; and Uliviero was borne forth by 
 his horse Rondel, who couldn't stand still, against Malprimo, the 
 first of the captains of Falseron. 
 
 And now lances began to be painted red, without any brush 
 but themselves ; and the new colour extended itself to the buck- 
 lers, and the cuishes, and the cuirasses, and the trappings of the 
 steeds. 
 
 Astolfo thrust his antagonist's body out of the saddle, and his 
 soul into the other world ; and Angiolin gave and took a terrible 
 blow with Malducco ; but his horse bore him onward ; and Avino 
 had something of the like encounter with Mazzarigi ; but Uliviero, 
 though he received a thrust which hurt him, sent his lance right 
 through the heart of Malprimo. 
 
 Falseron was daunted at this blow. " Verily," thought he, 
 ' this is a miracle." Uliviero did not press on among the Sara- 
 cens, his wound was too painful ; but Orlando now put himself 
 and his whole band into motion, and you may guess what an up-
 
 218 THE BATTLE OF RONCES^ALLLES. 
 
 roar ensued. The sound of the rattling of the blows and helmets 
 was as if the forge of Vulcan had been thrown open. Falseron 
 beheld Orlando coming so furiously, that he thought him a Luci- 
 fer who had burst his chain, and was quite of another mind than 
 when he proposed to have him all to himself. On the contrary, 
 he recommended himself to his gods ; and turning away, begged 
 for a more auspicious season of revenge. But Orlando hailed 
 and arrested him with a terrible voice, saying, " O thou traitor ! 
 Was this the end to which old quarrels were made up ? Dost 
 thou not blush, thou and thy fellow-traitor Marsilius, to have 
 kissed me on the cheek like a Judas, when last thou wert in 
 France?" 
 
 Orlando had never shewn such anger in his countenance as he 
 did that day. He dashed at Falseron with a fury so swift, and 
 at the same time a mastery of his lance so marvellous, that though 
 he plunged it in the man's body so as instantly to kill him, the 
 body did not move in the saddle. The hero himself, as he rush- 
 ed onwards, was fain to see the end of a stroke so perfect, and, 
 turning his horse back, he touched the carcass with his sword, 
 and it fell on the instant. They say, that it had no sooner fallen 
 than it disappeared. People got off their horses to lift up the body, 
 for it seemed to be there still, the armour being left ; but when 
 they came to handle the armour, it was found as empty as the 
 shell that is cast by a lobster. O new, and strange, and porten- 
 tous event ! proof manifest of the anger with which God regards 
 treachery. 
 
 When the first infidel army beheld their leader dead, such fear 
 fell upon them, that they were for leaving the field to the Pala- 
 dins ; but they were unable. Marsilius had drawn the rest of 
 his forces round the valley like a net, so that their shoulders were 
 turned in vain. Orlando rode into the thick of them, with Count 
 Anselm by his side. He rushed like a tempest ; and wherever 
 he went, thunderbolts fell upon helmets. The Paladins drove 
 here and there after them, each making a whirlwind round about 
 him and a bloody circle. Uliviero was again in the melee ; and 
 Walter of Amulion threw himself into it ; and Baldwin roared 
 like a lion ; and Avino and Avolio reaped the wretches' heads 
 like a turnip-field ; and blows blinded men's eyes ; and Arch-
 
 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 219 
 
 bishop Turpin himself had changed his crozier for a lance, and 
 chased a new flock before him to the mountains. 
 
 Yet what could be done against foes without number ? Multi- 
 tudes fill up the spaces left by the dead without stopping. Mar. 
 silius, from his anxious and raging post, constantly pours them in, 
 The Paladins are as units to thousands. Why tarry the horses 
 of Rinaldo and Ricciardetto ? 
 
 The horses did not tarry ; but fate had been quicker than en- 
 chantment. Ashtaroth, nevertheless, had presented himself to Ri- 
 naldo in Egypt, as though he had issued out of a flash of light- 
 ning. After telling his mission, and giving orders to hundreds of 
 invisible spirits round about him (for the air was full of them), 
 he and Foul-Mouth, his servant, entered the horses of Rinaldo and 
 Ricciardetto, which began to neigh and snort and leap with the 
 fiends within them, till off" they flew through the air over the pyr- 
 amids, crowds of spirits going like a tempest before them. Ric- 
 ciardetto shut his eyes at first, on perceiving himself so high in 
 the air ; but he speedily became used to it, though he looked down 
 on the sun at last. In this manner they passed the desert, and 
 the sea-coast, and the ocean, and swept the tops of the Pyrenees, 
 Ashtaroth talking to them of wonders by the way ; for he was 
 one of the wisest of the devils, and knew a great many things 
 which were then unknown to man. He laughed, for instance, as 
 they went over sea, at the notion, among other vain fancies, 
 that nothing was to be found, beyond the pillars of Hercules ; 
 " for," said he, " the earth is round, and the sea has an even sur- 
 face all over it ; and there are nations on the other side of the 
 globe, who walk with their feet opposed to yours, and worship 
 other gods than the Christians." 
 
 " Hah !" said Rinaldo ; " and may I ask whether they can be 
 saved ?" 
 
 " It is a bold thing to ask," said the devil ; " but do you take 
 the Redeemer for a partisan, and fancy he died for you only ? 
 Be assured he died for the whole world, Antipodes and all. Per- 
 haps not one soul will be left out the pale of salvation at last, but 
 the whole human race adore the truth, and find mercy. The 
 Christian is the only true religion ; but Heaven loves all good- 
 ness that believes honestly, whatsoever the belief may be."
 
 220 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 
 
 Rinaldo was mightily taken with the humanity of the devil's 
 opinions ; but they were now approaching the end of their jour- 
 ney, and began to hear the noise of the battle ; and he could no 
 longer think of any thing but the delight of being near Orlando, 
 and plunging into the middle of it. 
 
 " You shall be in the very heart of it instantly," said his bear- 
 er. " I love you, and would fain do all you desire. Do not fancy 
 that all nobleness of spirit is lost among us people below. You 
 know what the proverb says, ' There's never a fruit, however de- 
 generate, but will taste of its stock.' I was of a different order 
 
 of beings once, and But it is as well not to talk of happy 
 
 times. Yonder is Marsilius ; and there goes Orlando. Farewell, 
 and give me a place in your memory." 
 
 Rinaldo could not find words to express his sense of the devil's 
 good- will, nor that of Foul-Mouth himself. He said : " Ashta- 
 roth, I am as sorry to part with you as if you were a brother ; 
 and I certainly do believe that nobleness of spirit exists, as you say, 
 among your people below. I shall be glad to see you both some- 
 times, if you can come ; and I pray God (if my poor prayer be 
 worth any thing) that you may all repent and obtain his pardon ; 
 for without repentance, you know, nothing can be done for you." 
 
 " If I might suggest a favour," returned Ashtaroth, " since you 
 are so good as to wish to do me one, persuade Malagigi to free me 
 from his service, and I am yours for ever. To serve you will be 
 a pleasure to me. You will only .have to say, ' Ashtaroth,' and 
 my good friend here will be with you in an instant." 
 
 " I am obliged to you," cried Rinaldo, " and so is my brother. 
 I will write Malagigi, not merely a letter, but a whole packet-full 
 of your praises ; and so I will to Orlando ; and you shall be set 
 free, depend on it, your company has been so perfectly agree- 
 able." 
 
 " Your humble servant," said Ashtaroth, and vanished with his 
 companion like lightning. 
 
 But they did not go far. 
 
 There was a little chapel by the road-side in Roncesvalles, 
 which had a couple of bells ; and on the top of that chapel did 
 the devils place themselves, in order that they might catch the 
 souls of the infidels as they died, and so carry them off to the in-
 
 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 221 
 
 fernal regions. Guess if their wings had plenty to do that day ! 
 Guess if Minos and Rhadamanthus were busy, and Charon sung 
 in his boat, and Lucifer hugged himself for joy. Guess, also, if 
 the tables in heaven groaned with nectar and ambrosia, and good 
 old St. Peter had a dry hair in his beard. 
 
 The two Paladins, on their horses, dropped right into the mid- 
 dle of the Saracens, and began making such havoc about them, 
 that Marsilius, who overlooked the fight from a mountain, thought 
 his soldiers had turned one against the other. He therefore de- 
 scended in fury with his third army ; and Rinaldo, seeing him 
 coming, said to Ricciardetto, " We had better be off here, and 
 join Orlando ;" and with these words, he gaye his horse one turn 
 round before he retreated, so as to enable his sword to make a 
 bloody circle about him ; arid stories say, that he sheared off 
 twenty heads in the twirl of it. He then dashed through the as- 
 tonished beholders towards the battle of Orlando, who guessed it 
 could be no other than his cousin, and almost dropped from his 
 horse, out of desire to meet him. Ricciardetto followed Rinaldo ; 
 and Uliviero coming up at the same moment, the rapture of the 
 whole party is not to be expressed. They almost died for joy. 
 After a thousand embraces, and questions, and explanations, and 
 expressions of astonishment (for the infidels held aloof awhile, to 
 take breath from the horror and mischief they had undergone), 
 Orlando refreshed his little band of heroes, and then drew Rinal- 
 do apart, and said, " O my brother, I feel such delight at seeing 
 you, I can hardly persuade myself I am not dreaming. Heaven 
 be praised for it. I have no other wish on earth, now that I see 
 you before I die. Why didn't you write ? But never mind. 
 Here you are, and I shall not die for nothing." * 
 
 " I did write," said Rinaldo, " and so did Ricciardetto ; but 
 villany intercepted our letters. Tell me what to do, my dear 
 cousin ; for time presses, and all the world is upon us." 
 
 " Gan has brought us here," said Orlando, " under pretence 
 of receiving tribute from Marsilius you see of what sort ; and 
 Charles, poor old man, is waiting to receive his homage at the 
 town of St. John ! I have never seen a lucky day since you left 
 us. I believe I have done for Charles more than in duty bound,
 
 222 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 
 
 and that my sins pursue me, and I and mine must all perish in 
 Roncesvalles." 
 
 " Look to Marsilius," exclaimed Rinaldo ; " he is right upon 
 us." 
 
 Marsilius was upon them, surely enough, at once furious and 
 frightened at the coming of the new Paladins ; for his camp, nu- 
 merous as it was, had not only held aloof, but turned about to fly 
 like herds before the lion j so he was forced to drive them back, 
 and bring up his other troops, reasonably thinking that such 
 numbers must overwhelm at last, if they could but be kept to- 
 gether. 
 
 Not the less, however, for this, did the Paladins continue to 
 fight as if with joy. They killed and trampled wheresoevr they 
 went ; Rinaldo fatiguing himself with sending infinite numbers 
 of souls to Ashtaroth, and Orlando making a bloody passage 
 towards Marsilius, whom he hoped to settle as he had done 
 Falseron. 
 
 In the course of this his tremendous progress, the hero struck 
 a youth on the head, whose helmet was so good as to resist the 
 blow, but at the same time flew off; and Orlando seized him by 
 the hair to kill him. " Hold !" cried the youth, as loud as want 
 of breath could let him ; " you loved my father I'm Bujaforte." 
 
 The Paladin had never seen Bujaforte ; but he saw the like- 
 ness to the good old Man of the Mountain, his father ; and he let 
 go the youth's hair, and embraced and kissed him. " O Buja- 
 forte !" said he ; "I loved him indeed my good old man ; but 
 what does his son do here, fighting against his friend ?" 
 
 Bujaforte was a long time before he could speak for weeping. 
 At length he said, " Orlando, let not your noble heart be pained 
 with ill thoughts of my father's son. I am forced to be here by 
 my lord and master Marsilius. I had no friend left me in the 
 world, and he took me into his court, and has brought me here 
 before I knew what it was for ; and I have made a shew of fight- 
 ing, but have not hurt a single Christian. Treachery is on every 
 side of you. Baldwin himself has a vest given him by Mar- 
 silius, that every body may know the son of his friend Gan, 
 and do him no injury. See there look how the lances avoid 
 him."
 
 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 223 
 
 " Put your helmet on again," said Orlando, " and behave just 
 as you have done. Never will your father's friend be an enemy 
 to the son. Only take care not to come across Rinaldo." 
 
 The hero then turned in fury to look for Baldwin, who was 
 hastening towards him at that moment with friendliness in his 
 looks. 
 
 " 'Tis strange," said Baldwin ; " I have done my duty as well 
 as I could, yet no body will come against me. I have slain right 
 and left, and cannot comprehend what it is that makes the stoutest 
 infidels avoid me." 
 
 " Take off your vest," cried Orlando, contemptuously, " and 
 you will soon discover the secret, if you wish to know it. Your 
 father has sold us to Marsilius, all but his honourable son." 
 
 " If my father," cried Baldwin, impetuously tearing off the 
 vest, " has been such a villain, and I escape dying any longer, 
 by God ! I will plunge this sword through his heart. But I am 
 no traitor, Orlando ; and you do me wrong to say it. You do 
 me foul dishonour, and I'll not survive it. Never more shall 
 you behold me alive." 
 
 Baldwin spurred off into the fight, not waiting to hear another 
 word from Orlando, but constantly crying out, " You have done 
 me dishonour ;" and Orlando was very sorry for what he had 
 said, for he perceived that the youth was in despair. 
 
 And now the fight raged beyond all it had done before ; and 
 the Paladins themselves began to fall, the enemy were driven 
 forward in such multitudes by Marsilius. There was unhorsing 
 of foes, and re-seating of friends, and great cries, and anguish, 
 and unceasing labour ; and twenty Pagans went down for one 
 Christian ; but still the Christians fell. One Paladin disappeared 
 after another, having too much to do for mortal men. Some 
 could not make way through the press for very fatigue of killing, 
 and others were hampered with the falling horses and men. 
 Sansonetto was thus beaten to earth by the club of Grandonio ; 
 and Walter d'Amulion had his shoulders broken ; and Angiolin 
 of Bayona, having lost his lance, was thrust down by Marsilius, 
 and Angiolin of Bellonda by Sirionne ; and Berlinghieri and Ot- 
 tone are gone ; and then Astolfo went, in revenge of whose death 
 Orlando turned the spot on which he died into a gulf of Saracen
 
 224 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 
 
 blood. Rinaldo met the luckless Bujaforte, who had just begun 
 to explain how he seemed to be fighting on the side which his 
 father hated, when the impatient hero exclaimed, " He who is 
 not with me is against me ;" and gave him a volley of such hor- 
 rible cuffs about the head and ears, that Bujaforte died without 
 being able to speak another word. Orlando, cutting his way to a 
 spot in which there was a great struggle and uproar, found the 
 poor youth Baldwin, the son of Gan, with two spears in his 
 breast. " I am no traitor now," said Baldwin ; and so saying, 
 fell dead to the earth ; and Orlando lifted up his voice and wept, 
 for he was bitterly sorry to have been the cause of his death. 
 He then joined Rinaldo in the hottest of the tumult ; and all the 
 surviving Paladins gathered about them, including Turpin the 
 archbishop, who fought as hardily as the rest ; and the slaughter 
 was lavish and horrible, so that the eddies of the wind chucked 
 the blood into the air, and earth appeared a very seething-caul- 
 dron of hell. At length down went Uliviero himself. He had 
 become blind with his own blood, and smitten Orlando without 
 knowing him, who had never received such a blow in his life. 
 
 " How now, cousin !" cried Orlando ; " have you too gone over 
 to the enemy ?" 
 
 " O, my lord and master, Orlando," cried the other, " I ask 
 your pardon, if I have struck you. I can see nothing I am 
 dying. The traitor Arcaliffe has stabbed me in the back ; but I 
 killed him for it. If you love me, lead my horse into the thick of 
 them, so that I may not die unavenged." 
 
 " I shall die myself before long," said Orlando, " out of very 
 toil and grief; so we will go together. I have lost all hope, all 
 pride, all wish to live any longer : but not my love for Uliviero. 
 Come let us give them a few blows yet ; let them see what you 
 can do with your dying hands. One faith, one death, one only 
 wish be ours." 
 
 Orlando led his cousin's horse where the press was thickest, 
 and dreadful was the strength of the dying man and of his half- 
 dying companion. They made a street, through which they pass- 
 ed out of the battle ; and Orlando led his cousin away to his tent, 
 and said, " Wait a little till I return, for I will go and sound the 
 horn on the hill yonder."
 
 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLEF. 225 
 
 " 'Tis of no use," said Uliviero ; " and my spirit is fast going, 
 and desires to be with its Lord and Saviour." He would have 
 said more, but his words came from him imperfectly, like those 
 of a man in a dream ; only his cousin gathered that he meant to 
 commend to him his sister, Orlando's wife, Alda the Fair, of whom 
 indeed the great Paladin had not thought so much in this world 
 as he might have done. And with these imperfect words he ex- 
 pired. 
 
 But Orlando no sooner saw him dead, than he felt as if he was 
 left alone on the earth ; and he was quite willing to leave it ; 
 only he wished that Charles at St. John Pied de Port should hear 
 how the case stood before he went ; and so he took up the horn, 
 and blew it three times with such force that the blood burst out of 
 his nose and mouth. Turpin says, that at the third blast the horn 
 broke in two. 
 
 In spite of all the noise of the battle, the sound of the horn broke 
 over it like a voice out of the other world. They say that birds 
 fell dead at it, and that the whole Saracen army drew back in 
 terror. But fearfuller still was its effect at St. John Pied de Port. 
 Charlemagne was sitting in the midst of his court when the sound 
 reached him ; and Gan was there. The emperor was the first to 
 hear it. 
 
 " Do you hear that ?" said he to his nobles. " Did you hear 
 the horn, as I heard it ?" 
 
 Upon this they all listened ; and Gan felt his heart misgive him. 
 
 The horn sounded the second time. 
 
 " What is the meaning of this ?" said Charles. 
 
 " Orlando is hunting," observed Gan, " and the stag is kill- 
 ed. He is at the old pastime that he was so fond of in Aspra- 
 monte." 
 
 But when the horn sounded yet a third time, and the blast was 
 one of so dreadful a vehemence, every body looked at the other, 
 and then they all looked at Gan in fury. Charles rose from his 
 seat. " This is no hunting of the stag," said he. " The sound 
 goes to my very heart, and, I confess, makes me tremble. 'I am 
 awakened out of a great dream. O Gan ! O Gan ! Not for 
 thee do I blush, but for myself, and for nobody else. O my God, 
 what is to be done ! But whatever is to be done, must be done
 
 226 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 
 
 quickly. Take this villain, gentlemen, and keep him in hard 
 prison. O foul and monstrous villain ! Would to God I had not 
 lived to see this day ! O obstinate and enormous folly ! O Mal- 
 agigi, had I but believed thy foresight ! "Pis thou wert the wise 
 man, and I the grey-headed fool." 
 
 Ogier the Dane, and Namo and others, in the bitterness of their 
 grief and anger, could not help reminding the emperor of all which 
 they had foretold. But it was no time for words. They put the 
 traitor into prison ; and then Charles, with all his court, took his 
 way to Roncesvalles, grieving and praying. 
 
 It was afternoon when the horn sounded, and half an hour af- 
 ter it when the emperor set out ; and meantime Orlando had re- 
 turned to the fight that he might do his duty, however hopeless, 
 as long as he could sit his horse, and the Paladins were now re- 
 duced to four ; and though the Saracens suffered themselves to 
 be mowed down like grass by them and their little band, he found 
 his end approaching for toil and fever, and so at length he with- 
 drew out of the fight, and rode all alone to a fountain which he 
 knew of, where he had before quenched his thirst. 
 
 His horse was wearier still than he, and no sooner had its mas- 
 ter alighted, than the beast, kneeling down as if to take leave, and 
 to say, " I have brought you to your place of rest," fell dead at 
 his feet. Orlando cast water on him from the fountain, not wish- 
 ing to believe him dead ; but when he found it to no purpose, he 
 grieved for him as if he had been a human being, and addressed 
 him by name in tears, and asked forgiveness if ever he had done 
 him wrong. They say, that the horse at these words once more 
 opened his eyes a little, and looked kindly at his master, and so 
 stirred never more. 
 
 They say also that Orlando then, summoning all his strength, 
 smote a rock near him with his beautiful sword Durlindana, think- 
 ing to shiver the steel in pieces, and so prevent its falling into the 
 hands of the enemy ; but though the rock split like a slate, and a 
 deep .fissure remained ever after to astonish the eyes of pilgrims, 
 the sword remained unhurt. 
 
 " O strong Durlindana," cried he, " O noble and worthy sword, 
 had I known thee from the first as I know thee now, never would 
 I have been brought to this pass." ,
 
 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 227 
 
 And now Rinaldo and Ricciardetto and Turpin came up, hav- 
 ing given chase to the Saracens till they were weary, and Orlando 
 gave joyful welcome to his cousin, and they told him how the 
 battle was won, and then Orlando knelt before Turpin, his face all 
 in tears, and begged remission of his sins, and confessed them, 
 and Turpin gave him absolution ; and suddenly a light came 
 down upon him from heaven like a rainbow, accompanied with a 
 sound of music, and an angel stood in the air blessing him, and 
 then disappeared ; upon which Orlando fixed his eyes on the hilt 
 of his sword as on a crucifix, and embraced it and said, " Lord, 
 vouchsafe that I may look on this poor instrument as on the 
 symbol of the tree upon which Thou sufferedst thy unspeakable 
 martyrdom !" and so adjusting the sword to his bosom, and em- 
 bracing it closer, he raised his eyes, and appeared like a creature 
 seraphical and transfigured ; and in bowing his head he breathed 
 out his pure soul. A thunder was then heard in the heavens, and 
 the heavens opened and seemed to stoop to the earth, and a flock 
 of angels was seen like a white cloud ascending with his spirit, 
 who were known to be what they were by the trembling of their 
 wings. The white cloud shot out golden fires, so that the whole 
 air was full of them ; and the voices of the angels mingled in 
 song with the instruments of their brethren above, which made an 
 inexpressible harmony, at once deep and dulcet. The priestly 
 warrior Turpin, and the two Paladins, and the hero's squire Te- 
 rigi, who were all on their knees, forgot their own beings, in 
 following the miracle with their eyes. 
 
 It was now the office of that squire to take horse and ride off 
 to the emperor at St. John Pied de Port, and tell him of all that 
 had occurred ; but in spite of what he had just seen, he lay for a 
 time overwhelmed with grief. He then rose, and mounted his 
 steed, and left the Paladins and the archbishop with the dead 
 body, who knelt about it, guarding it with weeping love. 
 
 The good squire Terigi met the the emperor and his cavalcade 
 coming towards Roncesvalles, and alighted and fell on his knees, 
 telling him the miserable news, and how all his people were 
 slain but two of his Paladins, and himself, and the good arch- 
 bishop. Charles for anguish began tearing his white locks ; but 
 Terigi comforted him against so doing, by giving an account of
 
 228 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 
 
 the manner of Orlando's death, and how he had surely gone to 
 heaven. Nevertheless, the squire himself was broken-hearted 
 with grief and toil ; and he had scarcely added a denouncement 
 of the traitor Gan, and a hope that the emperor would appease 
 Heaven finally by giving his body to the winds, than he said, 
 " The cold of death is upon me ;" and so he fell dead at the em- 
 peror's feet. 
 
 Charles was ready to drop from his saddle for wretchedness. 
 He cried out, " Let nobody comfort me more. I will have no 
 comfort. Cursed be Gan, and cursed this horrible day, and this 
 place, and every thing. Let us go on, like blind miserable men 
 that we are, into Roncesvalles ; and have patience if we can, out 
 of pure misery, like Job, till we do all that can be done." 
 
 So Charles rode on with his nobles ; and they say, that for the 
 sake of the champion of Christendom and the martyrs that died 
 with him, the sun stood still in the sky till the emperor had seen 
 Orlando, and till the dead were buried. 
 
 Horrible to his eyes was the sight of the field of Roncesvalles. 
 The Saracens, indeed, had forsaken it, conquered ; but all his Pala- 
 dins but two were left on it dead ; and the slaughtered heaps among 
 which they lay made the whole valley like a great dumb slaugh- 
 ter-house, trampled up into blood and dirt, and reeking to the heat. 
 The very trees were dropping with blood ; and every thing, so to 
 speak, seemed tired out, and gone to a horrible sleep. 
 
 Charles trembled to his heart's core for wonder and agony. 
 After dumbly gazing on the place, he again cursed it with a sol- 
 emn curse, and wished that never grass might grow within it 
 again, nor seed of any kind, neither within it, nor on any of its 
 mountains around with their proud shoulders ; but the anger of 
 Heaven abide over it for ever, as on a pit made by hell upon 
 earth. 
 
 Then he rode on, and came up to where the body of Orlando' 
 awaited him with the Paladins, and the old man, weeping, threw 
 himself as if he had been a reckless youth from his horse, and 
 embraced and kissed the dead body, and said, " I bless thee, Or- 
 lando. I bless thy whole life, and all that thou wast, and all that 
 thou ever didst, and thy mighty and holy valour, and the father 
 that begot thee ; and I ask pardon of thee for believing those
 
 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 229 
 
 who brought thee to thine end. They shall have their reward, 
 O thou beloved one ! But, indeed, it is thou that livest, and I 
 that am worse than dead." 
 
 And now, behold a wonder. For the emperor, in the fervour of 
 his heart and of the memory of what had passed between them, 
 called to mind that Orlando had promised to give him his sword, 
 should he die before him ; and he lifted up his voice more brave- 
 ly, and adjured him even now to return it to him gladly ; and it 
 pleased God that the dead body of Orlando should rise on its feet, 
 and kneel as he was wont to do at the feet of his liege lord, and 
 gladly, and with a smile on its face, return the sword to the Em- 
 peror Charles. As Orlando rose, the Paladins and Turpin knelt 
 down out of fear and horror, especially seeing him look with a 
 stern countenance ; but when they saw that he knelt also, and 
 smiled, and returned the sword, their hearts became re-assured, 
 and Charles took the sword like his liege lord, though trembling 
 with wonder and affection : and in truth he could hardly clench 
 his fingers around it. 
 
 Orlando was buried in a great sepulchre in Aquisgrana, and 
 the dead Paladins were all embalmed and sent with majestic cav- 
 alcades to their respective counties and principalities, and every 
 Christian was honourably and reverently put in the earth, and 
 recorded among the martyrs of the Church. 
 
 But meantime the flying Saracens, thinking to bury their own 
 dead, and ignorant of what still awaited them, came back into the 
 valley, and Rinaldo beheld them with a dreadful joy. and shewed 
 them to Charles. Now the emperor's cavalcade had increased 
 every moment ; and they fell upon the Saracens with a new 
 and unexpected battle, and the old emperor, addressing the sword 
 of Orlando, exclaimed, " My strength is little, but do thou do thy 
 duty to thy master, thou famous sword, seeing that he returned it 
 to me smiling, and that his revenge is in my hands." And so 
 saying, he met Balugante, the leader of the infidels, as he came 
 borne along by his frightened horse ; and the old man, raising 
 the sword with both hands, cleaved him, with a delighted mind, to 
 the chin. 
 
 O sacred Emperor Charles ! O well-lived old man ! Defender 
 of the Faith ! light and glory of the old time ! thou hast cut oft 
 
 PART n. 3
 
 230 THE BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES. 
 
 the other ear of Malchus, and shewn how rightly thou wert born 
 into the world, to save it a second time from the abyss. 
 
 Again fled the Saracens, never to come to Christendom more : 
 but Charles went after them into Spain, he and Rinaldo and Ric- 
 ciardetto and the good Turpin ; and they took and fired Sara- 
 gossa ; and Marsilius was hung to the carob-tree under which he 
 had planned his villany with Gan ; and Gan was hung, and 
 drawn and quartered, in Roncesvalles, amidst the execrations of 
 the country. 
 
 And if you ask, how it happened that Charles ever put faith in 
 such a wretch, I shall tell you that it was because the good old 
 emperor, with all his faults, was a divine man, and believed in 
 others out of the excellence of his own heart and truth. And such 
 was the case with Orlando himself.
 
 BOIARDO: 
 
 Critical Notice of Iji0 ife an&
 
 CRITICAL NOTICE 
 
 BOIARDO'S LIFE AND GENIUS.* 
 
 WHILE Pulci in Florence was elevating romance out of the 
 street-ballads, and laying the foundation of the chivalrous epic, a 
 poet appeared in Lombardy (whether inspired by his example is 
 uncertain) who was destined to carry it to a graver though still 
 cheerful height, and prepare the way for the crowning glories of 
 Ariosto. In some respects he even excelled Ariosto : in all, with 
 the exception of style, shewed himself a genuine though imma- 
 ture master. 
 
 Little is known of his life, but that little is very pleasant. It 
 exhibits him in the rare light of a poet who was at once rich, ro- 
 mantic, an Arcadian and a man of the world, a feudal lord and 
 an indulgent philosopher, a courtier equally beloved by prince 
 and people. 
 
 Matteo Maria Boiardo, Count of Scandiano, Lord of Arccto, 
 Casalgrande, &c., Governor of Reggio, and Captain of the cita- 
 del of Modena (it is pleasant to repeat such titles when so adorn- 
 
 * The materials for the biography in this notice have been gathered from 
 Tiraboschi and others, but more immediately from the copious critical memoir 
 from the pen of Mr. Panizzi, in that gentleman's admirable edition of the com- 
 bined poems of Boiardo and Ariosto, in nine volumes octavo, published by Mr. 
 Pickering. I have been under obligations to this work in the notice of Pulci, 
 and shall again be so in that of Boiardo's successor ; but I must not a third time 
 run the risk of omitting to give it my thanks (such as they are), and of earnestly 
 recommending every lover of Italian poetry, who can afford it, to possess him- 
 self of this learned, entertaining, and only satisfactory edition of either of the 
 Orlandos. The author writes an English almost as correct as it is elegant ; and 
 he is as painstaking as he is lively.
 
 234 EOIARDO. 
 
 1 
 
 ed), is understood to have been born about the year 1434, at 
 Scandiano, a castle at the foot of the Apennines, not far from 
 Reggio, and famous for its vines. 
 
 He was of an ancient family, once lords of Rubiera, and son 
 of Giovanni, second count of Scandiano, and Lucia, a lady of 
 a branch of the Strozzi family in Florence, and sister and aunt 
 of Tito and Erole Strozzi, celebrated Latin poets. His parents 
 appear to have been wise people, for they gave him an education 
 that fitted him equally for public and private life. He was even 
 taught, or acquired, more Greek than was common to the men 
 of letters of that age. His whole life seems, accordingly, to 
 have been divided, with equal success, between his duties as a 
 servant of the dukes of Modena, both military and civil, and the 
 prosecution of his beloved art of poetry, a combination of pur- 
 suits which have been idly supposed incompatible. Milton's 
 poetry did not hinder him from being secretary to Cromwell, and 
 an active partisan. Even the sequestered Spenser was a states- 
 man ; and poets and writers of fiction abound in the political his- 
 tories of all the great nations of Europe. When a man possess- 
 es a thorough insight into any one intellectual department (ex- 
 cept, perhaps, in certain corners of science), it only sharpens his 
 powers of perception for the others, if he chooses to apply them. 
 
 In the year 1469, Boiardo was one of the noblemen who went 
 to meet the Emperor Frederick the Third on his way to Ferrara, 
 when Duke Borso of Modena entertained him in that city. Two 
 years afterwards, Borso, who had been only Marquis of Ferrara, 
 received its ducal title from the Pope ; and on going to Rome to 
 be invested with his new honours, the name of our poet is again 
 found among the adorners of his state. A few days after his re- 
 turn home this prince died ; and Boiardo, favoured as he had 
 been by him, appears to have succeeded to a double portion of 
 regard in the friendship of the new duke, Ercole, who was more 
 of his own age. 
 
 During all this period, from his youth to his prime, our author 
 varied his occupations with Italian and Latin poetry ; some of it 
 addressed to a lady of the name of Antonia Caprara, and some 
 to another, whose name is thought to have been Rosa ; but whe- 
 ther these ladies died, or his love was diverted elsewhere, he took
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 235 
 
 to wife, in the year 1472, Taddea Gonzaga, of the noble house 
 of that name, daughter of the Count of Novellara. In the 
 course of the same year he is supposed to have begun his 
 great poem. A popular court favourite, in the prime of life, 
 marrying and commencing a great poem nearly at one and the 
 same time, presents an image of prosperity singularly delightful. 
 By this lady Boiardo had two sons and four daughters. The 
 younger son, Francesco Maria, died in his childhood ; but the 
 elder, Camillo, succeeded to his father's title, and left an heir to 
 it, the last, I believe, of the name. The reception given to the 
 poet's bride, when he took her to Scandiano, is said to have been 
 very splendid. 
 
 In the ensuing year the duke his master took a wife himself. 
 She was Eleonora, daughter of the King of Naples: and the 
 newly-married poet was among the noblemen who were sent to 
 escort her to Ferrara. For several years afterwards, his time 
 was probably filled up with the composition of the Orlando In- 
 namorato, and the entertainments given by a splendid court. He 
 was appointed Governor of Reggio, probably in 1478. At the 
 expiration of two or three years he was made Captain of the cit- 
 adel of Modena ; and in 1482 a war broke out with the Vene- 
 tians, in which he took part, for it interrupted the progress of 
 his poem. In 1484 he returned to it ; but ten years afterwards 
 was again and finally interrupted by the unprincipled descent of 
 the French on Italy under Charles the Eighth ; and in the De- 
 cember following he died. The Orlando Innamorato was thus 
 left unfinished. Eight years before his decease the author pub- 
 lished what he had written of it up to that time, but the first 
 complete edition was posthumous. The poet was writing when 
 the French came : he breaks off with an anxious and bitter no- 
 tice of the interruption, though still unable to deny himself a 
 last word on the episode which he was relating, and a hope that 
 he should conclude it another time. 
 
 "Mentre che io canto, o Dio redentore, 
 Vedo 1" Italia tutta a fiamma e foco, 
 Per questi Galli, che con gran valore 
 Vengon, per disertar non so che loco :
 
 236 BOIARDO. 
 
 Per6 vi lascio in questo vano amore 
 
 Di Fiordespina ardente poco a poco : 
 Un' altra volta, so mi fia concesso, 
 Racconterovvi il tutto per espresso." 
 
 But while I sing, mine eyes, great God ! behold 
 
 A flaming fire light all the Italian sky, 
 Brought by these French, who, with their myriads bold, 
 
 Come to lay waste, I know not where or why. 
 Therefore, at present, I must leave untold 
 
 How love misled poor Fiordespina's eye.* 
 Another time, Fate willing, I shall tell, 
 
 From first to last, how every thing befell. 
 
 Besides the Orlando Innamorato, Boiardo wrote a variety of 
 prose works, a comedy in verse on the subject of Timon, lyrics 
 of great elegance, with a vein of natural feeling running through 
 them, and Latin poetry of a like sort, not, indeed, as classical in 
 its style as that of Politian and the other subsequent revivers of 
 the ancient manner, but perhaps not the less interesting on that 
 account ; for it is difficult to conceive a thorough copyist in style 
 expressing his own thorough feelings. Mr. Panizzi, if I am not 
 mistaken, promised the world a collection of the miscellaneous 
 poems of Boiardo ; but we have not yet had the pleasure of see- 
 ing them. In his life of the poet, however, he has given several 
 specimens, both Latin and Italian, which are extremely agreeable. 
 The Latin poems consist of ten eclogues and a few epigrams ; 
 but the epigrams, this critic tells us, are neither good nor on a fit- 
 ting subject, being satirical sallies against Nicolo of Este, who 
 had attempted to seize on Ferrara, and been beheaded. Boiardo 
 was not of a nature qualified to indulge in bitterness. A man of 
 his chivalrous disposition probably misgave himself while he was 
 writing these epigrams. Perhaps he suffered them to escape his 
 pen out of friendship for the reigning branch of the family. But 
 it must be confessed, that some of the best-natured men have too 
 often lost sight of their higher feelings during the pleasure and 
 pride of composition. 
 
 With respect to the comedy of Timon, if the whole of it is writ- 
 ten as well as the concluding address of the misanthrope (which 
 
 * She had taken a damsel in male attire for a man.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 237 
 
 Mr. Panizzi has extracted into his pages), it must be very pleas- 
 ant. Timon conceals a treasure in a tomb, and thinks he has 
 baffled some knaves who had a design upon it. He therefore 
 takes leave of his audience with the following benedictions : 
 
 "Pur ho scacciate queste due formiche, 
 Che raspavano 1' oro alia mia buca, 
 Or vadan pur, che Dio le malediche. 
 
 Cotal fortuna a casa li conduca. 
 Che lor fiacchi le gambe al primo passo, 
 E nel secondo 1' osso della nuca. 
 
 Voi altri, che ascoltate giuso al basso, 
 Chiedete, se volete alcuna cosa, 
 Prima ch' io parta, perche mo vi lasso. 
 
 Bench6 abbia 1' alma irata e disdegnosa, 
 Da ingiusti oltraggi combattuta e vinta, 
 
 A voi gia non 1' avro tanto ritrosa. 
 
 In me non e pietade al tutto estinta : 
 Faccia di voi la prova chi gli pare, 
 Sino alia corda, che mi trovo cinta ; 
 
 Gli presterfc, volendosi impiccare." 
 
 So ! I've got rid of these two creeping things, 
 That fain would have scratched up my buried gold. 
 They're gone ; and may the curse of God go with them ! 
 May they reach home just in good time enough 
 To break their legs at the first step in doors, 
 And necks i' the second ! And now then, as to you, 
 Good audience, groundlings, folks who love low places, 
 You too perhaps would fain get something of me, 
 Ere I take leave. Well ; angered though I be, 
 Scornful and torn with rage at being ground 
 Into the dust with wrong, I'm not so lost 
 To all concern and charity for others 
 As not to be still kind enough to part 
 With something near to me something that's wound 
 About my very self. Here, sirs ; mark this ; 
 
 [ Untying the cord round his uaist. 
 Let any that would put me to the test, 
 Take it with all my heart, and hang themselves. 
 
 The comedy of Timon, which was chiefly taken from Lucian, 
 and one, if not more, of Boiardo's prose translations from other 
 
 3*
 
 238 BOIARDO. 
 
 ancients, were written at the request of Duke Ercole, who was a 
 great lover of dramatic versions of this kind, and built a theatre 
 for their exhibition at an enormous expense. These prose trans, 
 lations consist of Apuleius's Golden Ass, Herodotus (the Duke's 
 order), the Golden Ass of Lucian, Xenophon's Cyropadia (not 
 printed), Emilius Probus (also not printed, and supposed to be 
 Cornelius Nepos), and Riccobaldo's credulous Historia Univer- 
 salis, with additions. It seems not improbable, that he also trans- 
 lated Homer and Diodorus ; and Doni the bookmaker asserts, that 
 he wrote a work called the Teslamento delV Anima (the Soul's 
 Testament) : but Mr. Panizzi calls Doni " a barefaced impostor ;" 
 and says, that as the work is mentioned by nobody else, we may 
 be " certain that it never existed," and that the title was " a for- 
 gery of the impudent priest." 
 
 Nothing else of Boiardo's writing is known to exist, but a col- 
 lection of official letters in the archives of Modena, which, accord- 
 ing to Tiraboschi, are of no great importance. It is difficult to 
 suppose, however, that they would not be worth looking at. The 
 author of the Orlando Innamoraio could hardly write, even upon 
 the driest matters of government, with the aridity of a common 
 clerk. Some little lurking well-head of character or circum- 
 stance, interesting to readers of a later age, would probably break 
 through the barren ground. Perhaps the letters went counter to 
 some of the good Jesuit's theology. 
 
 Boiardo's prose translations from the authors of antiquity are 
 so scarce, that Mr. Panizzi himself, a learned and miscellaneous 
 reader, says he never saw them.* I am willing to get the only 
 advantage in my power over an Italian critic, by saying that I 
 have had some of them in my hands, brought there by the pleas- 
 ant chances of the bookstalls ; but I can give no account of them. 
 A modern critic, quoted by this gentleman (Gamba, Testi di Lin- 
 gua), calls the version of Apuleius "rude and curious;" but 
 adds, that it contains " expressions full of liveliness and propri- 
 ety." By " rude " is probably meant obsolete, and compara- 
 tively unlearned. Correctness of interpretation and classical 
 
 * Crcscimbcni himself had not seen the translation from Apuleius, nor, ap- 
 parently, several others. Commentari, fyc. vol. ii. part ii. lib. vii. sect. zi.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 
 
 nicety of style (as Mr. Panizzi observes) were the growths of a 
 later age. 
 
 Nothing is told us by his biographers of the person of Boiardo : 
 and it is not safe to determine a man's physique from his writings, 
 unless perhaps with respect to the greater or less amount of his 
 animal spirits ; for the able-bodied may Write effeminately, and 
 the feeblest supply the defect of corporal stamina with spiritual. 
 Portraits, however, seem to be extant. Mazzuchelli discovered 
 that a medal had been struck in the poet's honour ; and in the 
 castle of Scandiano (though " the halls where knights and ladies 
 listened to the adventures of the Paladin are now turned into 
 granaries," and Orlando himself has nearly disappeared from the 
 outside, where he was painted in huge dimensions as if " en- 
 trusted with the wardenship") there was a likeness of Boiardo 
 executed by Niccolo dell' Abate, together with the principal 
 events of the Orlando Innamorato and the JEneid. But part of 
 these paintings (Mr. Panizzi tells us) were destroyed, and part 
 removed from the castle to Modena " to save them from certain 
 loss;" and he does not add whether the portrait was among the 
 latter. 
 
 From anecdotes, however, and from the poet's writings, we 
 gather the nature of the man ; and this appears to have been 
 very amiable. There is an aristocratic tone in his poem, when 
 speaking of the sort of people of whom the mass of soldiers is 
 wont to consist ; and Foscolo says, that the Count of Scandiano 
 writes like a feudal lord. But common soldiers are not apt to be 
 the elite of mankind ; neither do we know with how good-natured 
 a smile the mention of them may have been accompanied. Peo- 
 ple often give a tone to what they read, more belonging to their 
 own minds than the author's. All the accounts left us of Boiar- 
 do, hostile as well as friendly, prove him to have been an indul- 
 gent and popular man. According to one, he was fond of making 
 personal inquiries among its inhabitants into the history of his na- 
 tive place ; and he requited them so generously for their infor- 
 mation, that it was customary with them to say, when they wished 
 good fortune to one another, " Heaven send Boiardo to your 
 house !" There is said to have been a tradition at Scandiano, 
 that having tried in vain one day, as he was riding out, to dis-
 
 240 BOIARDO. 
 
 cover a name for one of his heroes, expressive of his lofty char- 
 acter, and the word Rodamonle coming into his head, he galloped 
 back with a pleasant ostentation to his castle, crying it out aloud, 
 and ordering the bells of the place to be rung in its honour ; to 
 the astonishment of the good people, who took " Rodamonte" for 
 some newly-discovered saint. His friend Paganelli of Modena, 
 who wrote a Latin poem on the Empire of Cupid, extolled the 
 Governor of Reggio for ranking among the deity's most generous 
 vassals, one who, in spite of his office of magistrate, looked with 
 an indulgent eye on errors to which himself was liable, and who 
 was accustomed to prefer the study of love-verses to that of the 
 law. The learned lawyer, his countryman Panciroli, probably 
 in resentment, as Panizzi says, of this preference, accused him of 
 an excess of benignity, and of being fitter for writing poems than 
 punishing ill deeds ; and in truth, as the same critic observes, 
 " he must have been considered crazy by the whole tribe of law- 
 yers of that age," if it be true that he anticipated the opinion of 
 Beccaria, in thinking that no crime ought to be punished with death. 
 The great work of this interesting and accomplished person, 
 the Orlando Innamorato, is an epic romance, founded on the love 
 of the great Paladin for the peerless beauty Angelica, whose name 
 has enamoured the ears of posterity. The poem introduces us to 
 the pleasantest paths in that track of reading in which Milton has 
 told us that his " young feet delighted to wander." Nor did he 
 forsake it in his age. 
 
 " Such forces met not, nor so wide a camp, 
 When Agrican with all his northern powers 
 Besieged Albracca, as romances tell, 
 The city of Gallaphrone, from whence to win 
 The fairest of her sex, Angelica." Paradise Regained. 
 
 The Orlando Innamorato may be divided into three principal 
 portions : the search for Angelica by Orlando and her other 
 lovers ; the siege of her father's city Albracca by the Tartars ; 
 and that of Paris and Charlemagne by the Moors. These, how- 
 ever, are all more or less intermingled, and with the greatest 
 art ; and there are numerous episodes of a like intertexture. 
 The fairies and fairy-gardens of British romance, and the fabu- 
 lous glories of the house of Este, now proclaimed for the first
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 241 
 
 time, were added by the author to the enchantments of Pulci, to- 
 gether with a pervading elegance ; and had the poem been com- 
 pleted, we were to have heard again of the traitor Gan of Ma- 
 ganza, for the purpose of exalting the imaginary founder of that 
 house, Ruggero. 
 
 This resuscitation of the Helen of antiquity, under a more sedu- 
 cing form, was an invention of Boiardo's ; so was the subjection 
 of Charles's hero Orlando to the passion of love ; so, besides the 
 heroine and her name, was that of other interesting characters 
 with beautiful names, which afterwards figured in Ariosto. This 
 inventive faculty is indeed so conspicuous in every part of the 
 work, on small *as well as great occasions, in fairy-adventures 
 and those of flesh and blood, that although the author appears to 
 have had both his loves and his fairies suggested to him by our 
 romances of Arthur and the Round Table, it constitutes, next to 
 the pervading elegance above mentioned, his chief claim to our 
 admiration. Another of his merits is a certain tender gallantry, 
 or rather an honest admixture of animal passion with spiritual, 
 also the precursor of the like ingenuous emotions in Ariosto ; and 
 he furthermore set his follower the example, not only of good 
 breeding, but of a constant heroical cheerfulness, looking with 
 faith on nature. Pulci has a constant cheerfulness, but not with 
 SD much grace and dignity. Foscolo has remarked, that Boiar. 
 do's characters even surpass those of Ariosto in truth and variety, 
 and that his Angelica more engages our feelings ;* to which I 
 will venture to add, that if his style is less strong and complete, 
 it never gives us a sense of elaboration. I should take Boiardo to 
 have been the healthier man, though of a less determined will than 
 Ariosto, and perhaps, on the whole, less robust. You find in Bo- 
 iardo almost all which Ariosto perfected, chivalry, battles, com- 
 bats, loves and graces, passions, enchantments, classical and ro- 
 mantic fable, eulogy, satire, mirth, pathos, philosophy. It is like 
 the first sketch of a great picture, not the worse in some respects 
 for being a sketch ; free and light, though not so grandly colour- 
 ed. It is the morning before the sun is up, and when the dew is 
 on the grass. Take the stories which are translated in the pres- 
 
 * Article on the Narrative and Romantic Poems of the Italians, in the Quar- 
 terly Renew, No. 62, p. 527.
 
 242 BOIARDO. 
 
 ent volume, and you might fancy them all written by Ariosto, 
 with a difference ; the Death of Agrican perhaps with minuter 
 touches of nature, but certainly not with greater simplicity and 
 earnestness. In the Saracen Friends there is just Ariosto's bal- 
 ance of passion and levity ; and in the story which I have enti- 
 tled Seeing and Believing, his exhibition of triumphant cunning. 
 During the lives of Pulci and Boiardo, the fierce passions and 
 severe ethics of Dante had been gradually giving way to a gent- 
 ler and laxer state of opinion before the progress of luxury ; and 
 though Boiardo's enamoured Paladin retains a kind of virtue not 
 common in any age to the heroes of warfare, the lord of Scan- 
 diano, who appears to have recited his poem, sometimes to his vas- 
 sals and sometimes to the ducal circle at court, intimates a smi- 
 ling suspicion that such a virtue would be considered a little rude 
 and obsolete by his hearers. Pulci's wandering gallant, Uliviero, 
 who in Dante's time would have been a scandalous profligate, 
 had become the prototype of the court-lover in Boiardo's. The 
 poet, however, in his most favourite characters, retained and rec- 
 ommended a truer sentiment, as in the instance of the loves of 
 Brandimart and Fiordelisa ; and there is a graceful cheerfulness 
 in some of his least sentimental ones, which redeems them from 
 grossness. I know not a more charming fancy in the whole lov- 
 ing circle of fairy-land, than the female's shaking her long tress- 
 es round Mandricardo, in order to furnish him with a mantle, 
 when he issues out of the enchanted fountain.* 
 
 * "E' suoi capelli a sfe sciolse di testa, 
 Che n' avea molti la dama gioconda; 
 Ed, abbracciato il cavalier con festa, 
 Tutto il coperse de la treccia bionda : 
 Cosi, nascosi entrambi di tal vesta, 
 Uscir' di quella fonte e la bell' onda." 
 
 Her locks she loosened from her lovely head, 
 For many and long had that same lady fair ; 
 And clasping him in mirth as round they spread, 
 Covered the knight with the sweet shaken hair : 
 And so, thus both together garmented. 
 They issued from the fount to the fresh air. 
 
 Readers of the Faerie Qiteene will here see where Spenser has been, among his 
 other visits to the Bowers of Bliss.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 243 
 
 But Boiardo's poem was unfinished : there are many prosaical 
 passages in it, many lame and harsh lines, incorrect and even 
 ungrammatical expressions, trivial images, and, above all, many 
 Lombard provincialisms, which are not in their nature of a " sig- 
 nificant or graceful" sort,* and which shocked the fastidious Flor- 
 entines, the arbiters of Italian taste. It was" to avoid these in his 
 own poetry, that Boiardo's countryman Ariosto carefully studied 
 the Tuscan dialect, if not visited Florence itself ; and the conse- 
 quence yvas, that his greater genius so obscured the popularity of 
 his predecessor, that a remarkable process, unique in the history of 
 letters, appears to have been thought necessary to restore its perusal. 
 The facetious Berni, a Tuscan wit full of genius, without omitting 
 any particulars of consequence, or adding a single story except of 
 himself, re-cast the whole poem of Boiardo, altering the diction 
 of almost every stanza, and supplying introductions to the cantos 
 after the manner of Ariosto ; and the Florentine idiom and unfail- 
 ing spirit of this re-fashioner's verse (though, what is very curi- 
 ous, not till after a long chance of its being overlooked itself, and 
 a posthumous editorship which has left doubts on the authority of 
 the text) gradually effaced almost the very mention of the man's 
 name who had supplied him with the whole staple commodity of 
 his book, with all the heart of its interest, and with far the great- 
 er part of the actual words. The first edition of Berni was pro- 
 hibited in consequence of its containing a severe attack on the 
 clergy ; but even the prohibition did not help to make it popular. 
 The reader may imagine a similar occurrence in England, by 
 supposing that Dryden had re-written the whole of Chaucer, and 
 that his reconstruction had in the course of time as much surpass- 
 ed the original in popularity, as his version of the Flower and the 
 Leaf did, up to the beginning of the present century. 
 
 I do not mean to compare Chaucer with Boiardo, or Dryden 
 with Berni. Fine poet as I think Boiardo, I hold Chaucer to be 
 a far finer ; and spirited, and in some respects admirable, as are 
 Dryden's versions of Chaucer, they do not equal that of Boiardo 
 by the Tuscan. Dryden did not apprehend the sentiment of 
 Chaucer in any such degree as Berni did that of his original. 
 
 * Foscolo, vt sup. p. 528.
 
 244 BOIARDO. 
 
 Indeed, Mr. Panizzi himself, to whom the world is indebted both 
 for the only good edition of Boiardo and for the knowledge of the 
 most curious facts respecting Berni's rifacimento, declares himself 
 unable to pronounce which of the two poems is the better one, the 
 original Boiardo, or the re-modelled. It would therefore not very 
 well become a foreigner to give a verdict, even if he were able ; 
 and I confess, after no little consideration (and apart, of course, 
 from questions of dialect, which I cannot pretend to look into), I 
 feel myself almost entirely at a loss to conjecture on which side 
 the superiority lies, except in point of invention and a certain 
 early simplicity. The advantage in those two respects unques- 
 tionably belongs to Boiardo ; and a great one it is, and may not 
 unreasonably be* supposed to settle the rest of the question in his 
 favour ; and yet Berni's fancy, during a more sophisticate period 
 of Italian manners, exhibited itself so abundantly in his own witty 
 poems, his pen at all times has such a charming facility, and he 
 proved himself, in his version of Boiardo, to have so strong a sym- 
 pathy with the earnestness and sentiment of his original in his 
 gravest moments, that I cannot help thinking the two men would 
 have been each what the other was in their respective times ; 
 the Lombard the comparative idler, given more to witty than se- 
 rious invention, under a corrupt Roman court ; and the Tuscan 
 the originator of romantic fictions, in a court more suited to him 
 than the one he avowedly despised. I look upon them as two 
 men singularly well matched. The nature of the present work 
 does not require, and the limits to which it is confined do not per- 
 mit, me to indulge myself in a comparison between them corrob- 
 orated by proofs ; but it is impossible not to notice the connexion : 
 and therefore, begging the reader's pardon for the sorry substitute 
 of affirmative for demonstrative criticism, I may be allowed to 
 say, that if Boiardo has the praise of invention to himself, Berni 
 thoroughly appreciated and even enriched it ; that if Boiardo has 
 sometimes a more thoroughly charming simplicity, Berni still ap- 
 preciates it so well, that the difference of their times is sufficient 
 to restore the claim of equality of feeling ; and finally, that if 
 Berni strengthens and adorns the interest of the composition with 
 more felicitous expressions, and with a variety of lively and beau- 
 tiful trains of thought, you feel that Boiardo was quite capable
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 
 
 of them all, and might have done precisely the same had he lived 
 in Berni's age. In the greater part of the poem the original is 
 altered in nothing except diction, and often (so at least it seems to 
 me) for no other reason than the requirements of the Tuscan man- 
 ner. And this is the case with most of the noblest, and even the 
 liveliest passages. My first acquaintance, for example, with the 
 Orlando Innamorato was through the medium of Berni ; and on 
 turning to those stories in his version, which I have translated 
 from his original for the present volume, I found. that every pas- 
 sage but one, to which I had given a mark of admiration, was the 
 property of the old poet. That single one, however, was in the 
 exquisitest taste, full of as deep a feeling as any thing in its com- 
 pany (I have noticed it in the translated passage). And then, in 
 the celebrated introductions to his cantos, and the additions to Bo- 
 iardo's passages of description and character (those about Roda- 
 monte, for example, so admired by Foscolo), if Berni occasionally 
 shews a comparative want of faith which you regret, he does it 
 with a regret on his own part, visible through all his jesting. 
 Lastly, the singular and indignant strength of his execution often 
 makes up for the trustingness that he was sorry to miss. If I 
 were asked, in short, which of the two poems I should prefer 
 keeping, were I compelled to choose, I should first complain of 
 being forced upon so hard an alternative, and then, with many a 
 look after Berni, retain Boiardo. The invention is his ; the first 
 earnest impulse ; the unmisgiving joy ; the primitive morning 
 breath, when the town-smoke has not polluted the fields, and the 
 birds are singing their " wood-notes wild." Besides, after all, 
 one cannot be sure that Berni could have invented as Boiardo did. 
 If he could, he would probably have written some fine serious 
 poem of his own. And Panizzi has observed, with striking and 
 conclusive truth, that " without Berni the Orlando Innamorato 
 will be read and enjoyed ; without Boiardo not even the name of 
 the poem remains." 
 
 Nevertheless this conclusion need not deprive us of either work. 
 Berni raised a fine polished edifice, copied and enlarged after that 
 of Boiardo ; on the other hand, the old house, thank Heaven, re- 
 mains ; and our best way of settling the question between the two 
 is, to be glad that we have got both. Let the reader who is rich
 
 246 BOIARDO. 
 
 in such possessions look upon Berni's as one of his town mansions, 
 erected in the park-like neighbourhood of some metropolis ; and 
 Boiardo's as the ancient country original of it, embosomed in the 
 woods afar off, and beautiful as the Enchanted Castle of Claude 
 
 " Lone sitting by the shores of old romance." 
 
 A late amiable man of wit, Mr. Stewart Rose, has given a prose abstract of 
 Berni's Orlando Innamorato, with occasional versification ; but it is hardly more 
 than a dry outline, and was, indeed, intended only as an introduction to his 
 version of the Furioso. A good idea, however, of one of the phases of Berni's 
 humour may be obtained from the same gentleman's abridgment of the AnimaU 
 Parlanti of Casti, in which he has introduced a translation of the Tuscan's 
 description of himself and of his way of life, out of his additions to Boiardo's 
 poem. The verses in the prohibited edition of Berni's Orlando, in which he 
 denounced the corruptions of the clergy, have been published, for the first time 
 in this country, in the notes to the twentieth canto of Mr. Panizzi's Boiardo. 
 They have all his peculiar wit, together with a Lutheran earnestness ; and shew 
 him, as that critic observes, to have been " Protestant at his heart." 
 
 Since writing this note I have called to mind that a translation of Berni's 
 account of himself is to be found in Mr. Rose's prose abstract of the Innamo- 
 rato.
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA,
 
 Angelica, daughter of Galafron, king of Cathay, the most beautiful of woman- 
 kind, and a possessor of the art of magic, comes, with her brother Argalia, to 
 the court of Charlemagne under false pretences, in order to carry away his 
 knights to the country of her father. Her immediate purpose is defeated, and her 
 brother slain ; but all the knights, Orlando in particular, fall in love with her ; 
 and she herself, in consequence of drinking at an enchanted fountain, becomes 
 in love with Rinaldo. On the other hand, Rinaldo, from drinking a neighbour- 
 ing fountain of a reverse quality, finds his own love converted to loathing. 
 Various adventures arise out of these circumstances ; and the fountains are 
 again drunk, with a mutual reversal of their effects.
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 
 
 IT was the month of May and the feast of Pentecost, and Char- 
 lemagne had ordained a great jousting, which brought into Paris 
 an infinite number of people, baptised and infidel ; for there was 
 truce proclaimed, in order that every knight might come. There 
 was King Grandonio from Spain, with his serpent's face ; and 
 Ferragus, with his eyes like an eagle ; and Balugante, the em- 
 peror's kinsman ; and Orlando, and Rinaldo, and Duke Namo ; 
 and Astolfo of England, the handsomest of mankind ; and the en- 
 chanter Malagigi ; and Isoliero and Salamone ; and the traitor 
 Gan, with his scoundrel followers ; and, in short, the whole flow- 
 er of the chivalry of the age, the greatest in the world. The ta- 
 bles at which they feasted were on three sides of the hall, with 
 the emperor's canopy midway at the top ; and at that first table 
 sat crowned heads ; and down the table on the right sat dukes 
 and marquises ; and down the table on the left, counts and cava- 
 liers. But the Saracen nobles, after their doggish fashion, looked 
 neither for chair nor bench, but preferred a carpet on the floor, 
 which was accordingly spread for them in the midst. 
 
 High sat Charlemagne at the head of his vassals and his Pala- 
 dins, rejoicing in the thought of all the great men of which they 
 consisted, and holding the infidels cheap as the sands which are 
 scattered by the tempest. To each of his lords, as they drank, he 
 sent round, by his pages, gifts of enamelled cups of exquisite 
 workmanship ; and to every body some mark of his princely dis- 
 tinction ; and so they were all sitting and hearing music, and 
 feasting oft" dishes of gold, and talking of lovely things with low 
 voices,* when suddenly there came into the hall four enormous 
 
 * " Con parlar basso c bei ragionamenti."
 
 250 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 
 
 giants, in the midst of whom was a lady, and behind the lady 
 there followed a cavalier. She was a very lily of the field, and 
 a rose of the garden, and a morning-star ; in short, so beautiful 
 that the like had never been seen. There was Galerana in the 
 hall ; there was Alda, the wife of Orlando ; and Clarice, and 
 Armellina the kind-hearted, and abundance of other ladies, all 
 beautiful till she made her appearance ; but after that they seem- 
 ed nothing. Every Christian knight turned his face that way ; 
 and not a Pagan remained on the floor, but arose and got as near 
 to her as he could ; while she, with a cheerful sweetness, and a 
 smile fit to enamour a heart of stone, began speaking the following 
 words : 
 
 " High-minded lord, the renown of your worthiness, and the 
 valour of these your knights, which echoes from sea to sea, en- 
 courages me to hope, that two pilgrims who have come from the 
 ends of the world to behold you, will not have encountered their 
 fatigue in vain. And to the end that I may not hold your atten- 
 tion too long with speaking, let me briefly say, that this knight 
 here, Uberto of the Lion, a prince renowned also for his achieve- 
 ments, has been wrongfully driven from out his dominions ; and 
 that I, who was driven out with him, am his sister, whose name 
 is Angelica. Fame has told us of the jousting this day appoint- 
 ed, and of the noble press of knights here assembled, and how 
 your generous natures care not to win prizes of gold or jewels, 
 or gifts of cities, but only a wreath of roses ; and so the prince 
 my brother has come to prove his own valour, and to say, that if 
 any or all of your guests, whether baptised or infidel, choose to 
 meet him in the joust, he will encounter them one by one, in the 
 green meadow without the walls, near the place called the Horse- 
 block of Merlin, by the Fountain of the Pine. And his condi- 
 tions are these, that no knight who chances to be thrown shall 
 have license to renew the combat in any way whatsoever, but 
 remain a submissive prisoner in his hands ; he, on the other 
 hand, if himself be thrown, agreeing to take his departure out 
 of the country with his giants, and to leave his sister, for prize, 
 in the hands of the conqueror." 
 
 Kneeling at the close of these words, the lady awaited the an- 
 swer of Charlemagne, and every body gazed on her with aston-
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 251 
 
 ishment. Orlando especially, more than all the rest, felt irre- 
 sistibly drawn towards her, so that his heart trembled, and he 
 changed countenance. But he felt ashamed at the same time ; 
 and casting his eyes down, he said to himself, " Ah, mad and un- 
 worthy Orlando ! whither is thy soul being hurried ? I am 
 drawn, and cannot say nay to what draws me. I reckoned the 
 whole world as nothing, and now I am conquered by a girl. I 
 cannot get her sweet look out of my heart. My soul seems to 
 die within me, at the thought of being without her. It is love 
 that has seized me, and I feel that nothing will set me free ; 
 not strength, nor courage, nor my own wisdom, nor that of any 
 adviser. I see the better part, and cleave to the worse."* 
 
 Thus secretly in his heart did the frank and noble Orlando la- 
 ment over his new feelings ; and no wonder ; for every knight in 
 the hall was enamoured of the beautiful stranger, not excepting 
 even old white-headed Duke Namo. Charlemagne himself did 
 not escape. 
 
 All stood for awhile in silence, lost in the delight of looking at 
 her. The fiery youth Ferragus was the first to exhibit symp- 
 toms in his countenance of uncontrollable passion. He refrained 
 
 * Video mdiora, proboque, fyc. Writers were now beginning to pride them- 
 selves on their classical reading. The present occasion, it must be owned, was a 
 very good one for introducing the passage from Horace. The previous words 
 have an affecting ingenuousness ; and, indeed, the whole stanza is beautiful : 
 
 " lo non mi posso dal cor dipartire 
 
 La dolce vista del viso sereno, 
 Perch' io mi sento senza lei morire, 
 
 E '1 spirto a poco a poco venir meno. 
 Or non mi vale forza, ne 1' ardire 
 
 Contra d' amor, che m' ha gia posto il freno ; 
 Ne mi giova saper, ne altrui consiglio : 
 II meglio veggio, ed al pcggior m' appiglio." 
 
 Alas ! I cannot, though I shut mine eyes, 
 
 Lose the sweet look of that delightful face ; 
 The very soul within me droops and dies, 
 
 To think that I may fail to gain her grace. 
 No strong limbs now, no valour, will suffice 
 
 To burst the spell that roots me to the place: 
 No, nor reflection, nor advice, nor force ; 
 I see the better part, and clasp the worse.
 
 252 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 
 
 with difficulty from going up to the giants, and tearing her out 
 of their keeping. Rinaldo also turned as red as fire ; while his 
 cousin Malagigi the enchanter, who had discovered that the 
 stranger was not speaking truth, muttered softly, as he looked at 
 her, " Exquisite false creature ! I will play thee such a trick 
 for this, as will leave thee no cause to boast of thy visit." 
 
 Charlemagne, to detain her as long as possible before him, 
 made a speech in answer, in which he talked and looked, and 
 looked and talked, till there seemed no end of it. At length, 
 however, the challenge was accepted in all its forms ; and the 
 lady quitted the hall with her brother and the giants. 
 
 She had not yet passed the gates, when Malagigi the enchanter 
 consulted his books ; and that no means might be wanting to 
 complete the counteraction of what he suspected, he summoned 
 to his aid three spirits out of the lower regions. But how serious 
 his look turned, how his very soul within him was shaken, when 
 he discovered that the most dreadful disasters hung over Charles 
 and his court, and that the sister of the pretended Uberto was 
 daughter of King Galafron of Cathay, a beauty accomplished in 
 every species of enchantment, and sent there by her father on 
 purpose to betray them all ! Her brother's name was not Uberto, 
 but Argalia. Galafron had given him a horse swifter than the 
 wind, an enchanted sword, a golden lance, also enchanted, which 
 overthrew all whom it touched,* and a ring of a virtue so extra- 
 ordinary, that if put into the mouth, it rendered the person in- 
 visible, and if worn on the finger, nullified every enchantment. 
 But beyond even all this, he gave him his sister for a companion ; 
 rightly judging, that every body that saw her would fall into the 
 proposal of the joust ; and trusting that, at the close of it, she 
 would bring him the whole court of France into Cathay, prison- 
 ers in her hands. 
 
 * AoyupEajj Xdy-^aiffi fia^av, xal jrai/ra ir l oarij<rij. 
 " Make war with silver spears, and you'll beat all." 
 
 The reader will note the allegory or not, as he pleases. It is a very good alle- 
 gory ; but allegory, by the due process of enchantment, becomes matter of fact ; 
 and it is pleasant to take it as such.
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 253 
 
 Such, Malagigi discovered, was the plot of the accursed infidel 
 hound, King Galafron.* 
 
 Meantime the pretended Uberto had returned to his station at 
 the Horseblock of Merlin. He had had a beautiful pavilion 
 pitched there ; and under this pavilion he lay down awhile to re- 
 fresh himself with sleep. His sister Angelica lay down also, 
 but in the open air, under the great pine by the fountain. The 
 four giants kept watch : and as she lay thus asleep, with her fair 
 head on the grass, she appeared like an angel come down from 
 heaven. 
 
 By this time Malagigi, borne by one of his demons, had ar- 
 rived in the same place. He saw the beauty asleep by the flow- 
 ery water, and the four giants all wide awake ; and he said with- 
 in his teeth, " Brute scoundrels, I will take every one of you 
 into my net without a blow." 
 
 Malagigi took his book, and cast a spell out of it ; and in an 
 instant the whole four giants were buried in sleep. Then, draw- 
 ing his sword, he softly approached the young lady, intending to 
 despatch her as quickly : but seeing her look so lovely as she 
 slept, he paused, and considered within himself, and resolved to 
 detain her in the same state by enchantment, so long as it should 
 please him. Laying down the naked sword in the grass, he again 
 took his book, and read and read on, and still read on, and fancied 
 he was locking up her senses all the while in a sleep .unwakeable. 
 But the ring of which I have spoken was on her finger. She had 
 borrowed it of her brother ; and a superior power rendered all 
 other magic of no avail. A touch from Malagigi to prove the 
 force of his spell awoke her, to the magician's consternation, 
 with a great cry. She fled into the arms of her brother, whom 
 it aroused ; and, by the help of his sister's knowledge of enchant- 
 ment, Argalia mastered and bound the magician. The book was 
 then turned against him, and the place was suddenly filled with 
 a crowd of his own demons, every one of them crying out to 
 Angelica, " What commandest thou ?" 
 
 " Take this man," said Angelica, " and bear him prisoner to 
 the great city between Tartary and India, where my father Gal- 
 
 * " Rfe Galafron, il maledetto cane." 
 PART II. 4
 
 254 THE ADVENTURES OP ANGELICA. 
 
 afron is lord. Present him to him in my name, and say it was 
 I that took him ; and add, that having so taken the master of the 
 book, I care not for all the other lords of the court of Charle- 
 magne." 
 
 At the end of these words, and at one and the same instant, 
 the magician was conveyed to the feet of Galafron in Cathay, and 
 locked up in a rock under the sea. 
 
 In due time the enamoured knights, according to agreement, 
 came to the spot for the purpose of jousting with the supposed 
 Uberto, each anxious to have the first encounter, particularly Or- 
 lando, in order that he might not see the beauty carried off by 
 another. But they were obliged to draw lots ; and thirty other 
 names appeared before his, the first of which was that of Astolfo 
 the Englishman. 
 
 Now Astolfo was son of the king of England; and as I 
 said before, he was the handsomest man in the world. He was 
 also very rich and well bred, and loved to dress well, and was 
 as brave as he was handsome ; but his success was not always 
 equal to his bravery. He had a trick of being thrown from his 
 horse, a failing which he was accustomed to attribute to accident ; 
 and then he would mount again, and be again thrown from the 
 saddle, in the boldest manner conceivable. 
 
 This gallant prince was habited, on the present occasion, in 
 arms worth a whole treasury. His shield had a border of large 
 pearls ; his mail was of gold ; on his helmet was a ruby as big 
 as a chestnut ; and his horse was covered with a cloth all over 
 golden leopards.* He issued to the combat, looking at nobody 
 and fearing nothing ; and on his sounding the horn to battle, Ar- 
 galia came forth to meet him. After courteous salutations, the 
 two combatants rushed together ; but the moment the English- 
 man was touched with the golden lance, his legs flew over his 
 head. 
 
 " Cursed fortune !'" cried he, as he lay on the grass ; " this is 
 out of all calculation. But it was entirely owing to the saddle. 
 You can't but acknowledge, that if I had kept my seat, the beau- 
 
 * The lions in the shield of England were leopards in the "olden time," and 
 it is understood, I believe, ought still to be so, as Napoleon, with an invidious 
 pedantry, once permitted himself to be angry enough to inform us.
 
 THE ADVENTURES OP ANGELICA. 255 
 
 tiful lady would have been mine. But thus it is when Fortune 
 chooses to befriend infidels !"* 
 
 The four giants, who had by this time been disenchanted out 
 of their sleep by Angelica, took up the English prince, and put 
 him in the pavilion. But when he was stripped of his armour, 
 he looked so handsome, that the lovely stranger secretly took 
 pity on him, and bade them shew him all the courtesies that cap- 
 tivity allowed. He was permitted to walk outside by the foun- 
 tain ; and Angelica, from a dark corner, looked at him with ad- 
 miration, as he walked up and down in the moonlight. f 
 
 The violent Ferragus had the next chance in the encounter, 
 and was thrown no less speedily than Astolfo ; but he did not so 
 easily put up with the mischance. Crying out, " What are the 
 emperor's engagements to me ?" he rushed with his sword against 
 Argalia, who, being forced to defend himself unexpectedly, dis- 
 mounted and set aside his lance, and got so much the worse of 
 th'e fight, that he listened to proposals of marriage from Ferragus 
 to his sister. The beauty, however, not feeling an inclination to 
 match with so rough and savage-looking a person, was so dis- 
 
 * The character of Astolfo, the germ of which is in our own ancient British 
 romances, appears to have been completed by the lively invention of Boiardo, 
 and is a curious epitome of almost all which has been discerned in the travelled 
 Englishmen by the envy of poorer and the wit of livelier foreigners. He has 
 the handsomeness and ostentation of a Buckingham, the wealth of a Beckford, 
 the generosity of a Carlisle, the invincible pretensions of a Crichton, the self- 
 commitals and bravery of a Digby, the lucklessness of a Stuart, and the nan-, 
 chalance "under difficulties" of " Milord- W 'hat-then" in Voltaire's Princess of 
 Babylon, where the noble traveller is discovered philosophically reading the 
 newspaper in his carriage after it was overturned. English beauty, ever since 
 the days of Pope Gregory, with his pun about Angles and Angels, has been 
 greatly admired in the south of Europe not a little, perhaps, on account of the 
 general fairness of its complexion. I once heard a fair-faced English gentleman, 
 who would have been thought rather effeminate-looking at home, called an 
 " Angel" by a lady in Genoa. 
 
 t " Stava disciolto, senza guardia alcuna, 
 Ed intorno a la fonte sollazzava ; 
 Angelica nel lume de la luna, 
 Quanto potea nascosa, lo mirava." 
 
 There is something wonderfully soft and lunar in the liquid monotony of the 
 third line.
 
 256 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 
 
 mayed at the offer, that, hastily bidding her brother meet her 
 in the forest of Arden, she vanished from the sight of both, 
 by means of the enchanted ring. Argalia, seeing this, took to 
 his horse of swiftness, and dashed away in the same direction ; 
 Ferragus, in distraction, pursued Argalia ; and Astolfo, thus left 
 to himself, took possession of the golden lance, and again issued 
 forth not, indeed, with quite his usual confidence of the result, 
 but determined to run all risks, in any thing that might ensue, for 
 the sake of the emperor. In fine, to cut this part of the history 
 short, Charlemagne, finding the lady and her brother gone, or- 
 dered the joust to be restored to its first intention ; and Astolfo, 
 who was as ignorant as the others of the treasure he possessed in 
 the enchanted lance, unhorsed all comers against him like so 
 many children, equally to their astonishment and his own. 
 
 The Paladin Rinaldo now learnt the issue of the fight between 
 Ferragus and the stranger, and galloped in a loving agony of 
 pursuit after the fair fugitive. Orlando learnt the disappearance 
 of Rinaldo, and, distracted with jealousy, pushed forth in like 
 manner ; and at length all three are in the forest of Arden, 
 hunting about for her who is invisible. 
 
 Now in this forest were two enchanted waters, the one a run- 
 ning stream, and the other a built fountain ; the first caused 
 every body who tasted it to fall in love, and the other (so to 
 speak) to fall out of love ; say, rather, to feel the love turned 
 into hate. To the latter of these two waters Rinaldo happened 
 to come ; and being flushed with heat and anxiety, he dismounted 
 from his horse, and quenched, in one cold draught, both his thirst 
 and his passion. So far from loving Angelica as before, or hold- 
 ing her beauty of any account, he became disgusted with its pur- 
 suit, nay, hated her from the bottom of his heart ; and so, in this 
 new state of mind, and with feelings of lofty contempt, he re- 
 mounted and rode away, and happened to come on the bank of 
 the running stream. There, enticed by the beauty of the place, 
 which was all sweet meadow-ground and bowers of trees, he 
 .again quitted his saddle, and, throwing himself on the ground, fell 
 fast asleep. 
 
 Unfortunately for the proud beauty Angelica, or rather in just 
 punishment for her contempt, her palfrey conducted her to this
 
 THE ADVENTURES OP ANGELICA. 257 
 
 very place. The water tempted her to drink, and, dismounting 
 and tying the animal to one of the trees, she did so, and then 
 cast her eyes on the sleeping Rinaldo. Love instantly seized her, 
 and she stood rooted to the spot. 
 
 The meadow round about was all full of lilies of the valley 
 ^.nd wild roses. Angelica, not knowing what to do, at length 
 plucked a quantity of these, and with her white hand she dropped 
 them' on the face of the sleeper. He woke up ; and seeing who 
 it was, not only received her salutations with a change of coun- 
 tenance, but remounting his horse, galloped away through the 
 thickest part of the forest. In vain the beautiful creature fol- 
 lowed and called after him ; in vain asked him what she had 
 done to be so despised, and entreated him, at any rate, to take care 
 how he went so fast. Rinaldo disappeared, leaving hef to wring 
 her hands in despair ; and she returned in tears to the spot on 
 which she had found him sleeping. There, in her turn, she her- 
 self lay down, pressing the spot of earth on which he had lain ; 
 and so, weeping and lamenting, yet blessing every flower and bit 
 of grass that he had touched, fell asleep out of fatigue and sor- 
 row. '-% 4. 
 
 As Angelica thus lay, the good or bad fortune of Orlando con- 
 ducted him to the same place. The attitude in which she was 
 sleeping was so lovely that it is not even to be conceived, much 
 less expressed. The very grass seemed to flower on all sides of 
 her for joy ; and the stream, as it murmured along, to go talking 
 of love.* Orlando stood gazing like a man who had been trans- 
 ported to another sphere. " Am I on earth," thought he, " or 
 am I in paradise ? Surely it is I myself that am sleeping, and 
 this is my dream." 
 
 But his dream was proved to be none, in a manner which he 
 
 * " La qua! dormiva in atto tanto adorno, 
 
 Che pensar non si pu6, non ch' io lo scriva : 
 Parea che 1" erba a lei fiorisse intorno, 
 E d' amor ragionasse quella riva." 
 
 Her posture, as she lay, was exquisite 
 Above all words nay, thought itself above : 
 The grass seemed flowering round her in delight, 
 And the soft river murmuring of love.
 
 258 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 
 
 little desired. Ferragus, who had slain Argalia,- came up raging 
 with jealousy, and a combat ensued which awoke the sleeper. 
 Terrified at what she beheld, she rushed to her palfrey ; and 
 while the fighters were occupied with one another, fled away 
 through the forest. 
 
 Fast fled the beauty in the direction taken by Rinaldo ; nor 
 did she cease travelling, by one conveyance or another, till she 
 reached her own country, whither she had sent Malagigi. Him 
 she freed from his prison, on condition that he would employ his 
 art for the purpose of bringing Rinaldo to a palace of hers, 
 which she possessed in an island ; and accordingly Rinaldo was 
 inveigled by a spirit into an enchanted barque, which he found 
 on a sea-shore, and which conveyed him, without any visible 
 pilot, into Joyous Palace (for so the island was called). 
 
 The whole island was a garden, fifteen miles in extent. It 
 was full of trees and lawns ; and on the western side, close to 
 the sea, was the palace, built of a marble so clear and polished, 
 that it reflected the landscape round about. Rinaldo, not know- 
 ing what to think of his strange conveyance, lost no time in leap- 
 ing to shore ; upon which a lady made her appearance, who in- 
 vited him within. The house was a most beautiful house, full of 
 rooms adorned with azure and gold, and with noble paintings ; 
 and within as well as without it were the loveliest flowers, the 
 purest fountains, and a fragrance fit to turn sorrow to joy. The 
 lady led the knight into an apartment painted with stories, and 
 opening to the garden through pillars of crystal with golden cap- 
 itals. Here he found a bevy of ladies, three of whom were 
 singing in concert, while another played on some foreign instru- 
 ment of exquisite accord, and the rest were dancing round about 
 them. When the ladies beheld him coming, they turned the 
 dance into a circuit round about himself; and then one of them, 
 in the sweetest manner, said, " Sir knight, the tables are set, and 
 the hour for the banquet is come :" and with these words they 
 all drew him, still dancing, across the lawn, in front of the apart- 
 ment, to a table that was spread with cloth of gold and fine linen, 
 under a bower of damask roses, by the side of a fountain.* 
 
 Four ladies were already seated there, who rose and placed 
 * Supremely elegant all this appears to me.
 
 THE ADVENTURES OP ANGELICA. 259 
 
 Rinaldo at their head, in a chair set with pearls. And 'truly in- 
 deed was he astonished. A repast ensued, consisting of viands 
 the most delicate, and wines as fragrant as they were fine, drunk 
 out of jewelled cups ; and when it drew towards its conclusion, 
 harps and lutes were heard in the distance, and one of the ladies 
 said in the knight's ear, " This house, and all that you see in it, 
 are yours. For you alone was it built, and the builder is a 
 queen ; and happy indeed must you think yourself, for she loves 
 you, and she is the greatest beauty in the world. Her name is 
 Angelica." 
 
 The moment Rinaldo heard the name he so detested, disgust 
 and wretchedness fell upon his heart, notwithstanding the joys 
 around him. He started up with a changed countenance, and, 
 in spite of all that the lady could say, broke off across the garden, 
 and never ceased hastening till be reached the place where he 
 landed. He would have thrown himself into the sea, rather than 
 stay any longer in that island ; but the enchanted barque was still 
 on the shore. He sprang into it, and attempted instantly to push 
 off, for he still saw nobody in it but himself; but the barque for 
 a while resisted his efforts ; till, on his feeling a wish to drown 
 himself, or to do any thing rather than return to that detested 
 house, it suddenly loosed itself from its moorings, and dashed 
 away with him over the sea, as if in a fury. 
 
 All night did the pilotless -barque dash on, till it reached, in the 
 morning, a distant shore covered with a gloomy forest. Here 
 Rinaldo, surrounded by enchantments of a very different sort from 
 those which he had lately resisted, was entrapped into a pit. 
 
 The pit belonged to a castle which was hung with human heads, 
 and painted red with blood ; and as the Paladin was calling upon 
 God to help him, a hideous white-headed old woman, of a spite- 
 ful countenance, made her appearance on the edge of the pit, and 
 told him that he must fight with a monster born of Death and 
 Desire. 
 
 " Be it so," said the Paladin. " Let me but remain armed as 
 I am, and I fear nothing." For Rinaldo had with him his re- 
 nowned sword Fusberta.* 
 
 * Sometimes called in the romances Frusberta (query, from fourfyr, to bur- 
 nish ; or froisser, to crush 7). The meaning dees not seem to be known. I
 
 360 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 
 
 The old woman laughed in derision. Rinaldo remained in the 
 den all night, and next day was taken to a place where a portcul- 
 lis was lifted up, and the monster rushed forth. He was a mix- 
 ture of hog and serpent, larger than an ox, and not to be looked 
 at without horror. He had eyes like a traitor, the hands of a 
 man, but clawed, a beard dabbled with blood, a skin of coarse 
 variegated colours, too hard to be cut through, and two horns on 
 his temples, which he could turri on all sides of him at his plea- 
 sure, and which were so sharp that they cut like a sword. 
 
 Rising on his hind-legs, and opening a mouth six palms in 
 width, this horrible beast fell heavily on Rinaldo, who was never- 
 theless quick enough to give it a blow on the snout which increas- 
 ed its fury. Returning the knight a tremendous cuff, it seized 
 his coat of mail between breast and shoulder, and tore away a 
 great strip of it down to the girdle, leaving the skin bare. Every 
 successive rent and blow was of the like irresistible violence ; 
 and though the Paladin himself never fought with more force and 
 fury, he lost blood every instant. The monster at length tearing 
 his sword out of his hand, the Paladin surely began to think that 
 his last hour was arrived. 
 
 Looking about to see what might possibly help him, he observ- 
 ed overhead a beam sticking out of a wall at the height of some 
 ten feet. He took a leap more than human ; and reaching the 
 beam with his hand, succeeded in flinging himself up across it. 
 Here he sat for hours, the furious brute continually trying to 
 reach him. Night-time then came on with a clear starry sky and 
 moonlight, and the Paladin could discern no way of escaping, 
 when he heard a sound of something, he knew not what, coming 
 through the air like a bird. Suddenly a female figure stood on 
 the end of the beam, holding something in her hand towards him, 
 and speaking in a loving voice. 
 
 It was Angelica, come with means for destroying the monster, 
 and carrying the knight away. 
 
 But the moment Rinaldo saw her, desperate as seemed to be 
 his condition, he renounced all offers of her assistance ; and at 
 
 ought to have observed, in the notes to Pulci, that the name of Orlando's sword, 
 DurlindancP (called also Durindana, Durandal, &c.), is understood to mean 
 Hardrhitter.
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 2G1 
 
 length became so exasperated with her good offices, especially 
 when she opened her arms and offered to bear him away in them, 
 that he threatened to cast himself down to the monster if she did 
 not go away.* 
 
 Angelica, saying that she would lose her life rather than dis- 
 please him, descended from the beam ; and having given the mon- 
 ster a cake of wax which fastened up his teeth, and then caught 
 and fixed him in a set of nooses she had brought for that purpose, 
 took her miserable departure. Rinaldo upon this got down from 
 the beam himself; and having succeeded, though with the great- 
 est difficulty, in beating and squeezing the life out of the monster, 
 dealt such havoc among the people of the castle who assailed him, 
 that the horrible old woman, whose crimes had made her the crea- 
 ture's housekeeper, and led her to take delight in its cruelty, 
 threw herself headlong from a tower. The Paladin then took his 
 way forth, turning his back on the castle and the sea-shore. 
 
 Angelica returned to the capital of her father's dominion, Al- 
 bracca ; and the pertinacity of others in seeking her love being 
 as great as that of hers for Rinaldo, she found King Galafron, in 
 a short time, besieged there for her sake, by the fierce Agrican, 
 king of Tartary. 
 
 In a short time a jealous feud sprang up between the loving 
 friends Rinaldo and Orlando ; and Angelica, torn with conflicting 
 emotions, from her dread on her father's account as well as her 
 own, and her aversion to every knight but her detester, was at 
 one time compelled to apply to Orlando for assistance, and at an- 
 other, being afraid that he would have the better of Rinaldo in 
 combat, to send him away on a perilous adventure elsewhere, 
 with a promise of accepting his love should he succeed. f Or- 
 lando went, but, not before he had slain Agrican and delivered 
 Albracca. Circumstances, however, again took him with her to 
 a distance, as the reader will see, ere he could bring her to per- 
 form her promise ; and the Paladins in general having again been 
 
 * The force of aversion was surely never better imagined than in this scene 
 of the opened arms of beauty, and the knight's preference of the most odious 
 death. 
 
 t Legalised, I presume, by a divorce from the hero's wife, the fair Alda ; who, 
 though she is generally designated by that epithet, seems never to have had 
 much of his attention.
 
 262 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 
 
 scattered abroad, it happened that Rinaldo a second time found 
 himself in the forest of Arden ; and here, without expecting it, 
 he became an altered man ; for he now tasted a very different 
 stream from that which had given him his hate for Angelica ; 
 namely, the one which had made her fall in love with himself. 
 He was led to do this by a very extraordinary adventure. 
 
 In the thick of the forest he had come upon a mead full of 
 flowers, in which there was a naked youth, singing in the midst 
 of three damsels, who were naked also, and who were da-ncing 
 round about him. They had bunches of flowers in their hands, 
 and garlands on their heads ; and as they were thus delighting 
 themselves, with faces full of love and joy, they suddenly changed 
 countenance on seeing Rinaldo. "Behold," cried they, "the 
 traitor ! Behold him, villain that he is, and the scorner of all 
 delights ! He has fallen into the net at last." With these words 
 they fell Upon him with the flowers like so many furies ; and ten- 
 der as such scourges might be thought, every blow which the 
 roses and violets gave him, every fresh stroke of the lilies and 
 the hyacinths, smote him to the very heart, and filled his veins 
 with fire. The flowers in the hands of the nymphs being ex- 
 hausted, the youth gave him a blow on the helmet with a tall 
 garden-lily, which felled him to the earth ; and so, taking him by 
 the legs, and dragging him over the grass, his conqueror went the 
 whole circuit of the mead with him, the nymphs taking the very 
 garlands off their heads, and again scourging him with their white 
 and red roses.* 
 
 At the close of this discipline, which left him more exhausted 
 than twenty battles, his enemies suddenly developed wings from 
 their shoulders, the feathers of which were of white and gold and 
 vermilion, every feather having an eye in it, not like those in the 
 peacock's feathers, but one full of life and motion, being a female 
 eye, lovely and gracious. And with these wings they poised 
 themselves a little, and so sprung up to heaven. f 
 
 * This violent effect of weapons so extremely gentle is beautifully conceived. 
 
 1 The "female eye, lovely and gracious," is charmingly painted per se; but 
 of this otherwise thoroughly beautiful description I must venture to doubt, 
 whether living eyes of any sort, instead of those in the peacock's feathers, are 
 in good taste. The imagination revolts from life misplaced.
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 263 
 
 The Paladin, more dead than alive, lay helpless among the 
 flowers, when a fourth nymph came up to him, of inexpressible 
 beauty. She told him that he had grievously offended the naked 
 youth, who was no other than Love himself; and added, that his 
 only remedy was to be penitent, and to drink of the waters of a 
 stream hard by, which he would find running from the roots of 
 an olive-tree and a pine. With these words, she vanished in her 
 turn like the rest ; and Rinaldo, dragging himself as well as he 
 could to the olive and pine, stooped down, and greedily drank of 
 the water. Again and again he drank, and wished still to be 
 drinking, for it took not only all pain out of his limbs, but all hate 
 and bitterness out of his soul, and produced such a remorseful and 
 doating memory of Angelica, that he would fain have galloped 
 that instant to Cathay, and prostrated himself at her feet. By de- 
 grees he knew the place ; and looking round about him, and pre- 
 paring to remount his horse, he discerned a knight and a lady in 
 the distance. The knight was in a coat of armour unknown to 
 him, and the lady kneeling and drinking at a fountain, which was 
 the one that had formerly quenched his own thirst ; to wit, the 
 Fountain of Disdain. 
 
 Alas ! it was Angelica herself; and the knight was Orlando. 
 She had allowed him to bring her into France, ostensibly for the 
 purpose of wedding him at the court of Charlemagne, whither the 
 hero's assistance had been called against Agramant king of the 
 Moors, but secretly with the object of discovering Rinaldo. Ri- 
 naldo, behold ! is discovered ; but the fatal averse water has been 
 drunk, and Angelica now hates him in turn, as cordially as he 
 detested her. In vain he accosted her in the humblest and most 
 repentant manner, calling himself the tmworthiest of mankind, 
 and entreating to be allowed to love her. Orlando, disclosing 
 himself, fiercely interrupted him ; and a combat so terrific en- 
 sued, that Angelica fled away on her palfrey till she came to a 
 large plain, in which she beheld an army encamped. 
 
 The army was Charlemagne's, who had come to meet Roda- 
 monte, one of the vassals of Agramant. Angelica, in a tremble, 
 related how she had left the two Paladins fighting in the wood ; 
 and Charlemagne, who was delighted to find Orlando so near 
 him, proceeded thither with his lords, and parting the combatants
 
 Argument. 
 
 Agrican, king of Tartary, in love with Angelica, and baffled by the prowess 
 of the unknown Orlando in his attempts to bring the siege of Albracca to a 
 favourable conclusion, entices him apart from the battle into a wood, in the hope 
 of killing him in single combat. The combat is suspended by the arrival of 
 night-time ; and a conversation ensues between the warriors, which is furiously 
 interrupted by Agrican's discovery of his rival, and the latter's refusal to re- 
 nounce his love. Agrican is slain ; and in his dying moments requests baptism 
 at the hand of his conqueror, who, with great tenderness, bestows it.
 
 THE DEATH OF AGRICAN. 
 
 THE siege of Albracca was going on formidably under the 
 command of Agrican, and the city of Galafron was threatened 
 with the loss of the monarch's daughter, Angelica, when Orlan- 
 do, at his earnest prayer, came to assist him, and changing at 
 once the whole course of the war, threw the enemy in his turn 
 into transports of anxiety. Wherever the great Paladin came, 
 pennon and standard fell before him. Men were cut up and 
 cloven down, at every stroke of his sword ; and whereas the 
 Indians had been in full rout but a moment before, and the Tar- 
 tars ever on their flanks, Galafron himself being the swiftest 
 among the spurrers away, it was now the Tartars that fled for 
 their lives ; for Orlando was there, and a band of fresh knights 
 were about him, and Agrican in vain attempted to rally his troops. 
 The Paladin kept him constantly in his front, forcing him to at- 
 tend to nobody else. 
 
 The Tartar king, who cared not a button for Galafron and all 
 his army,* provided he could but rid himself of this terrible 
 knight (whom he guessed at, but did not know), bethought him of 
 a stratagem. He turned his horse, and made a show of flying 
 in despair. Orlando dashed after him, as he desired ; and Agri- 
 can fled till he reached a green place in a wood, with a fountain 
 in it. 
 
 The place was beautiful, and the Tartar dismounted to refresh 
 himself at the fountain, but without taking off his helmet, or lay- 
 ing aside any of his armour. Orlando was quickly at his back, 
 crying out, " So bold, and yet such a fugitive ! How could you 
 
 * " Che tutti insieme, e '1 suo Rfe Galafrone, 
 Non li stimava quanto un vil bottone."
 
 268 THE DEATH OF AGRICAN. 
 
 fly from a single arm, and yet think to escape ? When a man 
 can die with honour, he should be glad to die ; for he may live 
 and fare worse. He may get death and infamy together." 
 
 The Tartar king had leaped on his saddle the moment he saw 
 his enemy ; and when the Paladin had done speaking, he said in 
 a mild voice, " Without doubt you are the best knight I ever en- 
 countered ; and fain would I leave you untouched for your own 
 sake, if you would cease to hinder me from rallying my people. 
 I pretended to fly, in order to bring you out of the field. If you 
 insist upon fighting, I must needs fight and slay you ; but I call 
 the sun in the heavens to witness, that I- would rather not. I 
 should be very sorry for your death." 
 
 The County Orlando felt pity for so much gallantry ; and he 
 said, "The nobler you shew yourself, the more it grieves me to 
 think, that in dying without a knowledge of the true faith, you 
 will be lost in the other world. Let me advise you to save body 
 and soul at once. Receive baptism, and go your way in peace." 
 
 Agrican looked him in the face, and replied, " I suspect you 
 to be the Paladin Orlando. If you are, I would not lose this op- 
 portunity of fighting with you, to be king of Paradise. Talk to 
 me no more about your things of the other world ; for you will 
 preach in vain. Each of us for himself, and let the sword be 
 umpire." 
 
 No sooner said than done. The Tartar drew his sword, boldly 
 advancing upon Orlando ; and a cut and thrust fight began, so long 
 and so terrible, each warrior being a miracle of prowess, that the 
 story says it lasted from noon till night. Orlando then, seeing 
 the stars come out, was the first to propose a respite. 
 
 " What are we to do," said he, " now that daylight has left 
 us?" 
 
 Agrican answered readily enough, " Let us repose in this 
 meadow, and renew the combat at dawn." 
 
 The repose was taken accordingly. Each tied up his horse, 
 and reclined himself on the grass, not far from one another, just 
 as if they had been friends, Orlando by the fountain, Agrican 
 beneath a pine. It was a beautiful clear night ; and as they 
 talked together before addressing themselves to sleep, the cham- 
 pion of Christendom, looking up at the firmament, said, " That is
 
 THE DEATH OF AGRICAN. 269 
 
 a fine piece of workmanship, that starry spectacle. God made 
 it all, that moon of silver, and those stars of gold, and the light 
 of day and the sun, all for the sake of human kind." 
 
 " You wish, I see, to talk of matters of faith," said the Tartar. 
 " Now I may as well tell you at once, that I have no sort of skill 
 in such matters, nor learning of any kind. I never could learn 
 anything when I was a boy. I hated it so, that I broke the man's 
 head who was commissioned to teach me ; and it produced such 
 an effect on others, that nobody ever afterwards dared so much as 
 shew me a book. My boyhood was therefore passed as it should 
 be, in horsemanship, and hunting, and learning to fight. What is 
 the good of a gentleman's poring all day over a book ? Prowess 
 to the knight, and prattle to the clergyman. That is my motto." 
 
 " I acknowledge," returned Orlando, " that arms are the first 
 consideration of a gentleman ; but not at all that he does himself 
 dishonour by knowledge. On the contrary, knowledge is as great 
 an embellishment of the rest of his attainments, as the flowers are 
 to the meadow before us ; and as to the knowledge of his Maker, 
 the man that is without it is no better than a stock or a stone, or 
 a brute beast. Neither, without study, can he reach anything 
 like a due sense of the depth and divineness of the contemplation." 
 
 " Learned or not learned," said Agrican, " you might shew 
 yourself better bred than by endeavouring to make me talk on a 
 subject on which you have me at a disadvantage. I have frankly 
 told you what sort of person I am ; and I dare say, that you 
 for your part are very learned and wise. You will therefore per- 
 mit me, if you say anything more of such things, to make you 
 no answer. If you choose to sleep, I wish you good night ; but 
 if you prefer talking, I recommend you to talk of fighting, or of 
 fair ladies. And, by the way, pray tell me are you, or are you 
 not, may I ask, that Orlando who makes such a noise in the 
 world ? And what is it, pray, brings you into these parts ? 
 Were you ever in love ? I suppose you must have been ; for to 
 be a knight and never to have been in love, would be like being a 
 man with no heart in his breast." 
 
 The County replied, " Orlando I am, and in love I am.* 
 
 * Berni has here introduced the touching words, "Would I were not so!" 
 (Cos! non foss' io!)
 
 270 THE DEATH OF AGRICAN. 
 
 Love has made me abandon every thing, and brought me into 
 these distant regions ; and to tell you all in one word, my heart 
 is in the hands of the daughter of King Galafron. You have 
 come against him with fire and sword, to get possession of his 
 castles and his dominions ; and I have come to help him, for no 
 object in the world but to please his daughter, and win her beau- 
 tiful hand. I care for nothing else in existence." 
 
 Now when the Tartar king Agrican heard his antagonist speak 
 in this manner, and knew him to be indeed Orlando, and to be in 
 love with Angelica, his face changed colour for grief and jeal- 
 ousy, though it could not be seen for the darkness. His heart 
 began beating with such violence, that he felt as if he should 
 have died. " Well," said he to Orlando, " we are to fight when 
 it is daylight, and one or the other is to be left here, dead on the 
 ground. I have a proposal to make to you ; nay, an entreaty. 
 My love is so excessive for the same lady, that I beg you to leave 
 her to me. I will owe you my thanks, and give up the fight my- 
 self. I cannot bear that any one else should love her, and I live 
 to see it. Why, therefore, should either of us perish ? Give 
 her up. Not a soul shall know it."* 
 
 " I never yet," answered Orlando, " made a promise which I 
 did not keep ; and, nevertheless, I own to you, that were I to 
 make a promise like that, and even swear to keep it, I should not. 
 You might as well ask me to tear away the limbs from my body, 
 and the eyes out of my head. I could as soon live without 
 breath itself, as cease loving Angelica." 
 
 Agrican had scarcely patience enough to let the speaker finish, 
 ere he leaped furiously on horseback, though it was midnight. 
 " Quit her," said he, " or die !" 
 
 Orlando, seeing the infidel getting up, and not being sure that 
 he would not add treachery to fierceness, had been hardly less 
 quick in mounting for the combat. " Never !" exclaimed he. 
 " I never could have quitted her if I would ; and now I wouldn't 
 if I could. You must seek her by other means than these." 
 
 Fiercely dashed their horses together, in the night-time, on the 
 
 * This proposal is in the highest ingenuous spirit of the absurd wilfulness of 
 passion, thinking that every thing is to give way before it, not excepting the 
 same identical wishes in other people.
 
 THE DEATH OF AGRICAN. 271 
 
 green mead. Despiteful and terrible were the blows they gave 
 and took by the moonlight. There was no need of their looking 
 out for one another, night-time though it was. Their business 
 was to take a sharp heed of every movement, as if it had been 
 noon-day.* 
 
 Agrican fought in a rage : Orlando was cooler. And now the 
 struggle had lasted more than five hours, and dawn began to be 
 visible, when the Tartar king k furious to find so much trouble 
 given him, dealt his enemy a blow sharp and violent beyond con- 
 ception. It cut the shield in two, as if it had been a cheesecake ; 
 and thongh blood could not be drawn from Orlando, because he 
 was fated, it shook and bruised him, as if it had started every 
 joint in his body. 
 
 His body only, however ; not a particle of his soul. So dread, 
 ful was the blow which the Paladin gave in return, that not only 
 shield, but every bit of mail on the body of Agrican, was broken 
 in pieces, and three of his left ribs cut asunder. 
 
 The Tartar, roaring like a lion, raised his sword with still 
 greater vehemence than before, and dealt a blow on the Paladin's 
 helmet, such as he had never yet received from mortal man. 
 For a moment it took away his senses. His sight failed ; his 
 ears tinkled ; his frightened horse turned about to fly ; and he was 
 falling from the saddle, when the very action of falling jerked 
 his head upwards, and with the jerk he regained his recollection. 
 
 " O my God !" thought he, " what a shame is this ! how shall I 
 ever again dare to face Angelica ! I have been fighting, hour 
 after hour, with this man, and he is but one, and I call myself 
 Orlando. If the combat last any longer, I will bury myself in a 
 monastery, and never look on sword again." 
 
 Orlando muttered with his lips closed and his teeth ground to- 
 gether ; and you might have thought that fire instead of breath 
 came out of his nose and mouth. He raised his sword Durindana 
 with both his hands, and sent it down so tremendously on Agri- 
 can's left shoulder, that it cut through breast-plate and belly- 
 piece down to the very haunch ; nay, crushed the saddle-bow, 
 though it was made of bone and iron, and felled man and horse 
 to the earth. From shoulder to hip was Agrican cut through his 
 Very fine all this, I think.
 
 2-72 THE DEATH OF AGRICAN. 
 
 weary soul, and he turned as white as ashes, and felt death upon 
 him. He called Orlando to come close to him with a gentle 
 voice, and said, as well as he could, " I believe in Him who died 
 on the Cross. Baptise me, I pray thee, with the fountain, before 
 my senses are gone. I have lived an evil life, but need not be 
 rebellious to God in death also. May He who came to save all 
 the rest of the world, save me ! He is a God of great mercy." 
 
 And he shed tears, did that king, though he had been so lofty 
 and fierce. 
 
 Orlando dismounted quickly, with his own face in tears. He 
 gathered the king tenderly in his arms, and took and laid him by 
 the fountain, on a marble cirque which it had ; and then he wept 
 in concert with him heartily, and asked his pardon, and so bap- 
 tised him in the water of the fountain, and knelt and prayed to 
 God for him with joined hands. 
 
 He then paused and looked at him ; and when he perceived 
 his countenance changed, and that his whole person was cold, he 
 left him there on the marble cirque by the fountain, all armed as 
 he was, with the sword by his side, and the crown upon his 
 head. 
 
 I think I may anticipate the warm admiration of the reader for the whole 
 of this beautiful episode, particularly its close. " I think," says Panizzi, " that 
 Tasso had this passage particularly in view when he wrote the duel of Clorinda 
 and Tancredi, and her conversion and baptism before dying. The whole pas- 
 sage, from stanza xii. (where Agrican receives his mortal blow) to this, is beau- 
 tiful ; and the delicate proceeding of Orlando in leaving Agrican's body armed ) 
 even with the sword in his hand, is in the noblest spirit of chivalry." Edition 
 of Boiardo and Ariosto, vol. iii. page 357. 
 
 The reader will find the original in the Appendix No. I. 
 
 In the course of the poem (canto xix. stanza xxvi.) a knight, with the same 
 noble delicacy, who is in distress for a set of arms, borrows those belonging to 
 the dead body, with many excuses, and a kiss on its face.
 
 A FAIRY LOVE-TALE.
 
 Prasildo, a nobleman of Babylon, to his great anguish, falls in love with his 
 friend's wife, Tisbina; and being overheard by her and her husband threatening 
 to kill himself, the lady, hoping to divert him from his passion by time and ab- 
 sence, promises to return it on condition of his performing a distant and peril- 
 ous adventure. He performs the adventure ; and the husband and wife, suppo- 
 sing that there is no other way of her escaping the consequences, resolve to take 
 poison ; after which the lady goes to Prasildo's house, and informs him of their 
 having done so. Prasildo resolves to die with them ; but hearing, in the mean 
 time, that the apothecary had given them a drink that was harmless, he goes 
 and tells them of their good fortune ; upon which the husband is so struck with 
 his generosity, that he voluntarily quits Babylon for life, and the lady marries 
 the lover. The new husband subsequently hears that his friend's life is in dan- 
 ger, and quits the wife to go and deliver him from it at the risk of his own, 
 which he does. 
 
 This story, which has resemblances to it in Boccaccio and Chaucer, is told to 
 Rinaldo while riding through a wood in Asia, with a damsel behind him on the 
 same horse. He has engaged to combat in her behalf with a band of knights ; 
 and the lady relates it to beguile the way. 
 
 The reader is to bear in mind, that the age of chivalry took delight in mooting 
 points of love and friendship, such as in after times would have been out of the 
 question ; and that the parties in this story are Mahometans, with whom divorce 
 was an easy thing, and caused no scandal.
 
 THE SARACEN FRIENDS. 
 
 IEOLDO, a knight of Babylon, had to wife a lady of the name 
 of Tisbina, whom he loved with a passion equal to that of Tristan 
 for Iseult ;* and she returned his love with such fondness, that 
 her thoughts were occupied with him from morning till night. 
 Among other pleasant circumstances of their position, they had a 
 neighbour who was accounted the greatest nobleman in the city ; 
 and he deserved his credit, for he spent his great riches in doing 
 nothing but honour to his rank. He was pleasant in company, 
 formidable in battle, full of grace in love ; an open-hearted, ac- 
 complished gentleman. 
 
 This personage, whose name was Prasildo, happened to be of a 
 party one day with Tisbina, who were amusing themselves in a 
 garden, with a game in which the players knelt down with their 
 faces bent on one another's laps, and guessed who it was that 
 struck them. The turn came to himself, and he knelt down to 
 the lap of Tisbina ; but no sooner was he there, than he expe- 
 rienced feelings he had never dreamt of ; and instead of trying 
 to guess correctly, took all the pains he could to remain in the 
 same position. 
 
 These feelings pursued him all the rest of the day, and still 
 more closely at night. He did nothing but think and sigh, and 
 find the soft feathers harder than any stone. Nor did he get bet- 
 ter as time advanced. His once favourite pastime of hunting 
 now ceased to afford him any delight. Nothing pleased him but 
 to be giving dinners and balls, to make verses and sing them to 
 his lute, and to joust and tournay in the eyes of his love, dressed 
 in the most sumptuous apparel. But above all, gentle and grace- 
 ful as he had been before, he now became still more gentle and 
 
 * The hero and heroine of the famous romance of Tristan de Leonoit.
 
 276 THE SARACEN FRIENDS. 
 
 graceful for good qualities are always increased when a man is 
 in love. Never in my life did I know them turn to ill in that 
 case. So, in Prasildo's, you may guess what a super-excellent 
 person he became. 
 
 The passion which had thus taken possession of this gentleman 
 was not lost upon the lady for want of her knowing it. A mu- 
 tual acquaintance was always talking to her on the subject, but 
 to no purpose ; she never relaxed her pride and dignity for a mo- 
 ment. The lover at last fell ill ; he fairly wasted away ; and 
 was so unhappy, that he gave up all his feastings and entertain- 
 ments. The only pleasure he took was in a solitary wood, in 
 which he used to plunge himself in order to give way to his grief 
 and lamentations. 
 
 It happened one day, early in the morning, while he was thus 
 occupied, that Iroldo came into the wood to amuse himself with 
 bird-catching. He had Tisbina with him ; and as they were 
 coming along, they overheard their neighbour during one of his 
 paroxysms, and stopped to listen to what he said. 
 
 " Hear me," exclaimed he, " ye flowers and ye woods. Hear 
 to what a pass of wretchedness I am come, since that cruel one 
 will hear me not. Hear, O sun that hast taken away the night 
 from the heavens, and you, ye stars, and thou the departing moon, 
 hear the voice of my grief for the last time, for exist I can no lon- 
 ger ; my death is the only way left me to gratify that proud beau- 
 ty, to whom it has pleased Heaven to give a cruel heart with a 
 merciful countenance. Fain would I have died in her presence. 
 It would have comforted me to see her pleased even with that 
 proof of my love. But I pray, nevertheless, that she may never 
 know it ; since, cruel as she is, she might blame herself for hav- 
 ing shewn a scorn so extreme ; and I love her so, I would not 
 have her pained for all her cruelty. Surely I shall love her 
 even in my grave." 
 
 With these words, turning pale with his own mortal resolution, 
 Prasildo drew his sword, and pronouncing the name of Tisbina 
 more than once with a loving voice, as though its very sound 
 would be sufficient to waft him to Paradise, was about to plunge 
 the steel into his bosom, when the lady herself, by leave of her
 
 THE SARACEN FRIENDS. 277 
 
 husband, whose manly visage was all in tears for pity, stood sud- 
 denly before him. 
 
 " Prasildo," said she, " if you love me, listen to me. You 
 have often told me that you do so. Now prove it. I happen to 
 be threatened with nothing less than the loss of life and honour. 
 Nothing short of such a calamity could have induced me to beg 
 of you the service I am going to request ; since there is no 
 greater shame in the world than to ask favours from those to 
 whom we have refused them. But I now promise you, that if 
 you do what I desire, your love shall be returned. I give you my 
 word for it. I give you my honour. On the other side of the 
 wilds of Barbary is a garden which has a wall of iron. It has 
 four gates. Life itself keeps one ; Death another ; Poverty the 
 third ; the fairy of Riches the fourth. He who goes in at one 
 gate must go out at the other opposite ; and in the midst of the 
 garden is a tree, tall as the reach of an arrow, which produces 
 pearls for blossoms. It is called the Tree of Wealth, and has 
 fruit of emeralds and boughs of gold. I must have a bough of 
 that tree, or suffer the most painful consequences. Now, then, 
 if you love me, I say, prove it. Prove it, and most assuredly I 
 shall love you in turn, better than ever you loved myself." 
 
 What need of saying that Prasildo, with haste and joy, under- 
 took to do all that she required ? If she had asked the sun and 
 stars, and the whole universe, he would have promised them. 
 Quitting her in spite of his love, he set out on the journey with- 
 out delay, only dressing himself before he left the city in the 
 habit of a pilgrim. 
 
 Now you must know, that Iroldo and his lady had set Prasildo 
 on that adventure, in the hope that the great distance which he 
 would have to travel, and the change which it might assist time 
 to produce, would deliver him from his passion. At all events, 
 in case this good end was not effected before he arrived at the 
 garden, they counted to a certainty on his getting rid of it when 
 he did ; because the fairy of that garden, which was called the 
 Garden of Medusa, was of such a nature, that whosoever did 
 but look on her countenance forgot the reason for his going thi- 
 ther ; and whoever saluted, touched, and sat down to converse 
 by her side, forgot all that had ever occurred in his lifetime. 
 PART IT. 5
 
 278 THE SARACEN FRIENDS. 
 
 Away, however, on his steed went our bold lover ; all alone, 
 or rather with Love for his companion ; and so, riding hard till 
 he came to the Red Sea, he took ship, and journeyed through 
 Egypt, and came to the mountains of Barca. where he overtook 
 an old grey-headed palmer. 
 
 Prasildo told the palmer the reason of his coming, and the 
 palmer told him what the reader has heard about the garden ; 
 adding, that he must enter by the gate of Poverty, and take no 
 arms or armour with him, excepting a looking-glass for a shield, 
 in which the fairy might behold her beauty. The old man gave 
 him other directions necessary for his passing out of the gate of 
 Riches ; and Prasildo, thanking him, went on, and in thirty days 
 found himself entering the garden with the greatest ease, by the 
 gate of Poverty. 
 
 The garden looked like a Paradise, it was so full of beautiful 
 trees, and flowers, and fresh grass. Prasildo took care to hold 
 the shield over his eyes, that he might avoid seeing the fairy 
 Medusa ; and in this manner, guarding his approach, he arrived 
 at the Golden Tree. The fairy, who was reclining against the 
 trunk of it, looked up, and saw herself in the glass. Wonder- 
 ful was the effect on her. Instead of her own white-and-red 
 blooming face, she beheld that of a dreadful serpent. The spec- 
 tacle made her take to flight in terror ; and the lover rinding his 
 object so far gained, looked freely at the tree, and climbed it, and 
 bore away a bough.* 
 
 With this he proceeded to the gate of Riches. It was all of 
 loadstone, and opened with a great noise. But he passed through 
 it happily, for he made the fairy who kept it a present of half the 
 bough ; and so he issued forth out of the garden, with indescriba- 
 ble joy. 
 
 Behold our loving adventurer now on his road home. Every 
 step of the way appeared to him a thousand. He took the road 
 of Nubia to shorten the journey ; crossed the Arabian Gulf with 
 
 * " Mr. Rose observes, that Medusa may be designed by Boiardo as the ' type 
 of conscience ;' and he is confirmed in his opinion by the circumstance men- 
 tioned in this canto (12, lib. i. stan. 39) of Medusa not being able to contemplate 
 the reflection of her own hideous appearance, though beautiful in the sight of 
 others. I fully agree with him." PANIZZI, ut sup., vol. iii. p. 333.
 
 THE SARACEN FRIENDS. 279 
 
 a breeze in his favour ; and travelling by night as well as by day, 
 arrived one fine morning in Babylon. 
 
 No sooner was he there than he sent to tell the object of his 
 passion how fortunate he had been. He begged her to name her 
 own place and time for receiving the bough at his hands, taking 
 care to remind her of her promise ; and he could not help adding, 
 that he should die if she broke it. 
 
 Terrible was the grief of Tisbina at this unlooked-for news. 
 She threw herself on her couch in despair, and bewailed the hour 
 she was born. " What on earth am I to do?" cried the wretched 
 lady ; " death itself is no remedy for a case like this, since it is 
 only another mode of breaking my word. To think that Prasildo 
 should return from the garden of Medusa ! who could have sup- 
 posed it possible 1 And yet, in truth, what a fool I was to sup- 
 pose any thing impossible to love ! O my husband ! little didst 
 thou think what thou thyself advisedst me to promise !" 
 
 The husband was coming that moment towards the room ; and 
 overhearing his wife grieving in this distracted manner, he en- 
 tered and clasped her in his arms. On learning the cause of her 
 affliction, he felt as though he should have died with her on the 
 spot. 
 
 "Alas!" cried he, " that it should be possible for me to be 
 miserable while I am so dear to your heart. But you know, O 
 my soul ! that when love and jealousy come together, the torment 
 is the greatest in the world. Myself myself, alas ! caused the 
 mischief, and myself alone ought to suffer for it. You must keep 
 your promise. You must abide by the word you have given, 
 especially to one who has undergone so much to perform what 
 you asked him. Sweet face, you must. But oh ! see him not 
 till after I am dead. Let Fortune do with me what she pleases, 
 so that I be saved from a disgrace like that. It will be a comfort 
 to me in death to think that I alone, while I was on earth, enjoyed 
 the fond looking of that lovely face. Nay," concluded the 
 wretched husband, " I feel as though I should die over again, 
 if I could call to mind in my grave how you were taken from 
 me." 
 
 Iroldo became dumb for anguish. It seemed to him as if his 
 very heart had been taken out of his breast. Nor was Tisbina
 
 280 THE SARACEN FRIENDS. 
 
 less miserable. She was as pale as death, and could hardly 
 speak to him, or bear to look at him. At length turning her eyes 
 upon him, she said, " And do you believe I could make my poor 
 sorry case out in this world without Iroldo ? Can he bear, him- 
 self, to think of leaving his Tisbina ? he who has so often said, 
 that if he possessed heaven itself, he should not think it heaven 
 without her ? O dearest husband, there is a way to make death 
 not bitter to either of us. It is to die together. I must only exist 
 long enough to see Prasildo ! Death, alas ! is in that thought ; 
 but the same death will release us. It need not even be a hard 
 death, saving our misery. There are poisons so gentle in their 
 deadliness, that we need but faint away into sleep, and so, in the 
 course of a few hours, be delivered. Our misery and our folly 
 will then alike be ended." 
 
 Iroldo assenting, clasped his wife in distraction ; and for a long 
 time they remained in the same posture, half stifled with grief, 
 and bathing one another's cheeks with their tears. Afterwards 
 they sent quietly for the poison ; and the apothecary made up a 
 preparation in a cup, without asking any questions ; and so the 
 husband and wife took it. Iroldo drank first, and then endeav- 
 oured to give the cup to his wife, uttering not a word, and trem- 
 bling in every limb ; not because he was afraid of death, but 
 because he could not bear to ask her to share it. At length, 
 turning away his face and looking down, he held the cup towards 
 her, and she took it with a chilled heart and trembling hand, and 
 drank the remainder to the dregs. Iroldo then covered his face 
 and head, not daring to see her depart for the house of Prasildo ; 
 and Tisbina, with pangs bitterer than death, left him in solitude. 
 
 Tisbina, accompanied by a servant, went to Prasildo, who 
 could scarcely believe his ears when he heard that she was at the 
 door requesting to speak with him. He hastened down to shew 
 her all honour, leading her from the door into a room by them- 
 selves ; and when he found her in tears, addressed her in the 
 most considerate and subdued, yet still not unhappy manner, 
 taking her confusion for bashfulness, and never dreaming what a 
 tragedy had been meditated. 
 
 Finding at length that her grief was not to be done away, he 
 conjured her by what she held dearest on earth to let him know
 
 THE SARACEN FRIENDS. 281 
 
 the cause of it ; adding, that he could still die for her sake, if 
 his death would do her any service. Tisbina spoke at these 
 words ; and Prasildo then heard what he did not wish to hear. 
 " I am in your hands," answered she, " while I am yet alive. I 
 am bound to my word, but I cannot survive the dishonour which 
 it costs me, nor, above all, the loss of the husband of my heart. 
 You also, to whose eyes I have been so welcome, must be pre- 
 pared for my disappearance from the earth. Had my affections 
 not belonged to another, ungentle would have been my heart not 
 to have loved yourself, who are so capable of loving ; but (as you 
 must well know) to love two at once is neither fitting nor in one's 
 power. It was for that reason I never loved you, baron ; I was 
 only touched with compassion for you ; and hence the mise- 
 ries of us all. Before this day closes, I shall have learnt the 
 taste of death." And without further preface she disclosed to 
 him how she and her husband had taken poison. 
 
 Prasildo was struck dumb with ^horror. He had thought his 
 felicity at hand, and was at the same instant to behold it gone for 
 ever. She who was rooted in his heart, she who carried his life 
 in her sweet looks, even she was sitting there before him, already, 
 so to speak, dead. 
 
 " It has pleased neither Heaven nor you, Tisbina," exclaimed 
 the unhappy young man, " to put my best feelings to the proof. 
 Often have two lovers perished for love ; the world will now behold 
 a sacrifice of three. Oh, why did you not make a request to me 
 in your turn, and ask me to free you from your promise ? You 
 say you took pity on me ! Alas, cruel one, confess that you have 
 killed yourself, in order to kill me. Yet why ? Never did I 
 think of giving you displeasure ; and I now do what I would have 
 done at any time to prevent it, I absolve you from your oath. 
 Stay, or go this instant, as it seems best to you." 
 
 A stronger feeling than compassion moved the heart of Tisbina 
 at these words. " This indeed," replied she, " I feel to be noble; 
 and truly could I also now die to save you. But life is flitting ; 
 and how may I prove my regard ?" 
 
 Prasildo, who had in good earnest resolved that three instead of 
 two should perish, experienced such anguish at the extraordinary 
 position in which he found all three, that even her sweet words
 
 THE SARACEN FRIENDS. 
 
 came but dimly to his ears. He stood like a man stupified ; then 
 begged of her to give him but one kiss, and so took his leave 
 without further ado, only intimating that her way out of the 
 house lay before her. As he spake, he removed himself from her 
 sight. 
 
 Tisbina reached home. She found her husband with his head 
 covered up as she left him ; but when she recounted what had 
 passed, and the courtesy of Prasildo, and how he had exacted 
 from her but a single kiss, Iroldo got up, and removed the cover- 
 ing from his face, and then clasping his hands, and raising it to 
 heaven, he knelt with grateful humility, and prayed God to give 
 pardon to himself, and reward to his neighbour. But before he 
 had ended, Tisbina sunk on the floor in a swoon. Her weaker 
 frame was the first to undergo the effects of what she had taken. 
 Iroldo felt icy chill to see her, albeit she seemed to sleep sweetly. 
 Her aspect was not at all like death. He taxed Heaven with 
 cruelty for treating two loving hearts so hardly, and cried out 
 against Fortune, and life, and Love itself. 
 
 Nor was Prasildo happier in his chamber. He also exclaimed 
 against the bitter tyrant " whom men call Love ;" and protested, 
 that he would gladly encounter any fate, to be delivered from the 
 worse evils of his false and cruel ascendency. 
 
 But his lamentations were interrupted. The apothecary who 
 sold the potion to the husband and wife was at the door below, 
 requesting to speak with him. The servants at first had refused to 
 carry the message ; but the old man persisting, and saying it was 
 a matter of life and death, entrance for him into his master's 
 chamber was obtained. 
 
 " Noble sir," said the apothecary, " I have always held you in 
 love and reverence. I have unfortunately reason to fear that 
 somebody is desiring your death. This morning a handmaiden 
 of the lady Tisbina applied to me for a secret poison ; and just 
 now it was told me, that the lady herself had been at this house. 
 I am old, sir, and you are young ; and I warn you against the 
 violence and jealousies of womankind. Talk of their flames of 
 love ! Satan himself burn them, say I, for they are fit for noth- 
 ing better. Do not be too much alarmed, however, this time : for 
 in truth I gave the young woman nothing of the sort that she
 
 THE SARACEN FRIENDS. 283 
 
 asked for, but only a draught so innocent, that if you have taken 
 it, it will cost you but four or five hours' sleep. So, in God's 
 name, give up the whole foolish sex ; for you may depend on it, 
 that in this city of ours there are ninety-nine wicked ones among 
 them to one good." 
 
 You may guess how Prasildo's heart revived at these words. 
 Truly might he be compared to flowers in sunshine after rain ; he 
 rejoiced through all his being, and displayed again a cheerful 
 countenance. Hastily thanking the old man, he lost no time in 
 repairing to the house of his neighbours, and telling them of 
 their safety : and you may guess how the like joy was theirs. 
 
 But behold a wonder ! Iroldo was so struck with the gene- 
 rosity of his neighbour's conduct throughout the whole of this 
 extraordinary affair, that nothing would content his grateful 
 though ever-grieving heart, but he must fairly give up Tisbina 
 after all. Prasildo, to do him justice, resisted the proposition as 
 stoutly as he could ; but a man's powers are ill seconded by an 
 unwilling heart ; and though the contest was long and handsome, 
 as is customary between generous natures, the husband adhered 
 firmly to his intention. In short, he abruptly quitted the city, 
 declaring that he would never again see it, and so left his wife to 
 the lover. And I must add (concluded the fair lady who was 
 telling the story to Rinaldo), that although Tisbina took his de- 
 parture greatly to heart, and sometimes felt as if she should die 
 at the thoughts of it, yet since he persisted in staying away, and 
 there appeared no chance of his ever doing otherwise, she did, 
 as in that case we should all do, we at least that are young and 
 kind, and took the handsome Prasildo for second spouse.* 
 
 * " Tisbina," says Panizzi, in a note on this passage, " very wisely acted like 
 Emilia (in Chaucer), who, when she saw she could not marry Arcita, because 
 he was killed, thought of marrying Palemone, rather than ' be a mayden all hire 
 lyf. 1 It is to be observed, that although she regretted very much what had hap- 
 pened, and even fainted away, she did not, however, stand on ceremonies, as the 
 poet says in the next stanza, but yielded immediately, and married Prasildo. 
 This, at first, I thought to be somewhat inconsistent; but on consideration I 
 found I was wrong. Tisbina was wrong ; because, having lost Iroldo, she did 
 not know what Prasildo would do ; but so soon as the latter offered to fill up the 
 place, she nobly and magnanimously resigned herself to her fate." Ut sup., 
 vol. iii. p. 336.
 
 284 THE SARACEN FRIENDS. 
 
 It might be thought inconsistent in Tishina, notwithstanding Mr. Panizzi's 
 pleasantry, to be so willing to take another husband, after having poisoned her- 
 self for the first ; but she seems intended by the pow to exhibit a character of 
 impulse in contradistinction to permanency of sentiment. She cannot help 
 shewing pity for Prasildo ; she cannot help poisoning herself for her husband ; 
 and she cannot help taking his friend, when she has lost him. Nor must it be 
 forgotten that the husband was the first to break the tie. We respect him more 
 than we do her, because he was capable of greater self-denial ; but if he him- 
 self preferred his friend to his love, we can hardly blame her (custom apart) for 
 following the example.
 
 THE SARACEN FRIENDS. 285 
 
 PART THE SECOND. 
 
 THE conclusion of this part of the history of Iroldo and Pra- 
 sildo was scarcely out of the lady's mouth, when a tremendous 
 voice was heard among the trees, and Rinaldo found himself con- 
 fronting a giant of a frightful aspect, who with a griffin on each 
 side of him was guarding a cavern that contained the enchanted 
 horse which had belonged to the brother of Angelica. A combat 
 ensued ; and after winning the horse, and subsequently losing 
 the company of the lady, the Paladin, in the course of his adven- 
 tures, came upon a knight who lay lamenting in a green place by 
 a fountain. The knight heeding nothing but his grief, did not 
 perceive the new comer, who for some time remained looking at 
 him in silence, till, desirous to know the cause of his sorrow, he 
 dismounted from his horse, and courteously begged to be informed 
 of it. The stranger in his turn looked a little while in silence at 
 Rinaldo, and then told him he had resolved to die, in order to be 
 rid of a life of misery. And yet, he added, it was not his own 
 lot which grieved him, so much as that of a noble friend who 
 would die at the same lime, and who had nobody to help him. 
 
 The knight, who was no other than Tisbina's husband Iroldo, 
 then briefly related the events which the reader has heard, and 
 proceeded to state how he had traversed the world ever since for 
 two years, when it was his misfortune to arrive in the territories 
 of the enchantress Falerina, whose custom it was to detain for- 
 eigners in prison, and daily give a couple of them (a lady and a 
 cavalier) for food to a serpent which kept the entrance of her 
 enchanted garden. To this serpent he himself was destined to 
 
 5*
 
 THE SARACEN FRIENDS. 
 
 be sacrificed, when Prasildo, the possessor of his wife Tisbina, 
 hearing of his peril, set out instantly from Babylon, and rode 
 night and day till he came to the abode of the enchantress, deter- 
 mined that nothing should hinder him from doing his utmost' to 
 save the life of a friend so generous. Save it he did, and that by 
 a generosity no less devoted ; for having attempted in vain to 
 bribe the keeper of the prison, he succeeded in prevailing on the 
 man to let him substitute himself for his friend ; and he was that 
 very day, perhaps that very moment, preparing for the dreadful 
 death to which he would speedily be brought. 
 
 " I will not survive such a friend," concluded Iroldo. " I 
 know I shall contend with his warders to no purpose ; but let the 
 wretches come, if they will, by thousands ; I shall fight them to 
 the last gasp. One comfort in death, one joy I shall at all events 
 experience. I shall be with Prasildo in the other world. And 
 yet when I think what sort of death he must endure, even the 
 release from my own miseries afflicts me, since it will not pre- 
 vent him from undergoing that horror." 
 
 The Paladin shed tears to hear of a case so piteous and affec- 
 tionate, and in a tone of encouragement offered his services 
 towards the rescue of his friend. Iroldo looked at him in aston- 
 ishment, but sighed and said, " Ah, sir, I thank you with all my 
 heart, and you are doubtless a most noble cavalier, to be so fear- 
 less and good-hearted ; but what right have I to bring you to 
 destruction for no reason and to no purpose ? There is not a man 
 on earth but Orlando himself, or his cousin Rinaldo, who could 
 possibly do us any good ; and so I beg you to accept my thanks 
 and depart in safety, and may God reward you." 
 
 " It is true," replied the Paladin, " I am not Orlando ; and yet, 
 for all that, I doubt not to be able to effect what I propose. Nor 
 do I offer my assistance out of desire of glory, or of thanks, or 
 return of any kind ; except indeed, that if two such unparalleled 
 friends could admit me to be a third, I should hold myself a happy 
 man. What ! you have given up the woman of your heart, and 
 deprived yourself of all joy and comfort ; and your friend, on 
 the other hand, has become a prisoner and devoted to death, for 
 your sake ; and can I be expected to leave two such friends in a
 
 THE SARACEN FRIENDS. 287 
 
 jeopardy so Vnonstrous, and not do all in my power to save them ? 
 I would rather die first myself, and on your own principle ; I 
 mean, in order to go with you into a better world." 
 
 While they were talking in this manner, a great ill-looking 
 rabble, upwards of a thousand strong, made their appearance, 
 carrying a banner, and bringing forth two prisoners to die. The 
 wretches were armed after their disorderly fashion ; and the 
 prisoners each tied upon a horse. One of these hapless persons 
 too surely was Prasildo ; and the other turned out to be the dam- 
 sel who had told Rinaldo the story of the friends. Having been 
 deprived of the Paladin's assistance, "her subsequent misadven- 
 tures had brought her to this terrible pass. The moment Rinaldo 
 beheld her, he leaped on his horse, and dashed among the villains. 
 The sight of such an onset was enough for their cowardly hearts. 
 The whole posse fled before him with precipitation, all except the 
 leader, who was a villain of gigantic strength; and him the Pala- 
 din, at one blow, clove through the middle. Iroldo could not 
 speak for joy, as he hastened to release Prasildo. He was forced 
 to give him tears instead of words. But when speech at length 
 became possible, the two friends, fervently and with a religious 
 awe, declared that their deliverer must have been divine and not 
 human, so tremendous was the death-blow he had given the ruf- 
 fian, and such winged and contemptuous slaughter he had dealt 
 among the fugitives. By the time he returned from the pursuit, 
 their astonishment had risen to such a pitch, that they fell on 
 their knees and worshipped him for the Prophet of the Saracens, 
 not believing such prowess possible to humanity, and devoutly 
 thanking him for the mercy he had shewn them in coming thus 
 visibly from heaven. Rinaldo for the moment was not a little 
 disturbed at this sally of enthusiasm ; but the singular good faith 
 and simplicity of it restored him to himself; and with a smile be- 
 tween lovingness and humility he begged them to lay aside all 
 such fancies, and know him for a man like themselves. He 
 then disclosed himself for the Rinaldo of whom they had spoken, 
 and made such an impression on them with his piety, and his at- 
 tributing what had appeared a superhuman valour to nothing but 
 his belief in the Christian religion, that the transported friends
 
 288 THE SARACEN FRIENDS. 
 
 became converts on the spot, and accompanied hin) thenceforth 
 as the most faithful of his knights. 
 
 The story tells us nothing further of Tisbina, though there can be no doubt 
 that Boiardo meant to give us the conclusion of her share in it ; for the two 
 knights take an active part in the adventures of their new friend Rinaldo. 
 Perhaps, however, the discontinuance of the poem itself was lucky for the au- 
 thor, as far as this episode was concerned ; for it is difficult to conceive in what 
 manner he would have wound it up to the satisfaction of the reader.
 
 SEEING AND BELIEVING,
 
 Qirgtiment. 
 
 A lady has two suitors, a young and an aid one, the latter of whom wins her 
 against her inclinations by practising the artifice of Hippomanes in his race with 
 Atalanta. Being very jealous, he locks her up in a tower; and the youth, who 
 continued to be her lover, makes a subterraneous passage to it ; and pretending 
 to have married her sister, invites the old man to his house, and introduces his 
 own wife to him as the bride. The husband, deceived, but still jealous, facili- 
 tates their departure out of the country, and returns to his tower to find himself 
 deserted. 
 
 This story, like that of the Saracen Friends, is told by a damsel to a knight 
 while riding in his company ; with this difference, that she is the heroine of it 
 herself. She is a damsel of a nature still lighter than the former; and the 
 reader's sympathy with the trouble she brings on herself, and the way she gets 
 out of it, will be modified accordingly. On the other hand, nobody can respect 
 the foolish old man with his unwarrantable marriage ; and the moral of Boiardo's 
 story is still useful for these " enlightened times," though conveyed with an air 
 of levity. 
 
 In addition to the classics, the poet has been to the Norman fablers for his 
 story. The subterranean passage has been more than once repeated in ro- 
 mance ; and the closing incident, the assistance given by the husband to his 
 wife's elopement, has been imitated in the farce of Lionel and Clarissa.
 
 SEEING AND BELIEVING. 
 
 MY father (said the damsel) is King of the Distant Islands, 
 where the treasure of the earth is collected. Never was greater 
 wealth known, and I was heiress of it all. 
 
 But it is impossible to foresee what is most to be desired for us 
 in this world. I was a king's daughter, I was rich, I was hand- 
 some, I was lively ; and yet to all those advantages I owed my 
 ill-fortune. 
 
 Among other suitors for my hand there came two on the same 
 day, one of whom was a youth named Ordauro, handsome from 
 head to foot ; the other an old man of seventy, whose name was 
 Folderico. Both were rich and of noble birth ; but the greybeard 
 was counted extremely wise, and of a foresight more than human. 
 As I did not feel in want of his foresight, the youth was far more 
 to my taste ; and accordingly I listened to him with perfect good- 
 will, and gave the wise man no sort of encouragement. 
 
 I was not at liberty, however, to determine the matter ; my 
 father had a voice in it ; so, fearing what he would advise, I 
 thought to secure a good result by cunning and management. It 
 is an old observation, that the craft of a woman exceeds all other 
 craft. Indeed, it is Solomon's own saying. But now-a-days peo- 
 ple laugh at it ; and I found to my cost that the laugh is just. I 
 requested my father to proclaim, first, that nobody should have 
 me in marriage who did not surpass me in swiftness (for I was a 
 damsel of a mighty agility) ; and secondly, that he who did sur- 
 pass me should be rny husband. He consented, and I thought 
 my happiness secure. You must know, I have run down a bird, 
 and caught it with my own hand. 
 
 Well, both my suitors came to the race ; the youth on a large
 
 292 SEEING AND BELIEVING. 
 
 
 
 war-horse, trapped with gold, which curvetted in a prodigious 
 manner, and seemed impatient for a gallop ; the old man on a 
 mule, carrying a great bag at his side, and looking already tired 
 out. They dismounted on the place chosen for the trial, which 
 was a meadow. It was encircled by a world of spectators ; and 
 the greybeard and myself (for his age gave him the first chance) 
 only waited for the sound of the trumpet to set off. 
 
 I held my competitor in such contempt, that I let him get the 
 start of me, on purpose to make him ridiculous ; but I was not 
 prepared for his pulling a golden apple out of his bag, and throw- 
 ing it as far as he could in a direction different from that of the 
 goal. The sight of a curiosity so tempting was too much for my 
 prudence" ; and it rolled away so roundly, and to such a distance, 
 that I lost more time in reaching it than I looked for. Before I 
 overtook the old gentleman, he threw another apple, and this again 
 led me a chase after it. In short, I blush to say, that, resolved as 
 I was to be tempted no further, seeing that the end of our course 
 was now at hand, and my marriage with an old man instead of a 
 young man was out of the question, he seduced me to give chase 
 to a third apple, and fairly reached the goal before me. I wept 
 for rage and disgust, and meditated every species of unconjugal 
 treatment of the old fox. What right had he to marry such a 
 child as I was ? I asked myself the question at the time ; I asked 
 it a thousand times afterwards ; and I must confess, that the more 
 I have tormented him, the more the retaliation delights me. 
 
 However, it was of no use at the moment. The old wretch 
 bore me off to his domains with an ostentatious triumph ; and 
 then, his jealousy misgiving him, he shut me up in a castle on a 
 rock, where he endeavoured from that day forth to keep me from 
 the sight of living being. You may judge what sort of castle it 
 was by its name Aliamura (lofty wall). It overlooked a desert 
 on three sides, and the sea on the fourth ; and a man might as 
 Well have flown as endeavoured to scale it. There was but one 
 path up to the entrance, very steep and difficult ; and when you 
 were there, you must have pierced outwork after outwork, and 
 picked the lock of gate after gate. So there sat I in this delicious 
 retreat, hopeless, and bursting with rage. I called upon death 
 day and night, as my only refuge. I had no comfort but in see-
 
 SEEING AND BELIEVING. 293 
 
 ing my keeper mad with jealousy, even in that desolate spot. I 
 think he was jealous of the very flies. 
 
 My handsome youth, Ordauro, however, had not forgotten me ; 
 no, nor even given me up. Luckily he was not only very clever, 
 but rich besides ; without which, to be sure,, his brains would not 
 have availed him a pin. What does he do, therefore, but take a 
 house in the neighbourhood on the sea-shore ; and while my tor- 
 mentor, in alarm and horror, watches every movement, and thinks 
 him coming if he sees a cloud or a bird, Ordauro sets people se- 
 cretly to work night and day, and makes a subterraneous passage 
 up to the very tower ! 
 
 Guess what I felt when I saw him enter ! Assuredly I did not 
 shew him the face which I shewed Folderico. I die with joy 
 this moment to think of my delight. As soon as we could dis- 
 course of any thing but our meeting, Ordauro concerted measures 
 for my escape ; and the greatest difficulty being surmounted by 
 the subterraneous passage, they at last succeeded. But our ene- 
 my gave us a frightful degree of trouble. 
 
 There was no end of the old man's pryings, peepings, and pre- 
 cautions. He left me as little as possible by myself; and he had 
 all the coast thereabouts at his command, together with the few 
 boats that ever touched it. 
 
 Ordauro, however, did a thing at once the most bold and the 
 most ingenious. He gave out that he was married ; and inviting 
 my husband to dinner, who had heard the news with transport, 
 presented me, to his astonished eyes, for the bride. The old man 
 looked as if he would have died for rage and misery. 
 
 " Horrible villain !" cried he, " what is this ?" 
 
 Ordauro professed astonishment in his turn. 
 
 " What !" asked he ; " do you not know that the princess, 
 your lady's sister, is wonderfully like her, and that she has done 
 me the honour of becoming my wife ? I invited you in order to 
 do honour to yourself, and so bring the good families together." 
 
 " Detestable falsehood !" cried Folderico. " Do you think I'm 
 blind, or a born idiot ? But I'll see to this business directly ; 
 and terrible shall be my revenge." 
 
 So saying, he flung out, and hastened, as fast as age would let 
 him, to the room in the tower, where he expected to find me not.
 
 294 SEEING AND BELIEVING. 
 
 But there he did find me : there was I, sitting as if nothing had 
 happened, with my hand on my cheek, and full of my old mel- 
 ancholy. 
 
 " God preserve me !" exclaimed he ; " this is astonishing in- 
 deed ! Never could I have dreamt that one sister could be so 
 like another ! But is it so, or is it not ? I have terrible sus- 
 picions. It is impossible to believe it. Tell me truly," he con- 
 tinued ; " answer me on the faith of a daring woman, and you 
 shall get no hurt by it. Has any one opened the portals for you 
 to-day ? Who was it ? How did you get out ? Tell me the 
 truth, and you shall not suffer for it ; but deceive me, and there 
 is no punishment that you may not look for." 
 
 It is needless to say how I vowed and protested that I had 
 never stirred ; that it was quite impossible ; that I could not have 
 done it if I would, &e. I took all the saints to witness to my 
 veracity, and swore I had never seen the outside of his tremen- 
 dous castle. 
 
 The monster had nothing to say to this ; but I saw what he 
 meant to do I saw that he would return instantly to the house 
 of Ordauro, and ascertain if the bride was there. Accordingly, 
 the moment he turned the key on me, I flew down the subterra- 
 neous passage, tossed on my new clothes like lightning, and sat 
 in my lover's house as before, waiting the arrival of the panting 
 old gentleman. 
 
 ",Well," exclaimed he, as soon as he set eyes upon me, 
 " never in all my life no I must allow it to be impossible 
 never can my wife at home be the lady sitting here." 
 
 From that day forth the old man, whenever he saw me in Or- 
 dauro's house, treated me as if I were indeed his sister-in-law, 
 though he never had the heart to bring the two wives together, for 
 fear of old recollections. Nevertheless, this state of things was 
 still very perilous ; and my new husband and myself lost no time 
 in considering how we should put an end to it by leaving the 
 country. Ordauro resorted, as before, to a bold expedient. He 
 told Folderico that the air of the sea-coast disagreed with him j 
 and the old man, whose delight at getting rid of his neighbour 
 helped to blind him to the deceit, not only expedited the move- 
 ment, but offered to see him part of the way on his journey !
 
 SEEING AND BELIEVING. 295 
 
 The offer was accepted. Six miles he rode forth with us, the 
 stupid old man ; and then, taking his leave, to return home, we 
 pushed our horses like lightning, and so left him to tear his hair 
 and his old beard with cries and curses, as soon as he opened the 
 door of his tower.
 
 ARIOSTOi 
 
 dritkal Notice of I)i0 ife ana (ftenins.
 
 CRITICAL NOTICE 
 
 ARIOSTO'S LIFE AND GENIUS. 
 
 THE congenial spirits of Pulci and Boiardo may be said to 
 have attained to their height in the person of Ariosto, upon the 
 principle of a transmigration of souls, or after the fashion of that 
 hero in romance, who was heir to the bodily strengths of all whom 
 he conquered. 
 
 Lodovico Giovanni Ariosto was born on the 8th of September, 
 1474, in the fortress at Reggio, in Lombardy, and was the son of 
 Niccolo Ariosto, captain of that citadel (as Boiardo had been), 
 and Daria Maleguzzi, whose family still exists. The race was 
 transplanted from Bologna in the century previous, when Obizzo 
 the Third of Este, Marquess of Ferrara, married a lady belong- 
 ing to it, whose Christian name was Lippa. Niccolo Ariosto, 
 besides holding the same office as Boiardo had done, at Modena 
 as well as at Reggio, was master of the household to his two suc- 
 cessive patrons, the Dukes Borso and Ercole. He was also em- 
 
 * The materials for this notice have been chiefly collected from the poet's own 
 writings (rich in autobiographical intimation) and from his latest editor Panizzi. 
 I was unable to see this writer's principal authority, Baruffaldi, till I corrected 
 the proofs and the press was waiting; otherwise I might have added two or 
 three more particulars, not, however, of any great consequence. Panizzi is, as 
 usual, copious and to the purpose ; and has, for the first time I believe, critically 
 proved the regularity and connectedness of Ariosto's plots, as well as the hol- 
 lowncss of the pretensions of the house of Este to be considered patrons of 
 literature. It is only a pity that his Life of Ariosto is not better arranged. I 
 have, of course, drawn my own conclusions respecting particulars, and some- 
 times have thought I had reason to differ with those who have preceded me; but 
 not, I hope, with a presumption unbecoming a foreigner.
 
 300 ARIOSTO. 
 
 ployed, like him, in diplomacy ; and was made a count by the 
 Emperor Frederick the Third, though not, it seems, with re- 
 mainder to his heirs. 
 
 Lodovico was the eldest of ten children, five sons and five 
 daughters. During his boyhood, theatrical entertainments were 
 in great vogue at court, as we have seen in the life of Boiardo ; 
 and at the age of twelve, a year after the decease of that poet 
 (who must have been well known to him, and probably encour- 
 aged his attempts), his successor is understood to have dramatised, 
 after his infant fashion, the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, and to 
 have got his brothers and sisters to perform it. Panizzi doubts 
 the possibility of these precocious private theatricals ; but con- 
 sidering what is called writing" on the part of children, and 
 that only one other performer was required in the piece, or at 
 best a third for the lion (which some little brother might have 
 " roared like any sucking-dove"), I cannot see good reason for 
 disbelieving the story. Pope was not twelve years old when he 
 turned the siege of Troy into a play, and got his school-fellows to 
 perform it, the part of Ajax being given to the gardener. Man is 
 a theatrical animal (&o /u/^^), and the instinct is developed at 
 a very early period, as almost every family can witness that has 
 taken its children to the " playhouse." 
 
 At fifteen the young poet, like so many others of his class, was 
 consigned to the study of the law, and took a great dislike to it. 
 The extreme mobility of his nature, and the wish to please his 
 father, appear to have made him enter on it willingly enough 
 in the first instance ;* but as soon as he betrayed symptoms of 
 disgust, Niccolo, whose affairs were in a bad way, drove him 
 back to it with a vehemence which must have made bad worse. f 
 At the expiration of five years he was allowed to give it up. 
 
 * See in his Latin poems the lines beginning, 
 
 "Hsec me verbosas suasit perdiscere leges." 
 
 De Diversis Amoribus. 
 t " Mio padre mi caccib con spiedi e lancie," &c. 
 
 Satira vi. 
 
 There is some appearance of contradiction in this passage and the one referred 
 to in the preceding note ; but I think the conclusion in the text the probable 
 one, and that he was not compelled to study the law in the first instance. He
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 301 
 
 There is reason to believe that Ariosto was " theatricalising" 
 during no little portion of this time ; for, in his nineteenth year, 
 he is understood to have been taken by Duke Ercole to Pavia 
 and to Milan, either as a writer or performer of comedies, proba- 
 bly both, since the courtiers and ducal family themselves occa- 
 sionally appeared on the stage ; and one of the poet's brothers 
 mentions his having frequently seen him dressed in character.* 
 
 On being delivered from the study of the law, the young poet 
 appears to have led a cheerful and unrestrained life for the next 
 four or five years. He wrote, or began to write, the comedy of 
 the Cassaria ; probably meditated some poem in the style of 
 Boiardo, then in the height of his fame ; and he cultivated the 
 Latin language, and intended to learn Greek, but delayed, and 
 unfortunately missed it in consequence of losing his tutor. Some 
 of his happiest days were passed at a villa, still possessed by the 
 Maleguzzi family, called La Mauriziana, two miles from Reggio. 
 Twenty-five years afterwards he called to mind, with sighs, the 
 pleasant spots there which used to invite him to write verses ; 
 the garden, the little river, the mill, the trees by the water-side, 
 and all the other shady places in which he enjoyed himself during 
 that sweet season of his life " betwixt April and May."f To 
 complete his happiness, he had a friend and cousin, Pandolfo 
 Ariosto, who loved every thing that he loved, and for whom he 
 augured a brilliant reputation. 
 
 But a dismal cloud was approaching. In his twenty-first year 
 he lost his father, and found a large family left on his hands in 
 narrow circumstances. The charge was at first so heavy, espe- 
 cially when aggravated by the death of Pandolfo, that he tells us 
 he wished to die. He took to it manfully, however, in spite of 
 these fits of gloom ; and he lived to see his admirable efforts 
 rewarded ; his brothers enablea to seek their fortunes, and his 
 sisters properly taken care of. Two of them, it seems, had be- 
 come nuns. A third married ; and a fourth remained long in his 
 house. It is not known what became of the fifth. 
 
 speaks more than once of his father's memory with great tenderness, particularly 
 in the lines on his death, entitled De Nicolao Areosto. 
 
 * His brother Gabriel expressly mentions it in his prologue to the Scholastica. 
 
 t " Gia mi fur dolci inviti," &c. Satira v. 
 
 PART II. 6
 
 302 ARIOSTO. 
 
 In these family-matters the anxious son and brother was occu- 
 pied for three or four years, not, however, without recreating 
 himself with his verses, Latin and Italian, and recording his 
 admiration of a number of goddesses of his youth. He men- 
 tions, in particular, one of the name of Lydia, who kept him 
 often from " his dear mother and household," and who is proba- 
 bly represented by the princess of the same name in the Orlando, 
 punished in the smoke of Tartarus for being a jilt and coquette.* 
 His friend Bembo, afterwards the celebrated cardinal, recommend- 
 ed him to be blind to such little immaterial points as ladies' infi- 
 delities. But he is shocked at the advice. He was far more of 
 Othello's opinion than Congreve's in such matters ; and declared, 
 that he would not have shared his mistress's good- will with Jupi- 
 ter himself.f 
 
 Towards the year 1504, the poet entered the service of the 
 unworthy prince, Cardinal Ippolito of Este, brother of the new 
 Duke of Ferrara, Alfonso the First. His eminence, who had 
 been made a prince of the church at thirteen years of age by the 
 infamous Alexander the Sixth (Borgia), was at this period little 
 more than one-and -twenty ; but he took an active part in the 
 duke's affairs, both civil and military, and is said to have made 
 himself conspicuous in his father's lifetime for his vices and bru- 
 tality. He is charged with having ordered a papal messenger to 
 be severely beaten for bringing him some unpleasant despatches : 
 which so exasperated his unfortunate parent, that he was exiled 
 to Mantua ; and the marquess of that city, his brother-in-law, was 
 obliged to come to Ferrara to obtain his pardon. But this was a 
 trifle compared with what he is accused of having done to one of 
 his brothers. A female of their acquaintance, in answer to a 
 speech made her by the reverend gallant, had been so unlucky 
 as to say that she preferred his brother Giulio's eyes to his emi- 
 nence's whole body : upon which the monstrous viUain hired two 
 
 * See, in the present volume, the beginning of Astolfo's Journey to the Moon. 
 t " Me potius fugiat, nullis mollita querelis, 
 
 Duin simulet reliquos Lydia dura procos. 
 Parte carere omni malo, quam admittere quemquam 
 In part cm. Cupiat Juppiter ipse, negem." 
 
 Ad Petrum Bembum.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 303 
 
 ruffians to put out his brother's eyes ; some say, was present at 
 the attempt. Attempt only it fortunately turned out to be, at 
 least in part ; the opinion being, that the sight of one of the eyes 
 was preserved.* 
 
 Party-spirit has so much to do with stories of princes, and 
 princes are so little in a condition to notice them, that, on the 
 principle of not condemning a man till he has been heard in his 
 defence, an honest biographer would be loath to credit these hor- 
 rors of Cardinal Ippolito, did not the violent nature of the times, 
 and the general character of the man, even with his defenders, 
 incline him to do so. His being a soldier rather than a church- 
 man was a fault of the age, perhaps a credit to the man, for he 
 appears to have had abilities for war, and it was no crime of his 
 if he was put into the church when a boy. But his conduct to 
 Ariosto shewed him coarse and selfish ; and those who say all 
 they can for him admit that he was proud and revengeful, and 
 that nobody regretted him when he died. He is said to have had 
 a taste for mathematics, as his brother had for mechanics. The 
 truth seems to be, that he and the duke, who lived in troubled 
 times, and had to exert all their strength to hinder Ferrara from 
 becoming a prey to the court of Rome, were clever, harsh men, 
 of no grace or elevation of character, and with no taste but for 
 war ; and if it had not been for their connexion with Ariosto, no- 
 body would have heard of them, except while perusing the annals 
 of the time. Ippolito might have been, and probably was, the 
 ruffian which the anecdote of his brother Giulio represents him ; 
 but the world would have heard little of the villany, had he not 
 treated a poet with contempt. 
 
 The admirers of our author may wonder how he could become 
 the servant of such a man, much more how he could praise him 
 as he did in the great work which he was soon to begin writing. 
 
 * Panizzi, on the authority of Guicciardini and others. Giulio and another 
 brother (Ferrante) afterwards conspired against Alfonso and/ Ippolito, and, on 
 the failure of their enterprise, were sentenced to be imprisoned for life. Fer- 
 rante died in confinement at the expiration of thirty-four years ; Giulio, at the 
 end of fifty-three, was pardoned. He came out of prison on horseback, dressed 
 according to the fashion of the time when he was arrested, and "greatly excited 
 the curiosity of the people." Idem, vol. i. p. xii.
 
 304 ARIOSTO. 
 
 But Ariosto was the son of a man who had passed his life in the 
 service of the family ; he had probably been taught a loyal blind- 
 ness to its defects ; gratuitous panegyrics of princes had been the 
 fashion of men of letters since the time of Augustus ; and the poet 
 wanted help for his relatives, and was of a nature to take the 
 least show of favour for a virtue, till he had learnt, as he unfor- 
 tunately did, to be disappointed in the substance. It is not known 
 what his appointment was under the cardinal. Probably he was 
 a kind of gentleman of all work ; an officer in his guards, a com- 
 panion to amuse, and a confidential agent for the transaction of 
 business. The employment in which he is chiefly seen is that of 
 an envoy, but he is said also to have been in the field of battle ; 
 and lie intimates in his Satires, that household attentions were 
 expected of him which he was not quick to offer, such as pulling 
 off his eminence's boots, and putting on his spurs.* It is certain 
 that he was employed in very delicate negotiations, sometimes to 
 the risk of his life from the perils of roads and torrents. Ippo- 
 lito, who was a man of no delicacy, probably made use of him on 
 every occasion that required address, the smallest as well as 
 greatest, an interview with a pope one day, and a despatch to a 
 dog-fancier the next. 
 
 His great poem, however, proceeded. It was probably begun 
 before he entered the cardinal's service ; certainly was in progress 
 during the early part of his engagement. This appears from a 
 letter written to Ippolito by his sister the Marchioness of Mantua, 
 to whom he had sent Ariosto at the beginning of the year 1509 to 
 congratulate her on the birth of a child. She gives her brother 
 special thanks for sending his message to her by " Messer Ludo- 
 vico Ariosto," who had made her, she says, pass two delightful 
 days, with giving her an account of the poem he was writing.f 
 
 * " Che debbo fare io qui 7 
 
 Agli usatti, agli spron (perch' io son grande) 
 Non mi posso adattar, per porne o trarne." 
 
 Safira ii. 
 
 t " Per la lettera de la S. V. Reverendiss. et a bocha da Ms. Ludovico Ariosto 
 ho inteso quanta leticia ha conceputa del felice parto mio : il che mi fe stato 
 summamente grato, cussi Io ringrazio de la visitazione, et particolarmente di 
 havermi maudato il dicto Ms. Ludovico, per che ultra che mi sia stato acetto, re- 
 presentando la persona de la 3. V. Reverendiss. lui anche per conto suo mi ha
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 305 
 
 Isabella was the name of this princess ; and the grateful poet did 
 not forget to embalm it in his verse.* 
 
 Ariosto's latest biographer, Panizzi, thinks he never served un- 
 der any other leader than the cardinal ; but I cannot help being 
 of opinion with a former one, whom he quotes, that he once took 
 arms under a captain of the name of Pio, probably a kinsman of 
 his friend Alberto Pio, to whom he addresses a Latin poem. It 
 was probably on occasion of some early disgust with the cardinal ; 
 but I am at a loss to discover at what period of time. Perhaps, 
 indeed, he had the cardinal's permission, both to quit his service, 
 and return to it. Possibly he was not to quit it at all, except ac- 
 cording to events ; but merely had leave given him to join a party 
 in arms, who were furthering Ippolito's own objects. Italy was 
 full of captains in arms and conflicting interests. The poet might 
 even, at some period of his life, have headed a troop under another 
 cardinal, his friend Giovanni de' Medici, afterwards Leo the 
 Tenth. He had certainly been with him in various parts of 
 Italy ; and might have taken part in some of his bloodless, if not 
 his most military, equitations. 
 
 Be this as it may, it is understood that Ariosto was present at 
 the repulse given to the Venetians by Ippolito, when they came 
 up the river Po against Ferrara towards the close of the year 
 1509 ; though he was away from the scene of action at his sub- 
 sequent capture of their flotilla, the poet having been despatched 
 between the two events to Pope Julius the Second on the delicate 
 business of at once appeasing his anger with the duke for resist- 
 ing his allies, and requesting his help to a feudatary of the church. 
 Julius was in one of his towering passions at first, but gave way 
 before the address of "the envoy, and did what he desired. But 
 Ariosto's success in this mission was nearly being the death of 
 him in another ; for Alfonso having accompanied the French the 
 year following in their attack on Vicenza, where they committed 
 cruelties of the same horrible kind as have shocked Europe with- 
 
 addutta gran satisfazione, havendomi cum la narrations de 1' opera che compone 
 facto passar questi due giorni non solum senza fastidio, ma cum piacer gran- 
 dissimo." Tiraboschi, Storia della Poesia Italiana, Matthias' edition, vol. iii. 
 p. 197. 
 
 * Orlando Furioso, canto ixix. st. 29.
 
 306 ARIOSTO. 
 
 in a few months past,* the poet's tongue, it was thought, might be 
 equally efficacious a second time ; but Julius, worn out of pa- 
 tience with his too independent vassal, who maintained an alii- 
 ance with the French when the pope had ceased to desire it, was 
 to be appeased no longer. He excommunicated Alfonso, and 
 threatened to pitch his envoy into the Tiber ; so that the poet 
 was fain to run for it, as the duke himself was afterwards, when 
 he visited Rome to be absolved. Would Julius have thus treated 
 Ariosto, could he have foreseen his renown ? Probably he would. 
 The greater the opposition to the will, the greater the will itself. 
 To chuck an accomplished envoy into the river would have been 
 much ; but to chuck the immortal poet there, laurels and all, in 
 the teeth of the amazement of posterity, would have been a temp- 
 tation irresistible. 
 
 It was on this occasion that Ariosto, probably from inability to 
 choose his times or modes of returning home, contracted a cough, 
 which is understood to have shortened his existence ; so that Ju- 
 lius may have killed him after all. But the pope had a worse 
 enemy in his own hosom his violence which killed himself in 
 a much shorter period. He died in little more than two years 
 afterwards ; and the poet's prospects were all now of a very dif- 
 ferent sort at least he thought so; for in March, 1513, his friend 
 Giovanni de' Medici succeeded to the papacy, under the title of 
 Leo the Tenth. 
 
 Ariosto hastened to Rome, among a shoal of visitants, to con- 
 gratulate the new pope, perhaps not without a commission from 
 Alfonso to see what he could do for his native country, on which 
 the rival Medici family never ceased to have designs. The poet 
 was full of hope, for he had known Leo under various fortunes ; 
 had been styled by him not only a friend, but a brother ; and 
 promised all sorts of participations of his prosperity. Not one of 
 them came. The visitor was cordially received. Leo stooped 
 from his throne, squeezed his hand, and kissed him on both his 
 cheeks ; but " at night," says Ariosto, " I went all the way to 
 the Sheep to get my supper, wet through." All that Leo gave 
 him was a " bull," probably the one securing to him the profits 
 
 * See the horrible account of the suffocated Vicentine Grottoes, in Sismondi, 
 Histoire des Republiques Italiennts, &c. vol. iv. p. 48.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 307 
 
 of his Orlando ; and the poet's friend Bibbiena wit, cardinal, 
 and kinsman of Berni facilitated the bull, but the receiver dis- 
 charged the fees. He did not get one penny by promise, pope, 
 or friend.* He complains a little, but all in good humour ; and 
 good-naturedly asks what he was to expect, when so many hun- 
 gry kinsmen and partisans were to be served first. Well and 
 wisely asked too, and with a superiority to his fortunes which 
 Leo and Bibbiena might have envied. 
 
 It is thought probable, however, that if the poet had been less 
 a friend to the house of Este, Leo would have kept his word with 
 him, for their intimacy had undoubtedly been of the most cordial 
 description. But it is supposed that Leo was afraid he should 
 have a Ferrarese envoy constantly about him, had he detained 
 Ariosto in Rome. The poet, however,, it is admitted, was not a 
 good hunter of preferment. He could not play the assenter, and 
 bow and importune : and sovereigns, however friendly they may 
 have been before their elevation, go the way of most princely 
 flesh when they have attained it. They like to take out a man's 
 gratitude beforehand, perhaps because they feel little security in 
 it afterwards. 
 
 The elevation to the papacy of the cheerful and indulgent son 
 of Lorenzo de' Medici, after the troublous reign of Julius, was 
 hailed with delight by all Christendom, and nowhere more so than 
 in the pope's native place, Florence. Ariosto went there to see 
 the spectacles ; and there, in the midst of them, he found himself 
 robbed of his heart by the lady whom he afterwards married. 
 Her name was Alessandra Benucci. She was the widow of one 
 of the Strozzi family, whom he had known in Ferrara, and he had 
 long admired her. The poet, who, like Petrarch and Boccaccio, 
 
 * " Piegossi a me dalla beata sede ; 
 La ma.no e poi le gote ambe mi prese, 
 E il santo bacio in amendue mi diede. 
 
 Di mezza quella bolla anco cortese 
 Mi fu, della quale ora il mio Bibbjena 
 Espedito m' ha il resto alle mie spese. 
 
 Indi col seno e con la falda piena 
 Di speme, ma di pioggia molle e brutto, 
 La notte andai sin al Montone a ccna." Sat. iv.
 
 308 ARIOSTO. 
 
 has recorded the day on which he fell in love, which was that of 
 St. John the Baptist (the showy saint-days of the south offer spe- 
 cial temptations to that effect), dwells with minute fondness on 
 the particulars of the lady's appearance. Her dress was black 
 silk, embroidered with two grape-bearing vines intertwisted ; and 
 " between her serene forehead and the path that went dividing in 
 two her rich and golden tresses," was a sprig of laurel in bud. 
 Her observer, probably her welcome if not yet accepted lover, 
 beheld something very significant in this attire ; and a mysterious 
 poem, in which he records a device of a black pen feathered with 
 gold, which he wore embroidered on a gown of his own, has been 
 supposed to allude to it. As every body is tempted to make his 
 guess on such occasions, I take the pen to have been the black- 
 haired poet himself, and the golden feather the tresses of the lady. 
 Beautiful as he describes her, with a face full of sweetness, and 
 manners noble and engaging, he speaks most of the charms of her 
 golden locks. The black gown could hardly have implied her 
 widowhood : the allusion would not have been delicate. The 
 vine belongs to dramatic poets, among whom the lover was at that 
 time to be classed, the Orlando not having appeared. Its duplifi- 
 cation intimated another self; and the crowning laurel was the 
 success that awaited the heroic poet and the conqueror of the 
 lady's heart.* 
 
 The marriage was never acknowledged. The husband was in 
 the receipt of profits arising from church-offices, which putlhim 
 into the condition of the fellow of a college with us, who cannot 
 marry so long as he retains his fellowship : but it is proved to 
 have taken place, though the date of it is uncertain. Ariosto, in 
 a satire written three or four years after his falling in love, says 
 he never intends either to marry or to take orders ; because, if 
 he takes orders, he cannot marry ; and if he marries, he cannot 
 take orders that is to say, must give up his semi-priestly emol- 
 uments. This is one of the falsehoods which the Roman Catholic 
 religion thinks itself warranted in tempting honest men to fall 
 into ; thus perplexing their faith as to the very roots of all faith, 
 and tending to maintain a sensual hypocrisy, which can do 
 
 * See canzone the first, " Non so s' io potr6," &c. ; and the capitolo beginning 
 " Delia mia negra penna in fregio <T oro."
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 309 
 
 no good to the strongest minds, and must terribly injure the 
 weak. 
 
 Ariosto's love for this lady I take to have been one of the 
 causes of dissatisfaction between him and the cardinal. " For- 
 tunately for the poet," as Panizzi observes, Ippolito was not al- 
 ways in Ferrara. He travelled in Italy, and he had an arch- 
 bishopric in Hungary, the tenure of which compelled occasional 
 residence. His company was not desired in Rome, so that he 
 was seldom there. Ariosto, however, was an amusing compan- 
 ion ; and the cardinal seems not to have liked to go anywhere 
 without him. In the year 1515 he was attended by the poet part 
 of the way on a journey to Rome and Urbino ; but Ariosto fell 
 ill, and had leave to return. He confesses that his illness was 
 owing to an anxiety of love ; and he even makes an appeal to the 
 cardinal's experience of such feelings ; so that it might seem he 
 was not afraid of Ippolito's displeasure in that direction. But the 
 weakness which selfish people excuse in themselves becomes a 
 " very different thing" (as they phrase it) in another. The" ap- 
 peal to the cardinal's experience might only have exasperated 
 him, in its assumption of the identity of the case. However, the 
 poet was, at all events, left this time to the indulgence of his love 
 and his poetry ; and in the course of the ensuing year, a copy of 
 the first edition of the Orlando Furioso, in forty cantos, was put 
 into the hands of the illustrious person to whom it was dedicated. 
 
 The words in which the cardinal was pleased to express him- 
 self on this occasion have become memorable. " Where the 
 devil, Master Lodovick," said the reverend personage, " have 
 you picked up such a parcel of trumpery ?" The original term 
 is much stronger, aggravating the insult with indecency. There 
 is no equivalent for it in English ; and I shall not repeat it in 
 Italian. " It is as low and indecent," says Panizzi, " as any in 
 the language." Suffice it to say that, although the age was not 
 scrupulous in such matters, it was one of the last words befitting 
 the lips of the reverend Catholic ; and that, when Ippolito of 
 Este (as Ginguene observes) made that speech to the great poet, 
 "be uttered prince, cardinal, and mathematician as he was 
 an impertinence."* 
 
 * Histoire Litt6raire. &c. vol. iv. p. 335. 
 6*
 
 310 ARIOSTO. 
 
 Was the cardinal put out of temper by a device which ap- 
 peared in this book ? On the leaf succeeding the title-page was 
 the privilege for its publication, granted by Leo in terms of the 
 most flattering personal recognition.* So far so good; unless 
 the unpoetical Este patron was not pleased to see such interest 
 taken in the book by the tasteful Medici patron. But on the back 
 of this leaf was a device of a hive, with the bees burnt out of it 
 for their honey, and the motto " Evil for good" (Pro bono malum). 
 Most biographers are of opinion that this device was aimed at the 
 cardinal's ill return for all the sweet words lavished on him and 
 his house. If so, and supposing Ariosto to have presented the 
 dedication-copy in person, it would have been curious to see the 
 faces of the two men while his Eminence was looking at it. 
 Some will think that the goodnatured poet could hardly have 
 taken such an occasion of displaying his resentment. But the 
 device did not express at whom it was aimed : the cardinal need 
 not have applied it to himself if he did not choose, especially as 
 the book was full of his praises ; and goodnatured people will not 
 always miss an opportunity of covertly inflicting a sting. The 
 device, at all events, shewed that the honey-maker had got worse 
 than nothing by his honey ; and the house of Este could not say 
 they had done any thing to contradict it. 
 
 I think it probable that neither the poet's device nor the car- 
 dinal's speech were forgotten, when, in the course of the next year, 
 the parties came to a rupture in consequence of the servant's re- 
 
 * " Singularis tua et pervctus erga nos familiamque nostrum observantia, 
 egregiaque bonarum artium et litterarum doctrina, atque in studiis mitioribus, 
 prsesertimque poetices elegans et prseclarum ingenium, jure prope suo a nobis 
 exposcere videntur, ut quse tibi usui futurse sint, justa praesertim et honesta 
 petenti, ea tibi liberaliter et gratiose concedamus. Quamobrem," &c. "On the 
 same page," says Panizzi, " are mentioned the privileges granted by the king of 
 France, by the republic of Venice, and other potentates;" so that authors, in 
 those days, appear to have been thought worthy of profiting by their labours, 
 wherever they contributed to the enjoyment of mankind. 
 
 Leo's privilege is the one that so long underwent the singular obloquy of 
 being a bull of excommunication against all who objected to the poem ! a mis- 
 conception on the part of some ignorant man, or misrepresentation by some 
 malignant one, which affords a remarkable warning against taking things on 
 trust from one writer after another. Even Bayle (see the article " Leo X." in 
 his Dictionary) suffered his inclinations to blind his vigilance.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 311 
 
 fusing to attend his master into Hungary. Ariosto excused him- 
 self on account of the state of his health and of his family. He 
 said that a cold climate did not agree with him ; that his chest 
 was affected, and could not bear even the stoves of Hungary ; and 
 that he could not, in common decency and humanity, leave his 
 mother in her old age, especially as all the rest of the family were 
 away but his youngest sister, whose interests he had also to take 
 care of. But Ippolito was not to be appeased. The public have 
 seen, in a late female biography, a deplorable instance of the un- 
 feelingness with which even a princess with a reputation for re- 
 ligion could treat the declining health and unwilling retirement 
 of a poor slave in her service, fifty times her superior in every 
 thing but servility. Greater delicacy was not to be expected of 
 the military priest. The nobler the servant, the greater the de- 
 sire to trample upon him and keep him at a disadvantage. It is 
 a grudge which rank owes to genius, and which it can only wave 
 when its possessor is himself" one of God Almighty's gentlemen." 
 I do not mean in point of genius, which is by no means the high- 
 est thing in the world, whatever its owners may think of it ; but 
 in point of the highest of all things, which is nobleness of heart. 
 I confess I think Ariosto was wrong in expecting what he did of 
 a man he must have known so well, and in complaining so much 
 of courts, however good-humouredly. A prince occupies the sta- 
 tion he does, to avert the perils of disputed successions, and not 
 to be what his birth cannot make him if nature has not supplied 
 the materials. Besides, the cardinal, in his quality of a mechan- 
 ical-minded man with no taste, might with reason have complain- 
 ed of his servant's attending to poetry when it was " not in his 
 bond ;" when it diverted from the only attentions which his em- 
 ployer understood or desired. Ippolito candidly confessed, as 
 Ariosto himself tells us, that he not only did not care for poetry, 
 but never gave his attendant- one stiver in patronage of it, or for 
 any thing whatsoever but going his journeys and doing as he was 
 bidden.* On the other hand, the cardinal's payments were sorry 
 
 * " Apollo, tua mercfc, tua mercfe, santo 
 Collegio dellc Muse, io non mi trovo 
 Tanto per voi, ch' io possa farmi un inanto:
 
 312 ARIOSTO. 
 
 ones ; and the poet might with justice have thought, that he was 
 not bound to consider them an equivalent for the time he was ex- 
 pected to give up. The only thing to have been desired in this 
 case was, that he should have said so ; and, in truth, at the close 
 of the explanation which he gave on the subject to his friends at 
 court, he did boldly desiring them, as became him, to tell the 
 cardinal, that if his eminence expected him to be a " serf" for 
 what he received, he should decline the bargain ; and that he 
 preferred the humblest freedom and his studies to a slavery so 
 preposterous.* 
 
 The truth is, the poet should have attached himself wholly to 
 the Medici. Had he not adhered to the duller house, he might 
 have led as happy a life with the pope as Pulci did with the pope's 
 father ; perhaps have been made a cardinal, like his friends Bem- 
 bo and Sadolet. But then we might have lost the Orlando. 
 
 The only sinecure which the poet is now supposed to have re- 
 tained, was a grant of twenty-five crowns every four months on 
 the episcopal chancery of Milan : so, to help out his petty income, 
 he proceeded to enter into the service of Alfonso, which shews 
 that both the brothers were not angry with him. He tells us, 
 that he would gladly have had no new master, could he have 
 helped it ; but that, if he must needs serve, he would rather serve 
 the master of every body else than a subordinate one. At this 
 juncture he had a brief prospect of being as free as he wished ; 
 
 E se 1 signer m' ha dato onde far novo 
 Ogni anno mi potrei piti d' un mantello, 
 Che mi abbia per voi dato, non approve. 
 
 Egli 1' ha detto." Satira ii. 
 
 * " Se avermi dato onde ogni quattro mesi 
 Ho venticinque scudi, ne si fermi, 
 Che molte volte non mi sien contesi, 
 
 Mi debbe incatenar, schiavo tenermi, 
 Obbligarmi ch' io sudi e trend senza 
 Rispetto alcun, ch' io muoja o ch' io m" infermi, 
 
 Non gli lasciate aver questa credenza : 
 Ditegli, che phi tosto ch' esser servo, 
 Torro la povertade in pazdenza." 
 
 Satira ii.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 313 
 
 for an uncle died leaving a large landed property still known as 
 the Ariosto lands (Le Arioste) ; but a convent demanded it on the 
 part of one of their brotherhood, who was a natural son of this 
 gentleman ; and a more formidable and ultimately successful claim 
 was advanced in a court of law by the Chamber of the Duchy of 
 Ferrara, the first judge in the cause being the duke's own stew- 
 ard and a personal enemy of the poet's. Ariosto, therefore, while 
 the suit was going on, was obliged to content himself with his fees 
 from Milan and a monthly allowance which he received from the 
 duke of " about thirty-eight shillings," together with provisions 
 for three servants and two horses. He entered the duke's service 
 in the spring of 1518, and remained in it for the rest of his life. 
 But it was not so burdensome as that of the cardinal ; and the 
 consequence of the poet's greater leisure was a second edition of 
 the Furioso, in the year 1521, with additions and corrections ; 
 still, however, in forty cantos only. It appears, by a deed of 
 agreement,* that the work was printed at the author's expense ; 
 that he was to sell the bookseller one hundred copies for sixty 
 livres (about 51. 12s.) on condition of the book's not being sold at 
 the rate of more than sixteen sous (Is. 8cZ.) ; that the author was 
 not to give, sell, or allow to be sold, any copy of the book at 
 Ferrara, except by the bookseller ; that the bookseller, after dis- 
 posing of the hundred copies, was to hava as many more as he 
 chose on the same terms ; and that, on his failing to require a 
 further supply, Ariosto was to be at liberty to sell his volumes to 
 whom he pleased. " With such profits," observes Panizzi, " it 
 was not likely that the poet would soon become independent :" 
 and it may be added, that he certainly got nothing by the first edi- 
 tion, whatever he may have done by the second. He expressly 
 tells us, in the satire which he wrote on declining to go abroad 
 with Ippolito, that all his poetry had not procured him money 
 enough to purchase a cloak. f Twenty years afterwards, when 
 he was dead, the poem was in such request, that, between 1542 
 and 1551, Panizzi calculates there must have been a sale of it in 
 Europe to the amount of a hundred thousand copies.:}: 
 
 * Panizzi, vol. i. p. 29. The agreement itself is in Baruffakli. 
 t See the lines before quoted, beginning " Apollo, tua merce." 
 t Bibliographical Notices of Editions of Ariosto, prefixed to his first vol. p. 51.
 
 314 ARIOSTO. 
 
 The second edition of the Furioso did not extricate the author 
 from very serious difficulties ; for the next year he was compelled 
 to apply to Alfonso, either to relieve him from his necessities, or 
 permit him to look for some employment more profitable than the 
 ducal service. The answer of this prince, who was now rich, 
 but had always been penurious, and who never laid out a farthing, 
 if he could help it, except in defence of his capital, was an ap- 
 pointment of Ariosto to the government of a district in a state of 
 anarchy, called Garfagnana, which had nominally returned to his 
 rule in consequence of the death of Leo, who had wrested it from 
 him. It was a wild spot in the Apennines, on the borders of the 
 Ferrarese and papal territories. Ariosto was there three years, 
 and is said to have reduced it to order ; but, according to his own 
 account, he had very doubtful work of it. The place was over- 
 run with banditti, including the troops commissioned to suppress 
 them. It required a severer governor than he was inclined to be ; 
 and Alfonso did not attend to his requisitions for supplies. The 
 candid and goodnatured poet intimates that the duke might have 
 given him the appointment rather for the governor's sake than the 
 people's ; and the cold, the loneliness and barrenness of the place, 
 and, above all, his absence from the object of his affections, op- 
 pressed him. He did not write a verse for twelve months ; he 
 says he felt like a bird moulting.* The best thing got out of it 
 was an anecdote for posterity. The poet was riding out one day 
 with a few attendants some say walking out in a fit of absence 
 of mind when he found himself in the midst of a band of out- 
 laws, who, in a suspicious manner, barely suffered him to pass. 
 A reader of Mrs. Radcliffe might suppose them a band of condot- 
 tieri, under the command of some profligate desperado ; and such 
 perhaps they were. The governor had scarcely gone by, when 
 
 * " La novita. del loco e stata tanta, 
 
 C' ho fatto come augel che muta gabbia, 
 Che molti giorni resta che non canta." 
 
 For the rest of the above particulars see the fifth satire, beginning " II vigesi- 
 mo giorno di Febbraio." I quote the exordium, because these compositions are 
 differently numbered in different editions. The one I generally use is that 
 of Molini Poetie Varie di Lodovico Ariosto, con Annotazioni. Firenze, I2mo. 
 1324.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 315 
 
 the leader of the band, discovering who he was, came riding back 
 with much earnestness, and making his obeisance to the poet, said, 
 that he never should have allowed him to pass in that manner had 
 he known him to be the Signor Ludovico Ariosto, author of the 
 Orlando Furioso ; that his own name was Filippo Pacchione (a 
 celebrated personage of his order) ; and that his men and himself, 
 so far from doing the signer displeasure, would have the honour 
 of conducting him back to his castle. " And so they did," says 
 Baretti, " entertaining him all along the way with the various ex- 
 cellences they had discerned in his poem, and bestowing upon it 
 the most rapturous praises."* 
 
 On his return from Garfagnana, Ariosto is understood to have 
 made several journeys in Italy, either with or without the duke 
 his master ; some of them to Mantua, where it has been said that 
 he was crowned with laurel by the Emperor Charles the Fifth. 
 But the truth seems to be, that he only received a laureate diplo- 
 ma : it does not appear that Charles made him any other gift. 
 His majesty, and the whole house of Este, and the pope, and all 
 the other Italian princes, left that to be done by the imperial gen- 
 eral, the celebrated Alfonso Davallos, Marquess of Vasto, to whom 
 he was sent on some mission by the Duke of Ferrara, and who 
 settled on him an annuity of a hundred golden ducats ; " the only 
 reward," says Panizzi, " which we find to have been conferred 
 on Ariosto expressly as a poet."']' Davallos was one of the con- 
 
 * Italian Library, p. 52. I quote Baretti, because he speaks with a corres- 
 ponding enthusiasm. He calls the incident " a very rare proof of the irresisti- 
 ble powers of poetry, and a noble comment on the fables of Orpheus and 
 Amphion," &c. The words "noble comment" might lead us to fancy that 
 Johnson had made some such remark to him while relating the story in Bolt 
 Court. Nor is the former part of the sentence unlike him : " A very rare proof, 
 sir, of the irresistible powers of poetry, and a noble comment," &c. Johnson, 
 notwithstanding his classical predilections, was likely to take much interest in 
 Ariosto on account of his universality and the heartiness of his passions. He 
 had a secret regard for " wildness" of all sorts, provided it came within any pale 
 of the sympathetic. He was also fond of romances of chivalry. On one occa- 
 sion he selected the history of Felixmarte of Hyrcania as his course of reading 
 during a visit. 
 
 t The deed of gift sets forth the interest which it becomes princes and com- 
 manders to take in men of letters, particularly poets, as heralds of their fame, 
 and consequently the special fitness of the illustrious and superexcellent poet
 
 316 ARIOSTO. 
 
 querors of Francis the First, young and handsome, and himself a 
 writer of verses. The grateful poet accordingly availed himself 
 of his benefactor's accomplishments to make him, in turn, a pres- 
 ent of every virtue under the sun. Csesar was not so liberal, 
 Nestor so wise, Achilles so potent, Nireus so beautiful, nor even 
 Ladas, Alexander's messenger, so swift.* Ariosto was now verg- 
 ing towards the grave ; and he probably saw in the hundred 
 ducats a golden sunset of his cares. 
 
 Meantime, however, the poet had built a house, which, although 
 small, was raised with his own money ; so that the second edition 
 of the Orlando may have realized some profits at last. He re- 
 corded the pleasant fact in an inscription over the door, which has 
 become celebrated ; 
 
 ' Parva, sed apta mihi ; sed nulli obnoxia ; sed non 
 Sordida ; parta meo sed tamen sere domus." 
 
 Small, yet it suits me ; is of no offence ; 
 Was built, not meanly, at my own expense. 
 
 What a pity (to compare great things with small) that he had 
 not as long a life before him to enjoy it, as Gil Bias had with his 
 own comfortable quotation over his retreat at Lirias !f 
 
 The house still remains ; but the inscription unfortunately be- 
 came effaced ; though the following one remains, which was ad- 
 ded by his son Virginio : 
 
 " Sic domus haec Areostea 
 Propitios habeat deos, olim ut Pindarica." 
 
 Dear to the gods, whatever come to pass, 
 Be Ariosto's house, as Pindar's was. 
 
 This was an anticipation perhaps the origin of Milton's son- 
 
 Lodovico Ariosto for receiving from Alfonso Davallos, Marquess of Vasto, the 
 irrevocable sum of, &c. &c. Panizzi has copied the substance of it from Ba- 
 ruffaldi, vol. i. p. 67. 
 
 * Orlarido f arioso, canto xxxiii. st. 28. 
 
 t "Inveni portum: spes et fortuna, valete; 
 Sat me lusistis ; ludite nunc alios. :) 
 
 My port is found : adieu, ye freaks of chance ; 
 The dance ye led me, now let others dance.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 317 
 
 net about his own house, addressed to " Captains and Collonels," 
 during the civil war.* 
 
 Davallos made the poet his generous present in the October of 
 the year 1531 ; and in the same month of the year following the 
 Orlando was published as it now stands, with various insertions 
 throughout, chiefly stories, and six additional cantos. Cardinal 
 Ippolito had been dead some time ; and the device of the beehive 
 was exchanged for one of two vipers, with a hand and pair of 
 shears cutting out their tongues, and the motto, " Thou hast pre- 
 ferred ill-will to good" (Dilexisti maliliam super benignitatem). 
 The allusion is understood to have been to certain critics whose 
 names have all perished, unless Sperone (of whom we shall hear 
 more by and by) was one of them. The appearance of this edi- 
 tion was eagerly looked for ; but the trouble of correcting the 
 press, and the destruction of a theatre by fire which had been 
 built under the poet's direction, did his health no good in its rapid- 
 ly declining condition ; and after suffering greatly from an ob- 
 struction, he died, much attenuated, on the sixth day of June, 
 1533. His decease, his fond biographers have told us, took place 
 " about three in the afternoon ;" and he was " aged fifty-eight 
 years, eight months, and twenty-eight days." His body, accord- 
 ing to his direction, was taken to the church of the Benedictines 
 during the night by four men, with only two tapers, and in the 
 most private and simple manner. The monks followed it to the 
 grave out of respect, contrary to their usual custom. 
 
 So lived, and so died, and so desired humbly to be buried, one 
 of the delights of the world. 
 
 His son Virginio had erected a chapel in the garden of the 
 house built by his father, and he wished to have his body removed 
 thither ; but the monks would not allow it. The tomb, at first a 
 very humble one, was subsequently altered and enriched several 
 times ; but remains, I believe, as rebuilt at the beginning of the 
 century before last by his grand-nephew, Ludovico Ariosto, with 
 a bust of the poet, and two statues representing Poetry and 
 Glory. 
 
 * " The great Emathian conqueror bade spare 
 
 The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower 
 Went to the ground," &c.
 
 318 ARIOSTO. 
 
 Ariosto was tall and stout, with a dark complexion, bright black 
 eyes, black and curling hair, aquiline nose, and shoulders broad 
 but a little stooping. His aspect was thoughtful, and his gestures 
 deliberate. Titian, besides painting his portrait, designed that 
 which appeared in the woodcut of the author's own third edition of 
 his poem, which has been copied into Mr. Panizzi's. It has all 
 the look of truth of that great artist's vital hand ; but, though 
 there is an expression of the genial character of the mouth, not- 
 withstanding the exuberance of beard, it does not suggest the 
 sweetness observable in one of the medals of Ariosto, a wax im- 
 pression of which is now before me ; nor has the nose so much 
 delicacy and grace.* 
 
 The poet's temperament inclined him to melancholy, but his in- 
 tercourse was always cheerful. One biographer says he was 
 strong and healthy another, that he was neither. In all proba- 
 bility he was naturally strong, but weakened by a life full of 
 emotion. He talks of growing old at forty-four, and of having 
 been bald for some time.f He had a cough for many years be. 
 fore he died. His son says he cured it by drinking good old wine. 
 Ariosto says that " vin fumoso" did not agree with him ; but that 
 might only mean wine of a heady sort. The chances, under such 
 circumstances, were probably against wine of any kind ; and 
 Panizzi thinks the cough was never subdued. His physicians 
 forbade him all sorts of stimulants with his food 4 
 
 * This medal is inscribed "Ludovicus Ariost. Poet." and has the bee-hive on 
 the reverse, with the motto " Pro bono malum." Ariosto was so fond of this 
 device, that in his fragment called the Five Cantos (c. v. st. 26), the Paladin 
 Rinaldo wears it embroidered on his mantle. 
 
 t " lo son de' dieci il primo, e vecchio fatto 
 Di quaranta quattro anni, e il capo calvo 
 Da un tempo in qua sotto il cuffiotto appiatto." 
 
 Satira ii. 
 
 t "II vin fumoso, a me vie pifc interdetto 
 Che '1 tosco, cost! a inviti si tracanna, 
 E sacrilegio 6 non ber molto, e schietto. 
 
 (He is speaking of the wines of Hungary, and of the hard drinking expected 
 of strangers in that country.) 
 
 Tutti li cibi son con pepe e canna, 
 Di amomo e d' altri aromati, che tutti 
 Come nocivi il medico mi danna." 
 
 Satira ii.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 319 
 
 His temper and habits were those of a man wholly given up to 
 love and poetry. In his youth he was volatile, and at no time 
 without what is called some " affair of the heart." Every wo- 
 man attracted him who had modesty and agreeableness ; and as, 
 at the same time, he was very jealous, one might imagine that 
 his wife, who had a right to be equally so, would have led no easy 
 life. But it is evident he could practise very generous self- 
 denial ; and probably the married portion of his existence, sup- 
 posing Alessandra's sweet countenance not to have belied her, 
 was happy on both sides. He was beloved by his family, which 
 is never the case with the unamiable. Among his friends were 
 most of the great names of the age, including a world of ladies, 
 and the whole graceful court of Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, duke 
 of Urbino, for which Catiglione wrote his book of the Gentleman 
 (II Cortegiano). Raphael addressed him a sonnet, and Titian 
 painted his likeness. He knew Vittoria Colonna, and Veronica 
 da Gambera, and Giulia Gonzaga (whom the Turks would have 
 run away with), and Ippolita Sforza, the beautiful blue-stocking, 
 who set Bandello on writing his novels, and Bembo, and Flami- 
 nio, and Berni, and Molza, and Sannazzaro, and the Medici fam- 
 ily, and Vida, and v Macchiavelli ; and nobody doubts that he 
 might have shone at the court of Leo the brightest of the bright. 
 But he thought it " better to enjoy a little in peace, than seek 
 after much with trouble."* He cared for none of the pleasures 
 of the great, except building, and that he was content to satisfy in 
 Cowley's fashion, with " a small house in a large garden." He 
 was plain in his diet, disliked ceremony, and was frequently ab- 
 sorbed in thought. His indignation was roused by mean and 
 brutal vices ; but he took a large and liberal view of human na- 
 ture in general ; and, if he was somewhat free in his life, must 
 be pardoned for the custom of the times, for his charity to others, 
 and for the genial disposition which made him an enchanting poet. 
 Above all, he was an affectionate son ; lived like a friend with 
 his children ; and, in spite of his tendency to pleasure, supplied 
 the place of an anxious and careful father to his brothers and sis- 
 ters, who idolized him. 
 
 * Pigna, I Romanzi, p. 119.
 
 320 ARIOSTO. 
 
 " Ornabat pietas et grata modestia vatem," 
 wrote his brother Gabriel, 
 
 " Sancta fides, dictique memor, munitaque recto 
 Justitia, et nullo patientia victa labore, 
 Et constans virtus animi, et dementia mitis, 
 Ambitione procul pulsa fastusque tumore ; 
 Credere uti posses natum fclicibus horis, 
 Felici fulgente astro Jovis atque Diones."* 
 
 Devoted tenderness adorn'd the bard, 
 
 And grateful modesty and grave regard 
 
 To his least word, and justice arm'd with right, 
 
 And patience counting every labour light, 
 
 And constancy of soul, and meekness too, 
 
 That neither pride nor worldly wishes knew. 
 
 You might have thought him born when there concur 
 
 The sweet star and the strong, Venus and Jupiter. 
 
 His son Virginio, and others, have left a variety of anecdotes 
 corroborating points in his character. I shall give them all, for 
 they put us into his company. 
 
 It is recorded, as an instance of his reputation for honesty, 
 that an old kinsman, a clergyman, who was afraid of being poi- 
 soned for his possessions, would trust himself in no other hands ; 
 but the clergyman was his own grand-uncle and namesake, prob- 
 ably godfather ; so that the compliment is not so very great. 
 
 In his youth he underwent a long rebuke one day from his fa- 
 ther without saying a word, though a satisfactory answer was in 
 his power ; on which his brother Gabriel expressing his surprise, 
 he said that he was thinking all the time of a scene in a comedy 
 he was writing, for which the paternal lecture afforded an excel- 
 lent study. 
 
 He loved gardening better than he understood it ; was always 
 shifting his plants, and destroying the seeds, out of impatience to 
 see them germinate. He was rejoicing once on the coming up 
 of some " capers," which he had been visiting every day to see 
 how they got on, when it turned out that his capers were elder- 
 trees ! 
 
 * Epicedium on his brother's death. It is reprinted (perhaps for the first 
 time since 1582) in Mr. Panizzi's Appendix to the Life, in his first volume, 
 TO. clxi.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 321 
 
 He was perpetually altering his verses. His manuscripts are 
 full of corrections. He wrote the exordium of the Orlando over 
 and over again ; and at last could only be satisfied with it in pro- 
 portion as it was not his own ; that is to say, in proportion as it 
 came nearer to the beautiful passage in Dante from which his 
 ear and his feelings had caught it.* 
 
 He, however, discovered that correction was not always im- 
 provement. He used to say, it was with verses as with trees. A 
 plant naturally well growing might be made perfect by a little 
 delicate treatment ; but over-cultivation destroyed its native 
 grace. In like manner, you might perfect a happily-inspired 
 verse by taking away any little fault of expression ; but too great 
 a polish deprived it of the charm of the first conception. It was 
 like over-training a naturally graceful child. If it be wondered 
 how he who corrected so much should succeed so well, even to 
 an appearance of happy negligence, it is to be considered that 
 the most impulsive writers often put down their thoughts too 
 hastily, then correct, and re-correct them in the same impatient 
 manner ; and so have to bring them round, by as many steps, to 
 the feeling which they really had at first, though they were too 
 hasty to do it justice. 
 
 Ariosto would have altered his house as often as his verses, but 
 did not find It so convenient. Somebody wondering that he con- 
 tented himself with so small an abode, when he built such mag- 
 nificent mansions in his poetry, he said it was easier to put words 
 together than blocks of stone. ( 
 
 * "Le donne, i cavalier, 1' arme, gli amori, 
 Le cortesie, le audaci imprese, io canto," 
 
 is Anosto's commencement ; 
 
 Ladies, and cavaliers, and loves, and arms, 
 And courtesies, and daring deeds, I sing. 
 
 In Dante's Purgatory (canto xiv.), a noble Romagnese, lamenting the degene- 
 racy of his country, calls to mind with graceful and touching regret, 
 
 " Le donne, i cavalier, gli affanni e gli agi, 
 Che inspiravano amore e cortesia." 
 
 The ladies and the knights, the cares and leisures, 
 Breathing around them love and courtesy. 
 
 t The original is much pithier, but I cannot find equivalents for the allitera-
 
 322 ARIOSTO. 
 
 He liked Virgil ; commended the style of Tibullus ; did not 
 care for Propertius ; but expressed high approbation of Catullus 
 and Horace. I suspect his favourite to have been Ovid. His son 
 says he did not study much, nor look after books ; but this may 
 have been in his decline, or when Virginio first took to observing 
 him. A different conclusion as to study is to be drawn from the 
 corrected state of his manuscripts, and the variety of his knowl- 
 edge ; and with regard to books, he not only mentions the libra- 
 ry of the Vatican as one of his greatest temptations to visit 
 Rome, but describes himself, with all the gusto of a book- worm, 
 as enjoying them in his chimney-corner.* 
 
 To intimate his secrecy in love-matters, he had an inkstand 
 with a Cupid on it, holding a finger on his lips. I believe it is 
 still in existence. f He did not disclose his mistresses' names, as 
 Dante did, for the purpose of treating them with contempt ; nor, 
 on the other hand, does he appear to have been so indiscriminate- 
 ly gallant as to be fond of goitres.:}: The only mistress of whom 
 he complained he concealed in a Latin appellation ; and of her 
 he did not complain with scorn. He had loved, besides Alessan- 
 dra Benucci, a lady of the name of Ginevra ; the mother of one 
 of his children is recorded as a certain Orsolina ; and that of the 
 
 tion. He said, " Porvi le pietre e porvi le parole non e il medesimo." Pigna, 
 p. 119. According to his son, however, his remark was, that " palaces could be 
 made in poems without money." He probably expressed the same thing in dif- 
 ferent ways to different people. 
 
 * Vide Sat. iii. "Mi sia un tempo," &c. ; and the passage in Sat. vii. begin- 
 ning " Di libri antiqui." 
 
 t The inkstand which Shelley saw at Ferrara (Essays and Letters, p. 149) 
 could not have been this ; probably his eye was caught by a wrong one. Doubts 
 also, after what we know of the tricks practised upon visitors of Stratford-upon- 
 Avon, may unfortunately be entertained of the "plain old wooden piece of fur- 
 niture," the arm-chair. Shelley describes the handwriting of Ariosto as " a 
 small, firm, and pointed character, expressing, as he should say, a strong and 
 keen, but circumscribed energy of mind." Every one of Shelley's words is 
 always worth consideration ; but handwritings are surely equivocal testimonies 
 of character; they depend so much on education, on times and seasons and 
 moods, conscious and unconscious wills, &c. What would be said by an auto- 
 graphist to the strange old, ungraceful, slovenly handwriting of Shakspeare 1 
 
 t See vol. i. of the present work, pp. 16, 118, and 126.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 323 
 
 other was named Maria, and is understood to have been a gov- 
 erness in his father's family.* 
 
 He ate fast, and of whatever was next him, often beginning 
 with the bread on the table before the dishes came ; and he would 
 finish his dinner with another bit of bread. " Appetiva le rape," 
 says his good son ; videlicet, he was fond of turnips. In his fourth 
 Satire, he mentions as a favourite dish, turnips seasoned with vin- 
 egar and boiled must (sapa), which seems, not unjustifiably, to 
 startle Mr. Panizzi.f He cared so little for good eating, that he 
 said of himself, he should have done very well in the days when 
 people lived on acorns. A stranger coming in one day at the 
 dinner-hour, he ate up what was provided for both ; saying after- 
 wards, when told of it, that the gentleman should have taken care 
 of himself. This does not look very polite ; but of course it was 
 said in jest. His son attributed this carelessness at table to ab- 
 sorption in his studies. 
 
 He carried this absence of mind so far, and was at the same 
 time so good a pedestrian, that Virginio tells us he once walked 
 all the way from Carpi to Ferrara in his slippers, owing to his 
 haying strolled out of doors in that direction. 
 
 The same biographers who describe him as a brave soldier, 
 add, that he was a timid horseman and seaman ; and indeed he 
 appears to "have eschewed every kind of unnecessary danger. It 
 was a maxim of his to be the last in going out of a boat. I know 
 not what Orlando would have said to this ; but there is no doubt 
 that the good son and brother avoided no pain in pursuit of his 
 duty. He more than once risked his life in the service of govern- 
 ment from the perils of travelling among war-makers and ban- 
 ditti. Imagination finds something worthy of itself on great oc- 
 casions, but is apt to discover the absurdity of staking existence 
 on small ones. Ariosto did not care to travel out of Italy. He 
 preferred, he says, going round the earth in a map ; visiting coun- 
 
 * Baruffaldi, 1807; p. 105. 
 
 t " In casa mia mi sa meglio una rapa 
 Ch* io cuoca, e cotta s 1 un stecco m' infbrco, 
 E mondo, e spargo poi di aceto e sapa, 
 
 Che all' altrui mcnsa tordo, starno, o porco 
 Selvaggio."
 
 324 ARIOSTO. 
 
 tries without having to pay innkeepers, and ploughing harmless 
 seas without thunder and lightning.* 
 
 His outward religion, like the one he ascribed to his friend 
 Cardinal Bembo, was " that of other people." He did not think 
 it of use to disturb their belief: yet excused rather than blamed 
 Luther, attributing his heresy to the necessary consequences of 
 mooting points too subtle for human apprehension, f He found it 
 impossible, however, to restrain his contempt of bigotry ; and 
 like most great writers in Catholic countries, was a derider of the 
 pretensions of devotees, and the discords and hypocrisies of the 
 convent. He evidently laughed at Dante's figments about the 
 other world ; not at the poetry of them, for that he admired, and 
 sometimes imitated, but at the superstition and presumption. He 
 turned the Florentine's moon into a depository of nonsense ; and 
 found no hell so bad as the hearts of tyrants. The only other 
 people he put into the infernal regions are ladies who were cruel 
 to their lovers ! He had a noble confidence in the intentions of 
 his Creator ; and died in the expectation of meeting his friends 
 again in a higher state of existence. 
 
 Of Ariosto's four brothers, one became a courtier at Naples, 
 another a clergyman, another an envoy to the Emperor Charles 
 the Fifth ; and the fourth, who was a cripple and a scholar, lived 
 with Lodovico, and celebrated his memory. His two sons, whose 
 
 * " Chi vuole andare," &c. Satira iv. 
 t " Se iN'icoletto o Fra Martin fan segno 
 
 D' infedele o d' eretico, ne accuso 
 
 II saper troppo, e men con lor mi sdegno: 
 
 Perche salendo lo intelletto in suso 
 Per veder Dio, non de' parerci strano 
 Se talor cade giu cieco e confuso." 
 
 Satira vi. 
 
 This satire was addressed to Bembo. The cardinal is said to have asked a visitor 
 from Germany whether Brother Martin really believed what he preached ; and 
 to have expressed the greatest astonishment when told that he did. Cardinals 
 were then what augurs were in the time of Cicero wondering that they did 
 not burst out a-laughing in one another's faces. This was bad ; but inquisitors 
 are a million times worse. By the Nicoletto here mentioned by Ariosto in com- 
 pany with Luther, we are to understand (according to the conjecture of Molini) 
 a Paduan professor of the name of Niccolb Vernia, who was accused of hold- 
 ing the Pantheistic opinions of Averroes.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 325 
 
 names were Virginio and Gianbattista, and who were illegitimate 
 (the reader is always to bear in mind the more indulgent customs 
 of Italy in matters of this nature, especially in the poet's time), 
 became, the first a canon in the cathedral of Ferrara, and the 
 other an officer in the army. It does not appear that he had any 
 other children. 
 
 Ariosto's renown is wholly founded on the Orlando Furioso, 
 though he wrote satires, comedies, and a good deal of miscellane- 
 ous poetry, all occasionally exhibiting a master-hand. The com- 
 edies, however, were unfortunately modelled on those of the an- 
 cients ; and the constant termination of the verse with trisyl- 
 lables contributes to render them tedious. What comedies might 
 he not have written, had he given himself up to existing times 
 and manners !* 
 
 The satires are rather good-natured epistles to his friends, 
 written with a charming ease and straightforwardness, and con- 
 taining much exquisite sense and interesting autobiography. 
 
 On his lyrical poetry he set little value ; and his Latin verse 
 is not of the best order. Critics have expressed their surprise at 
 its inferiority to that of contemporaries inferior to him in genius ; 
 but the reason lay in the very circumstance. I mean, that his 
 large and liberal inspiration could only find its proper vent in his 
 own language ; he could not be content with potting up little del- 
 icacies in old-fashioned vessels. 
 
 The Orlando Furioso is, literally, a continuation of the Orlan- 
 do Innamorato ; so much so, that the story is not thoroughly intelli- 
 gible without it. This was probably the reason of a circumstance 
 that would be otherwise unaccountable, and that was ridiculously 
 
 * Take a specimen of this leap-frog versification from the prologue to the 
 Cassaria : 
 
 " Questa commedia, ch' oggi rscltdtaci 
 Sara, se nol sapete, e la Cassdria, 
 Ch' un altra volta, gi& vent' anni pdssano, 
 Veder si fece sopra questi pidpUi 
 Ed allora assai piacque a tutto il pdpolo, 
 Ma non ne riposte gia degno premio, 
 Che data in preda a gl" importuni ed drndi 
 Stampatbr fu," &c. 
 
 This through five comedies in five acts ! 
 PART n. 7
 
 326 ARIOSTO. 
 
 charged against him as a proof of despairing envy by the despair- 
 ing envy of Sperone ; namely, his never having once mentioned the 
 name of his predecessor. If Ariosto had despaired of equalling 
 Boiardo, he must have been hopeless of reaching posterity, in which 
 case his silence must have been useless ; and, in any case, it is 
 clear that he looked on himself as the continuator of another's nar- 
 ration. But Boiardo was so popular when he wrote, that the very 
 silence shews he must have thought the mention of his name super- 
 fluous. Still it is curious that he never should have alluded to it in 
 the course of the poem. It could not have been from any dislike to 
 the name itself, or the family ; for in his Latin poems he has eu- 
 logised the hospitality of the house of Boiardo.* 
 
 The Furioso continued not only what Boiardo did, but what he 
 intended to do ; for as its subject is Orlando's love, and knight- 
 errantry in general, so its object was to extol the house of Este, 
 and deduce it from its fabulous ancestor Ruggiero. Orlando is 
 the open, Ruggiero the covert hero ; and almost all the incidents 
 of this supposed irregular poem, which, as Panizzi has shewn, is 
 one of the most regular in the world, go to crown with triumph 
 and wedlock the originator of that unworthy race. This is done 
 on the old groundwork of Charlemagne and his Paladins, of the 
 treacheries of the house of Gan of Maganza, and of the wars of 
 the Saracens against Christendom. Bradamante, the Amazonian 
 intended of Ruggiero, is of the same race as Orlando, and a great 
 overthrower of infidels. Ruggiero begins with being an infidel 
 himself, and is kept from the wars, like a second Achilles, by 
 the devices of an anxious guardian, but ultimately fights, is con- 
 verted, and marries ; and Orlando all the while slays his thou- 
 sands, as of old, loves, goes mad for jealousy, is the foolishest 
 and wisest of mankind (somewhat like the poet himself) ; and 
 crowns the glory of Ruggiero, not only by being present at his 
 marriage, but putting on his spurs with his own hand when he 
 goes forth to conclude the war by the death of the king of 
 Algiers. 
 
 The great charm, however, of the Orlando Furioso is not in 
 its knight-errantry, or its main plot, or the cunning interweave- 
 ment of its minor ones, but in its endless variety, truth, force, 
 * In the Terses entitled Bcuxhi Statua.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 327 
 
 and animal spirits ; in its fidelity to actual nature while it keeps 
 within the bounds of the probable, and its no less enchanting ver- 
 isimilitude during its wildest sallies of imagination. At one mo- 
 ment we are in the midst of flesh and blood like ourselves ; at the 
 next with fairies and goblins ; at the next in a tremendous battle or 
 tempest ; then in one of the loveliest of solitudes ; then hearing a 
 tragedy, then a comedy ; then mystified in some enchanted pal- 
 ace ; then riding, dancing, dining, looking at pictures ; then 
 again descending to the depths of the earth, or soaring to the 
 moon, or seeing lovers in a glade, or witnessing the extravagances 
 of the great jealous hero Orlando ; and the music of an enchant- 
 ing style perpetually attends us, and the sweet face of Angelica 
 glances here and there like a bud : and there are gallantries of 
 all kinds, and stories endless, and honest tears, and joyous bursts 
 of laughter, and beardings for all base opinions, and no bigotry, 
 and reverence for whatsoever is venerable, and candour exqui- 
 site, and the happy interwoven names of " Angelica and Medoro," 
 young for ever. 
 
 But so great a work is not to be dismissed with a mere rhap- 
 sody of panegyric. Ariosto is inferior, in some remarkable 
 respects, to his predecessors Pulci and Boiardo. His characters, 
 for the most part, do not interest us as much as theirs by their 
 variety and good fellowship ; he invented none as Boiardo did, 
 with the exception, indeed, of Orlando's, as modified by jealousy ; 
 and he has no passage, I think, equal in pathos to that of the 
 struggle at Roncesvalles ; for though Orlando's jealousy is pa- 
 thetic, as well as appalling, the effects of it are confined to one 
 person, and disputed by his excessive strength. Ariosto has 
 taken all tenderness out of Angelica, except that of a kind of 
 boarding-school first love (which, however, as hereafter intimated, 
 may have simplified and improved her general effect), and he has 
 omitted all that was amusing in the character of Astolfo. Knight- 
 errantry has fallen oft" a little in his hands from its first youthful 
 and trusting freshness ; more sophisticate times are opening upon 
 us ; and satire more frequently and bitterly interferes. The 
 licentious passages (though never gross in words, like those of his 
 contemporaries,) are not redeemed by sentiment as in Boiardo ; 
 and it seems to me, that Ariosto hardly improved so much as he
 
 328 ARIOSTO. 
 
 might have done upon his predecessor's imitations of the classics. 
 I cannot help thinking that, upon the whole, he had better have 
 left them alone, and depended entirely on himself. Shelley says, 
 he has too much fighting and " revenge,"* which is true ; but 
 the revenge was only among his knights. He was himself (like 
 my admirable friend) one of the most forgiving of men ; and the 
 fighting was the taste of the age, in which chivalry was still 
 flourishing in the shape of such men as Bayard, and ferocity in 
 men like Gaston de Foix. Ariosto certainly did not anticipate, 
 any more than Shakspeare did, that spirit of human amelioration 
 which has ennobled the present age. He thought only of reflect- 
 ing nature as he found it. He is sometimes even as uninteresting 
 as he found other people ; but the tiresome passages, thank God, 
 all belong to the house of Este ! His panegyrics of Ippolito 
 and his ancestors recoiled on the poet with a retributive dulness. 
 But in all the rest there is a wonderful invigoration and en- 
 largement. The genius of romance has increased to an extraor- 
 dinary degree in power, if not in simplicity. Its shoulders have 
 grown broader, its voice louder and more sustained ; and if it has 
 lost a little on the sentimental side, it has gained prodigiously, not 
 only in animal vigour, but, above all, in knowledge of human na- 
 ture, and a brave and joyous candour in shewing it. The poet 
 takes a universal, an acute, and, upon the whole, a cheerful 
 view, like the sun itself, of all which the sun looks on ; and 
 readers are charmed to see a knowledge at once so keen and so 
 happy. Herein lies the secret of Ariosto's greatness ; which is 
 great, not because it has the intensity of Dante, or the incessant 
 thought and passion of Shakspeare, or the dignified imagination 
 of Milton, to all of whom he is far inferior in sustained excellence, 
 but because he is like very Nature herself. Whether great, 
 small, serious, pleasurable, or even indifferent, he still has the 
 life, ease, and beauty of the operations of the daily planet. Even 
 where he seems dull and commonplace, his brightness and orig- 
 inality at other times make it look like a good-natured conde- 
 scension to our own common habits of thought and discourse ; as 
 though he did it but on purpose to leave nothing unsaid that 
 
 * Essays and Letters, ut sup. vol. ii. p. 125.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 329 
 
 could bring him within the category of ourselves. His charm- 
 ing manner intimates that, instead of taking thought, he chooses 
 to take pleasure with us, and compare old notes ; and we are de- 
 lighted that he does us so much honour, and makes, as it were, 
 Ariostos of us all. He is Shakspearian in going all lengths 
 with Nature as he found her, not blinking the fact of evil, yet 
 finding a " soul of goodness" in it, and, at the same time, never 
 compromising the worth of noble and generous qualities. His 
 young and handsome Medoro is a pitiless slayer of his enemies ; 
 but they were his master's enemies, and he would have lost his 
 life, even to preserve his dead body. His Orlando, for all his 
 wisdom and greatness, runs mad for^love of a coquette, who 
 triumphs over warriors and kings, only to fall in love herself 
 with an obscure lad. His kings laugh with all their hearts, 
 like common people j his mourners weep like such unaffected 
 children of sorrow, that they must needs " swallow some of their 
 tears."* His heroes, on the arrival of intelligence that excites 
 them, leap out of bed and write letters before they dress, from 
 natural impatience, thinking nothing of their " dignity." When 
 Astolfo blows the magic horn which drives every body out of the 
 castle of Atlantes, " not a mouse" stays behind ; not, as Hoole 
 and such critics think, because the poet is here writing ludicrous- 
 ly, but because he uses the same image seriously, to give an idea 
 of desolation, as Shakspeare in Hamlet does to give that of si- 
 lence, when "not a mouse is stirring." Instead of being mere 
 comic writing, such incidents are in the highest epic taste of 
 the meeting of extremes, of the impartial eye with which Na- 
 ture regards high and low. So, give Ariosto his hippogriff, and 
 other marvels with which he has enriched the stock of romance, 
 and Nature takes as much care of the verisimilitude of their ac- 
 tions, as if she had made them herself. His hippogriff returns, 
 like a common horse, to the stable to which he has been accus- 
 
 * " Le lacrime scendean tra gigli e r&se, 
 
 La dove avvien ch' alcune sfe n' inghiozzi." 
 
 Canto xii. st. 94. 
 Which has been well translated by Mr. Roee : 
 
 " And between rose and lily, from her eyes 
 Tears fall so fast, she needs must swallow some."
 
 330 ARIOSTO. 
 
 tomed. His enchanter, who is gifted with the power of surviving 
 decapitation and pursuing the decapitator so long as a fated hair 
 remains on his head, turns deadly palo in the face when it is 
 scalped, and falls lifeless from his horse. His truth, indeed, is so 
 genuine, and at the same time his style is so unaffected, sometimes 
 so familiar in its grace, and sets us so much at ease in his company, 
 that the familiarity is in danger of bringing him into contempt 
 with the inexperienced, and the truth of being considered old and 
 obvious, because the mode of its introduction makes it seem an 
 old acquaintance. When Voltaire was a young man, and (to 
 Anglicise a favourite Gallic phrase) fancied he had profounded 
 every thing deep and knowing, he thought nothing of Ariosto. 
 Some years afterwards he took him for the first of grotesque 
 writers, but nothing more. At last he pronounced him equally 
 " entertaining and sublime, and humbly apologised for his error." 
 Foscolo quotes this passage from the Dirlionnaire Philosophique ; 
 and adds another from Sir Joshua Reynolds, in which the painter 
 speaks of a similar inability on his own part, when young, to en- 
 joy the perfect nature of Raphael, and the admiration and aston- 
 ishment which, in his riper years, he grew to feel for it.* 
 
 The excessive " wildness" attributed to Ariosto is not wilder 
 than many things in Homer, or even than some things in Virgil 
 (such as the transformation of ships into sea-nymphs). The reason 
 why it has been thought so is, that he rendered them more pop- 
 ular by mixing them with satire, and thus brought them more 
 universally into notice. One main secret of the delight they 
 give us is their being poetical comments, as it were, on fancies 
 and metaphors of our own. Thus, we say of a suspicious man, 
 that he is suspicion itself; Ariosto turns him accordingly into an 
 actual being of that name. We speak of the flights of the poets ; 
 Ariosto makes them literally flights flights on a hippogrifF, and 
 to the moon. The moon, it has been said, makes lunatics ; he 
 accordingly puts a man's wits into that planet. Vice deforms 
 beauty ; therefore his beautiful enchantress turns out to be an 
 old hag. Ancient defeated empires are sounds and emptiness ; 
 
 * Essay on the Narrative and Romantic Poems of tin Italians, in the Quar- 
 terly Review, vol. iii.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 331 
 
 therefore the Assyrian and Persian monarchies become, in his 
 limbo. of vanities, a heap of positive bladders. Youth is head- 
 strong, and kissing goes by favour ; so Angelica, queen of Cathay, 
 and beauty of the world, jilts warriors and kings, and marries a 
 common soldier. 
 
 And what a creature is this Angelica ! what effect has she not 
 had upon the world in spite of all her faults, nay, probably by 
 very reason of them ! I know not whether it has been remarked 
 before, but it appears to me, that the charm which every body 
 has felt in the story of Angelica consists mainly in that very fact 
 of her being nothing but a beauty and a woman, dashed even 
 with coquetry, which renders her so inferior in character to most 
 heroines of romance. Her interest is founded on nothing exclu- 
 sive or prejudiced. It is not addressed to any special class. 
 She might or might not have been liked by this person or that ; 
 but the world in general will adore her, because nature has made 
 them to adore beauty and the sex, apart from prejudices right or 
 wrong. Youth will attribute virtues to her, whether she has 
 them or not ; middle-age be unable to help gazing on her ; old- 
 age dote on her. She is womankind itself in form and substance ; 
 and that is a stronger thing, for the most part, than all our fig- 
 ments about it. Two musical names, " Angelica and Medoro,'"' 
 have become identified in the minds of poetical readers with the 
 honeymoon of youthful passion. 
 
 The only false and insipid fiction I can call to mind in the Or- 
 lando Furioso is that of the " swans" who rescue " medals" from 
 the river of oblivion (canto xxxv.). It betrays a singular forget- 
 fulness of the poet's wonted verisimilitude ; for what metaphor 
 can reconcile us to swans taking an interest in medals ? Pop- 
 ular belief had made them singers ; but it was not a wise step to 
 convert them into antiquaries. 
 
 Ariosto's animal spirits, and the brilliant hurry and abundance 
 of his incidents, blind a careless reader to his endless particular 
 beauties, which, though he may too often " describe instead of 
 paint" (on account, as Foscolo says, of his writing to the many), 
 shew that no man could paint better when he chose. The bo- 
 soms of his females " come and go, like the waves on the sea-
 
 332 ARIOSTO. 
 
 coast in summer airs."* His witches draw the fish out of the 
 water 
 
 "With simple words and a pure warbled spell."t 
 
 He borrows the word " painting" itself, like a true Italian and 
 friend of Raphael and Titian, to express the commiseration in 
 the faces of the blest for the sufferings of mortality : 
 
 " Dipinte di pietade il viso pio."t 
 Their pious looks painted with tenderness. 
 
 Jesus is very finely called, in the same passage, " il sempiterno 
 Amante," the eternal Lover. The female sex are the 
 
 " Schiera gentil che pur adorna il mondo." 
 The gentle bevy that adorns the world. 
 
 He paints cabinet pictures like Spenser, in isolated stanzas, with 
 a pencil at once solid and light ; as in the instance of the charm- 
 ing one that tells the story of Mercury and his net ; how he 
 watched the Goddess of Flowers as she issued forth at dawn with 
 her lap full of roses and violets, and so threw the net over her 
 "one day," and " took her ;" 
 
 "un di lo presse."il 
 
 But he does not confine himself to these gentle pictures. He 
 has many as strong as Michael Angelo, some as intense as Dante. 
 He paints the conquest of America in five words : 
 
 " Veggio da diece cacciar mille."1T 
 
 I see thousands 
 Hunted by tens. 
 
 He compares the noise of a tremendous battle heard in the neigh- 
 bourhood to the sound of the cataracts of the Nile : 
 
 * " Vengono e van, come onda al primo margo 
 Quando piacevole aura il mar combatte." 
 
 Canto vii. st. 14. 
 t " Con semplici parole e puri incanti." 
 
 Canto vi. st. 38. 
 
 t Canto xiv. st. 79. Canto xxviii. st. 98. 
 
 II Canto xv. st. 57. V Id. st. 23.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 333 
 
 "un ajto suon ch' a quel s' accorda 
 Con che i vicin' cadendo il Nil assorda."* 
 
 He " scourges" ships at sea with tempests say rather the " mis- 
 erable seamen j" while night-time grows blacker and blacker on 
 the " exasperated waters. "j" 
 
 When Rodomont has plunged into the thick of Paris, and is 
 carrying every thing before him (" like a serpent that has newly 
 cast his skin, and goes shaking his three tongues under his eyes 
 of fire"), he makes this tremendous hero break the middle of the 
 palace-gate into a huge " window," and look through it with a 
 countenance which is suddenly beheld by a crowd of faces as pale 
 as death : 
 
 " E dentro fatto 1' ha tanta finestra, 
 Che ben vedere e veduto esser puote 
 Dai visi impressi di color di morte J 
 
 The whole description of Orlando's jealousy and growing mad- 
 ness is Shaksperian for passion and circumstance, as the reader 
 may see even in the prose abstract of it in this volume ; and his 
 sublimation of a suspicious king into suspicion itself (which it also 
 contains) is as grandly and felicitously audacious as any thing 
 ever invented by poet. Spenser thought so ; and has imitated 
 and emulated it in one of his own finest passages. Ariosto has 
 not the spleen and gall of Dante, and therefore his satire is not so 
 tremendous ; yet it is very exquisite, as all the world have ac- 
 knowledged in the instances of the lost things found in the moon, 
 and the angel who finds Discord in a convent. He does not take 
 things so much to heart as Chaucer. He has nothing so pro- 
 foundly pathetic as our great poet's Griselda. Yet many a gen- 
 tle eye has moistened at the conclusion of the story of Isabella ; 
 and to recur once more to Orlando's jealousy, all who have ex- 
 perienced that passion will feel it shake them. I have read some- 
 where of a visit paid to Voltaire by an Italian gentleman, who re- 
 cited it to him, and who (being moved perhaps by the recollection 
 of some passage in his own history) had the tears all the while 
 pouring down his cheeks. 
 
 * Canto xvi. st. 56. t Canto xviii. st. 142. 
 
 t Canto xvii. st. 12. 
 
 7*
 
 S34 ARIOSTO. 
 
 Such is the poem which the gracious and good Cardinal Ippo- 
 lito designated as a " parcel of trumpery." It had, indeed, to 
 contend with more slights than his. Like all originals, it was oblv 
 ged to wait for the death of the envious and the self-loving, before 
 it acquired a popularity which surpassed all precedent. Foscolo 
 says, that Macchiavelli and Ariosto, " the two writers of that age 
 who really possessed most excellence, were the least praised du- 
 ring their lives. Bembo was approached in a posture of adora- 
 tion and fear; the infamous Aretino extorted a fulsome letter of 
 praises from the great and the learned."* He might have added, 
 that the writer most in request " in the circles" was a gentleman 
 of the name of Bernardo Accolti, then called the Unique, now 
 never heard of. Ariosto himself eulogised him among a shoal of 
 writers, half of whose names have perished ; and who most like- 
 ly included in that half the men who thought he did not praise 
 them enough. For such was the fact ! I allude to the charming 
 invention in his last canto, in which he supposes himself welcomed 
 home after a long voyage. Gay imitated it very pleasantly in 
 an address to Pope on the conclusion of his Homer. Some of 
 the persons thus honoured by Ariosto were vexed, it is said, at 
 not being praised highly enough ; others at seeing so many praised 
 in their company ; some at being left out of the list ; and some 
 others at being mentioned at all ! These silly people thought it 
 taking too great a liberty ! The poor flies of a day did not know 
 that a god had taken them in hand to give them wings for eter- 
 nity. Happily for them the names of most of these mighty per- 
 sonages are not known. One or two, however, took care to make 
 posterity laugh. Trissino, a very great man in his day, and the 
 would-be restorer of the ancient epic, had the face, in return for 
 the poet's too honourable mention of him, to speak, in his own 
 absurd verses, of " Ariosto, with that Furioso of his, which pleases 
 the vulgar :" 
 
 " L' Ariosto 
 Con quel f\irioso suo che place al volgo." 
 
 " His poem," adds Panizzi, " has the merit of not having pleased 
 any body."j- A sullen critic, Sperone (the same that afterwards 
 
 * Essay, as above, p. 534. t Boiardo and Ariosto, vol. iv. p. 318.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 335 
 
 plagued Tasso), was so disappointed at being left out, that he be- 
 came the poet's bitter enemy. He talked of Ariosto taking him- 
 self for a swan and " dying like a goose" (the allusion was to 
 the fragment he left called the Five Cantos). What has become 
 of the swan Sperone ? Bernardo Tasso, Torquato's father, made 
 a more reasonable (but which turned out to be an unfounded) 
 complaint, that Ariosto had established a precedent which poets 
 would find inconvenient. And Macchiavelli, like the true genius 
 he was, expressed a goodnatured and flattering regret that his 
 friend Ariosto had left him out of his list of congratulators, in a 
 work which was " fine throughout," and in some places wonder- 
 ful."* 
 
 The great Galileo knew Ariosto nearly by heart. f 
 He is a poet whom it may require a certain amount of animal 
 spirits to relish thoroughly. The air of his verse must agree 
 with you before you can perceive all its freshness and vitality. 
 But if read with any thing like Italian sympathy, with allowance 
 for times and manners, and with a sense as well as admittance of 
 the different kinds of the beautiful in poetry (two very different 
 things), you will be almost as much charmed with the " divine 
 Ariosto" as his countrymen have been for ages. 
 
 * Lift, in Panizzi, p. ix. 
 
 t Opere di Galileo, Padova, 1744, vol. i. p. Ixzii.
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA,
 
 Argument. 
 
 PART I. Angelica flies from the camp of Charlemagne into a wood, where 
 she meets with a number of her suitors. Description of a beautiful natural 
 bower. She claims the protection of Sacripant, who is overthrown, in passing, 
 by an unknown warrior that turns out to be a damsel. Rinaldo comes up, and 
 Angelica flies from both. She meets a pretended hermit, who takes her to some 
 rocks in the sea, and casts her asleep by magic. They are seized and carried 
 off by some mariners from the isle of Ebuda, where she is exposed to be de- 
 voured by an ore, but is rescued by a knight on a winged horse. He descends 
 with her into a beautiful spot on the coast of Brittany, but suddenly misses both 
 horse and lady. He is lured, with the other knights, into an enchanted palace, 
 whither Angelica comes too. She quits it, and again eludes her suitors. 
 
 PART II. Cloridan and Medoro, two Moorish youths, after a battle with the 
 Christians, resolve to find the dead body of their master, King Dardinel, and 
 bury it. They kill many sleepers as they pass through the enemy's camp, and 
 then discover the body ; but are surprised, and left for dead themselves. Me- 
 doro, however, survives his friend, and is cured of his wounds by Angelica, 
 who happens to coiae up. She falls in love with and marries him. Account 
 of their honeymoon in the woods. They quit them to set out for Cathay, and 
 see a madman on the road. 
 
 Part III. When the lovers had quitted their abode in the wood, Orlando, by 
 chance, arrived there, and saw every where, all round him, in-doors and out-of- 
 doors, inscriptions of " Angelica and Medoro." He tries in vain to disbelieve 
 his eyes ; finally, learns the whole story from the owner of the cottage, and 
 loses his senses. What he did in that state, both in the neighbourhood and afar 
 off, where he runs naked through the country. His arrival among his brother 
 Paladins ; and the result.
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 
 
 (CONTINUED BY ARIOSTO FROM BOIARDO.*) 
 
 PART THE FIRST. 
 ANGELICA AND HER SUITORS. 
 
 ANGELICA, not at all approving her consignment to the care of 
 Namo by Charlemagne, for the purpose of being made the prize 
 of the conqueror, resolved to escape before the battle with the 
 Pagans. She accordingly mounted her palfrey at once, and fled 
 with all her might till she found herself in a wood. 
 
 Scarcely had she congratulated herself on being in a place of 
 refuge, when she met a warrior full armed, whom with terror she 
 recognised to be the once-loved but now detested Rinaldo. He 
 had lost his horse, and was looking for it. Angelica turned her 
 palfrey aside instantly, and galloped whithersoever it chose to 
 carry her, till she came to a river-side, where she found another of 
 her suitors, Ferragus. She called loudly upon him for help. 
 Rinaldo had recognised her in turn ; and though he was on foot, 
 she knew he would be coming after her. 
 
 Come after her he did. A fight between the rivals ensued ; 
 and the beauty, taking advantage of it, again fled away fled 
 like the fawn, that, having seen its mother's throat seized by a 
 wild beast, scours through the woods, and fancies herself every 
 instant in the jaws of the monster. Every sweep of the wind in 
 the trees every shadow across her path drove her with sudden 
 
 * See p. 32 of the present volume.
 
 340 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 
 
 starts into the wildest cross-roads ; for it made her feel as if Ri- 
 naldo was at her shoulders.* 
 
 Slackening her speed by degrees, she wandered afterwards she 
 knew not whither, till she came, next day, to a pleasant wood that 
 was gently stirring with the breeze. There were two streams in 
 it, which kept the grass always green ; and when you listened, 
 you heard them softly running among the pebbles with a broken 
 murmur. 
 
 Thinking herself secure at last, and indeed feeling as if she 
 were now a thousand miles off from Rinaldo tired also with her 
 long journey, and with the heat of the summer sun she here 
 determined to rest herself. She dismounted ; and having re- 
 lieved her horse of his bridle, and let him wander away in the 
 fresh pasture, she cast her eyes upon a lovely natural bower, 
 formed of wild roses, which made a sort of little room by the 
 water's side. The bower beheld itself in the water ; trees en- 
 closed it overhead, on the three other sides ; and in the middle 
 was room enough to lie down on the sward ; while the whole was 
 so thickly trellised with the leaves and branches, that the sun- 
 beams themselves could not enter, much less any prying sight. 
 The place invited her to rest ; and accordingly the beautiful 
 creature laid herself down, and so gathering herself, as it were, 
 together, went fast asleep. f 
 
 * " Fugge tra selve spavcntose e scure, 
 
 Per lochi inabitati, enni e selvaggi. 
 II mover de le frondi e di verzure 
 
 Che di cerri sentia, d' olmi e di faggi, 
 Fatto le avea con subite paure 
 
 Trovar di qua e di la strani viaggi ; 
 Ch' ad ogni ombra veduta o in monte o in valle 
 Temea Rinaldo aver sempre alle spalle." 
 
 Canto i. st. 33. 
 
 t " Ecco non lungi un bel cespuglio vede 
 
 Di spin fioriti e di vermiglie r6se, 
 Che de le liquide onde al specchio siede, 
 
 Chiuso dal Sol fra 1' alte quercie ombrose ; 
 Cos! v6to nel mezo, che concede 
 
 Fresca stanza fra 1' ombre piu nascose : 
 E la foglie coi rami in modo e mista, 
 Che '1 Sol non v' entra, non che minor vista.
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 341 
 
 She had not slept long when she was awakened by the tramp- 
 ling of a horse ; and getting up, and looking cautiously through 
 the trees, she perceived a cavalier, who dismounted from his 
 steed, and sat himself down by the water in a melancholy pos- 
 ture. It was Sacripant, king of Circassia, one of her lovers, 
 wretched at the thought of having missed her in the camp of 
 King Charles. Angelica loved Sacripant no more than the rest ; 
 but, considering him a man of great conscientiousness, she thought 
 he would make her a good protector while on her journey home. 
 She therefore suddenly appeared before him out of the bower, 
 like a goddess of the woods, or Venus herself, and claimed his 
 protection. 
 
 Never did a mother bathe the eyes of her son with tears 
 of such exquisite joy, when he came home after news of his 
 death in battle, as the Saracen king beheld this sudden appari- 
 tion with its divine face and beautiful manners.* He could not 
 help clasping her in his arms ; and very different intentions were 
 coming into his head than those for which she had given him 
 credit, when the noise of a second warrior thundering through 
 the woods made him remount his horse and prepare for an en- 
 counter. The stranger speedily made his appearance, a person- 
 age of a gallant and fiery bearing, clad in a surcoat white as 
 snow, with a white streamer for a crest. He seemed more bent 
 on having the way cleared before him than anxious about the 
 manner of it ; so couching his lance as he came, while Sacri- 
 pant did the like with his, he dashed upon the Circassian with 
 such violence as to cast him on the ground ; and though his own 
 horse slipped at the same time, he had it up again in an instant 
 
 Dentro letto vi fan tener' erbette, 
 
 Ch' invitano a posar chi s' appresenta. 
 La bella donna in mezo a quel si mette ; 
 
 Ivi si scorca, et ivi s' addormenta." St. 37. 
 
 An exquisite picture ! 
 * And how lovely is this ! 
 
 " E fuor di quel cespuglio oscuro e cieco 
 Fa di se bella et iinprovvisa mostra, 
 Come di selva o fuor d' ombroso speco 
 
 Diana in scena, o Citerea si mostra," &c. St. 52.
 
 342 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 
 
 with his spurs ; and so, continuing his way, was a mile off be- 
 fore the Saracen recovered from his astonishment. 
 
 As the stunned and stupid ploughman, who has been stretched 
 by a thunderbolt beside his slain oxen, raises himself from the 
 ground after the lofty crash, and looks with astonishment at the 
 old pine-tree near him which has been stripped from head to foot, 
 with just such amazement the Circassian got up from his down- 
 fall, and stood in the presence of Angelica, who had witnessed it. 
 Never in his life had he blushed so red as at that moment. 
 
 Angelica comforted him in sorry fashion, attributing the dis- 
 aster to his tired and ill-fed horse, and observing that his enemy 
 had chosen to risk no second encounter ; but, while she was talk- 
 ing, a messenger, with an appearance of great fatigue and anx- 
 iety, came riding up, who asked Sacripant if* he had seen a 
 knight in a white surcoat and crest. 
 
 " He has this instant," answered the king, " overthrown me, 
 and galloped away. Who is he ?" 
 
 " It is no he" replied the messenger. " The rider who has 
 overthrown you, and thus taken possession of whatever glory you 
 may have acquired, is a damsel ; and she is still more beautiful 
 than brave. Bradamante is her illustrious name." 
 
 And with these words the horseman set spurs to his horse, and 
 left the Saracen more miserable than before. He mounted An- 
 gelica's horse without a word, his own having been disabled ; and 
 so, taking her up behind him, proceeded on the road in continued 
 silence.* 
 
 They had just gone a couple of miles, when they again heard 
 a noise, as of some powerful body in haste ; and in a little while, 
 a horse without a rider came rushing towards them, in golden 
 trappings. It was Rinaldo's horse, Bayardo.f The Circassian, 
 
 * How admirable is the suddenness, brevity, and force of this scene ! And it 
 is as artful and dramatic as off-hand ; for this Amazon, Bradamante, is the fu- 
 ture heroine of the warlike part of the poem, and the beauty from whose mar- 
 riage with Ruggiero is to spring the house of Este. Nor without her appear- 
 ance at this moment, as Panizzi has shewn (vol. i. p. cvi.), could a variety of 
 subsequent events have taken place necessary to the greatest interests of the 
 story. All the previous passages in romance about Amazons are nothing com- 
 pared with this flash of a thunderbolt. 
 
 t From bayard^ old French ; bay-colour.
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 343 
 
 dismounting, thought to seize it, but was welcomed with a curvet, 
 which made him beware how he hazarded something worse. The 
 horse then went straight to Angelica in a way as caressing as a 
 do** : for he remembered how she fed him in Albracca at the 
 
 D * 
 
 time when she was in love with his ungracious master : and the 
 beauty recollected Bayardo with equal pleasure, for she had need 
 of him. Sacripant, however, watched his opportunity, and 
 mounted the horse ; so that now the two companions had each a 
 separate steed. They were about to proceed more at their ease, 
 when again a great noise was heard, and Rinaldo himself was 
 seen coming after them on foot, threatening the Saracen with 
 furious gestures, for he saw that he had got his horse ; and he 
 recognised, above all, in a rage of jealousy, the lovely face beside 
 him. Angelica in vain implored the Circassian to fly with her. 
 He asked if she had forgotten the wars of Albracca, and all 
 which he had done to serve her, that thus she supposed him afraid 
 of another battle. 
 
 Sacripant endeavoured to push Bayardo against Rinaldo ; but 
 the horse refusing to fight his master, he dismounted, and the two 
 rivals encountered each other with their swords. At first they 
 went through the whole sword-exercise to no effect ; but Rinaldo, 
 tired of the delay, raised the terrible Fusberta,* and at one blow 
 cut through the other's twofold buckler of bone and steel, and 
 benumbed his arm. Angelica turned as pale as a criminal going 
 to execution ; and, without farther waiting, galloped off through 
 the forest, looking round every instant to see if Rinaldo was upon 
 her. 
 
 She had not gone far when she met an old man who seemed to 
 be a hermit, but was in reality a magician, coming along upon 
 an ass. He was of venerable aspect, and seemed worn out with 
 age and mortifications ; yet, when he beheld the exquisite face 
 before him, and heard the lady explain how it was she needed his 
 assistance, even he, old as he really was, began to fancy himself 
 a lover, and determined to use his art for the purpose of keeping 
 his two rivals at a distance. Taking out a book, and reading a 
 little in it, there issued from the air a spirit in likeness of a ser- 
 
 * His famous sword, vide p. 27.
 
 344 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 
 
 vant, whom he sent to the two combatants with directions to give 
 them a false account of Orlando's having gone off to France 
 with Angelica. The spirit disappeared ; and the magician jour- 
 neying with his companion to the sea-coast, raised another, who 
 entered Angelica's horse, and carried her, to her astonishment 
 and terror, out to sea, and so round to some lonely rocks. There, 
 to her great comfort at first, the old man rejoined her ; but his 
 proceedings becoming very mysterious, and exciting her indigna- 
 tion, he cast her into a deep sleep. 
 
 It happened, at this moment, that a ship was passing by the 
 rocks, bound upon a tragical commission from the island of 
 Ebuda. It was the custom of that place to consign a female 
 daily to the jaws of a sea-monster, for the purpose of averting the 
 wrath of one of. their gcds ; and as it was thought that the god 
 would be appeased if they brought him one of singular beauty, 
 the mariners of the ship seized with avidity on the sleeping An- 
 gelica, and carried her off, together with the old man. The 
 people of Ebuda, out of love and pity, kept her, unexposed to the 
 sea-monster, for some days ; but at length she was bound to the 
 rock where it was accustomed to seek its food ; and thus, in tears 
 and horror, with not a friend to look to, the delight of the world 
 expected her fate. East and west she looked hi vain ; to the 
 heavens she looked in vain ; every where she looked in vain. 
 That beauty which had made King Agrican come from the Cas- 
 pian gates, with half Scythia, to find his death from the hands of 
 Orlando ; that beauty which had made King Sacripant forget both 
 his country and his honour ; that beauty which had tarnished the 
 renown and the wisdom of the great Orlando himself, and turned 
 the whole East upside down, and laid it at the feet of loveliness, 
 has now not a soul near it to give it the comfort of a word. 
 
 Leaving^our heroine a while in this condition, I must now tell 
 you that Ruggiero, the greatest of all the infidel warriors, had 
 been presented by his guardian, the magician Atlantes, with two 
 wonderful gifts ; the one a shield of dazzling metal, which blinded 
 and overthrew every one that looked at it ; and the other an ani- 
 mal which combined the bird with the quadruped, and was called 
 the Hippogriff, or griffin-horse. It had the plumage, the wings, 
 head, beak, and front-legs of a griffin, and the rest like a horse.
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 345 
 
 It was not made by enchantment, but was a creature of a natural 
 kind found but very rarely in the Riphseari mountains, far on the 
 other side of the Frozen Sea.* 
 
 With these gifts, high mounted in the air, the young ward of 
 Atlantes was now making the grandest of grand tours. He had 
 for some time been confined by the magician in a castle, in order 
 to save him from the dangers threatened in his horoscope. From 
 this he had been set free by the lady with whom he was destined 
 to fall in love ; he had then been inveigled by a wicked fairy into 
 her tower, and set free by a good one ; and now he was on his 
 travels through the world, to seek his mistress and pursue knight- 
 ly adventures. 
 
 Casting his eyes on the coast of Ebuda, the rider of the hippo- 
 griff beheld the amazing spectacle of the lady tied to the rock ; 
 and struck with a beauty which reminded him of her whom he 
 loved, he resolved to deliver her from a peril which soon became 
 too manifest. 
 
 A rtoise was heard in the sea ; and the huge monster, the Ore, 
 appeared half in the water, and half out of it, like a ship which 
 drags its way into port after a long and tempestuous voyage.f It 
 seemed a huge mass without form except the head, which had 
 
 * To richness and rarity, how much is added by remoteness ! It adds distance 
 to the other difficulties of procuring it. 
 
 t " Ecco apparir lo smisurato mostro 
 Mezo ascoso ne 1' onda, e mezo sorto. 
 Come sospinto suol da Borea o d' Ostro 
 Venir lungo navilio a pigliar porto." 
 
 Canto x. st. 100. 
 
 Improved from Ovid, Metamorph. lib. iv. 706 : 
 
 t " Ecce velut navis prsefixo concita rostro 
 
 Sulcat aquas, juvenum sudantibus acta lacertis ; 
 Sic fera," &c. 
 
 As when a galley with sharp beak comes fierce, 
 Ploughing the waves with many a sweating oar. 
 
 Ovid is brisker and more obviously to the purpose ; but Ariosto gives the pon- 
 derousness and dreary triumph of the monster. The comparison of the fly and 
 the mastiff is in the same higher and more epic taste. The classical reader need 
 not be told that the whole ensuing passage, as far as the combat is concerned, is 
 imitated from Ovid's story of Perseus and Andromeda.
 
 346 THE ADVENTURES OP ANGELICA. 
 
 eyes sticking out, and bristles like a boar. Ruggiero, who had 
 dashed down to the side of Angelica, and attempted to encourage 
 her in vain, now rose in the air ; and the monster, whose atten- 
 tion was diverted by a shadow on the water of a couple of great 
 wings dashing round and above him, presently felt a spear on his 
 neck ; but only to irritate him, for it could not pierce the skin. 
 In vain Rujjgiero tried to do so a hundred times. The combat 
 was of no more effect than that of the fly with the mastiff, when 
 it dashes against his eyes and mouth, and at last comes once too 
 often within the gape of his snapping teeth. The ore raised such 
 a foam and tempest in the waters with the flapping of his tail, 
 that the knight of the hippogriff hardly knew whether he was in 
 air or sea. He began to fear that the monster would disable the 
 creature's wings ; and where would its rider be then ? He there- 
 fore had recourse to a weapon which he never used but at the last 
 moment, when skill and courage became of no service : he un- 
 veiled the magic shield. But first he flew to Angelica, and put 
 on her finger the ring which neutralized its effect. The. shield 
 blazed on the water like another sun. The ore, beholding it, felt 
 it smite its eyes like lightning ; and rolling over its unwieldy 
 body in the foam which it had raised, lay turned up, like a dead 
 fish, insensible. But it was not dead ; and Ruggiero was so long 
 in making ineffectual efforts to pierce it, that Angelica cried out 
 to him for God's sake to release her while he had the opportunity, 
 lest the monster should revive. " Take me with you," she said ; 
 "drown me ; any thing, rather than let me be food for this horror." 
 
 The knight released her instantly. He set her behind him on 
 the winged horse, and in a few minutes was in the air, transport- 
 ed with having deprived the brute of his delicate supper. Then, 
 turning as he went, he imprinted on her a thousand kisses. He 
 had intended to make a tour of Spain, which was not far off; but 
 he now altered his mind, and descended with his prize into a love- 
 ly spot on the coast of Brittany, encircled with oaks full of night- 
 ingales, with here and there a solitary mountain. 
 
 It was a little green meadow with a brook.* Ruggiero look- 
 ed about him with transport, and was preparing to disencumber 
 
 * " Sul lito un bosco era di querce ombrose, 
 Dove ogn' or par che Filomena piagna ;
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 347 
 
 himself of his hot armour, when the blushing beauty, casting her 
 eyes downwards, beheld on her finger the identical magic ring 
 which her father had given her when she first entered Christen- 
 dom, and which had delivered her out of so many dangers. If 
 put on the finger only, it neutralized all enchantment ; but put 
 into the mouth, it rendered the wearer invisible. It had been 
 stolen from her, and came into the hands of a good fairy, who 
 gave it to Ruggiero, in order to deliver him from the wiles of a 
 bad one. Falsehood to the good fairy's friend, his own mistress 
 Bradamante, now rendered him unworthy of its possession ; and 
 at the moment when he thought Angelica his own beyond re- 
 demption, she vanished out of his sight. In vain he knew the 
 secret of the ring, and the possibility of her being still present 
 the certainty, at all events, of her not being very far off. He ran 
 hither and thither like a madman, hoping to clasp her in his arms, 
 and embracing nothing but the air. In a little while she was dis- 
 tant far enough ; and Ruggiero, stamping about to no purpose in 
 a rage of disappointment, and at length resolving to take horse, 
 perceived he had been deprived, in the mean time, of his hippogrifF. 
 It had loosened itself from the tree to which he had tied it, and 
 taken its own course over the mountains. Thus he had lost horse, 
 ring, and lady, all at once.* 
 
 Pursuing his way, with contending emotions, through a valley 
 between lofty woods, he heard a great noise in the thick of them. 
 He rushed to see what it was ; and found a giant combating with 
 
 Ch' in mezo avea un pratel con una fonte, 
 E quinci e quindi un solitario monte. 
 
 Quivi il bramoso cavalier ritenne 
 
 L' audace corso, e nel pratel discese." 
 
 St. 113. 
 
 What a landscape ! and what a charm beyond painting he has put into it with 
 his nightingales ! and then what figures besides ! A knight on a winged steed 
 descending with a naked beauty into a meadow in the thick of woods, with 
 " here and there a solitary mountain." The mountains make no formal circle ; 
 they keep their separate distances, with their various intervals of light and shade. 
 And what a heart of solitude is given to the meadow by the loneliness of these 
 ite waiters aloof! 
 
 * Nothing can be more perfectly wrought up than this sudden change of cir- 
 cumstances.
 
 318 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 
 
 a young knight. The giant got the better of the knight ; and 
 having cast him on the ground, unloosed his helmet for the pur- 
 pose of slaying him, when Ruggiero, to his horror, beheld in the 
 youth's face that of his unworthily-treated mistress Bradamante. 
 He rushed to assault her enemy ; but the giant, seizing her in 
 his arms, took to his heels ; and the penitent lover followed him 
 with all his might, but in vain. The wretch was hidden from 
 his eyes by the trees. At length Ruggiero, incessantly pursuing 
 him, issued forth into a great meadow, containing a noble man- 
 sion ; and here he beheld the giant in the act of dashing through 
 the gate of it with his prize. 
 
 The mansion was an enchanted one, raised by the anxious old 
 guardian of Ruggiero for the purpose of enticing into it both the 
 youth himself, and all from whom he could experience danger in 
 the course of his adventures. Orlando had just been brought 
 there by a similar device, that of the apparition of a knight car- 
 rying off Angelica ; for the supposed Bradamante was equally a 
 deception, and the giant no other than the magician himself. 
 There also were the knights Ferragus, and Brandimart, and 
 Grandonio,-and King Sacripant, all searching for something they 
 had missed. They wandered about the house to no purpose ; 
 and sometimes Ruggiero heard Bradamante calling him ; and 
 sometimes Orlando beheld Angelica's face at a window.* 
 
 At length the beauty arrived in her own veritable person. She 
 was again on horseback, and once more on the look-out for a 
 knight who should conduct her safely home whether Orlando or 
 Sacripant she had not determined. The same road which had 
 brought Ruggiero to the enchanted honse having done as much 
 for her 5 she now entered it invisibly by means of the ring. 
 
 Finding both the knights in the place, and feeling under the 
 necessity of coming to a determination respecting one or the other, 
 
 * To feel the complete force of this picture, a reader should have been in the 
 South, and beheld the like sudden apparitions, at open windows, of ladies looking 
 forth in dresses of beautiful colours, and with faces the most interesting. I re- 
 member a vision of this sort at Carrara, on a bright but not too hot day (I fancied 
 that the marble mountains there cooled it). It resembled one of Titian's wo- 
 men, with its broad shoulders, and boddice and sleeves differently coloured 
 from the petticoat ; and seemed literally framed in the unsashed window. But 
 I am digressing.
 
 THE ADVENTURES OP ANGELICA. 349 
 
 Angelica made up her mind in favour of King Sacripant, whom 
 she reckoned to be more at her disposal. Contriving therefore to 
 meet him by himself, she took the ring out of her mouth, and 
 suddenly appeared before him. He had hardly recovered from 
 his amazement, when Ferragus and Orlando himself came up ; 
 and as Angelica now was visible to all, she took occasion to de- 
 liver them from the enchanted house by hastening before them 
 into a wood. They ail followed of course, in a frenzy of anx- 
 iety and delight ; but the lady being perplexed with the presence 
 of the whole three, and recollecting that she had again obtained 
 possession of her ring, resolved to trust her safe conduct to invis- 
 ibility alone ; so, in the old fashion, she left them to new quarrels 
 by suddenly vanishing from their eyes. She stopped, neverthe- 
 less, a while to laugh at them, as they all turned their stupified 
 faces hither and thither ; then suffered them to pass her in a 
 blind thunder of pursuit ; and so, gently following at her leisure 
 on the same road, took her way towards the East. 
 
 It was a long journey, and she saw many places and people, 
 and was now hidden and now seen, like the moon, till she came 
 one day into a forest near the walls of Paris, where she beheld a 
 youth lying wounded on the grass, between two companions that 
 were dead. 
 
 PART n.
 
 350 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 
 
 PART THE SECOND. 
 
 ANGELICA AND MEDORO. 
 
 Now, in order to understand who the youth was that Angelica 
 found lying on the grass between the two dead companions, and 
 how he came to be so lying, you must know that a great battle 
 had been fought there between Charlemagne and the Saracens, in 
 which the latter were defeated, and that these three people be- 
 longed to the Saracens. The two that were slain were Dardinel, 
 king of Zumara, and Cloridan, one of his followers ; and the 
 wounded survivor was another, whose name was Medoro. Clo- 
 ridan and Medoro had been loving and grateful servants of Dar- 
 dinel, and very fast friends of one another ; such friends, indeed, 
 that on their own account, as well as in honour of what they 
 did for their master, their history deserves a particular mention. 
 
 They were of a lowly stock on the coast of Syria, and in all 
 the various fortunes of their lord had shewn him a special at- 
 tachment. Cloridan had been bred a huntsman, and was the 
 robuster person of the two. Medoro was in the first bloom of 
 youth, with a complexion rosy and fair, and a most pleasant as 
 well as beautiful countenance. He had black eyes, and hair 
 that ran into curls of gold ; in short, looked like a very angel 
 from heaven. 
 
 These two were keeping anxious watch upon the trenches of 
 the defeated army, when Medoro, unable to cease thinking of the 
 master who had been left dead on the field, told his friend that he 
 could no longer delay to go and look for his dead body, and bury 
 it. " You," said he, " will remain, and so be able to do justice 
 to my memory, in case I fail." 
 
 Cloridan, though he delighted in this proof of his friend's 
 noble-heartedness, did all he could to dissuade him from so peril-
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 351 
 
 ous an enterprise ; but Medoro, in the fervour of his gratitude for 
 benefits conferred on him by his lord, was immovable in his deter- 
 mination to die or to succeed ; and Cloridan, seeing this, deter- 
 mined to go with him. 
 
 They took their way accordingly out of the Saracen camp, 
 and in a short time found themselves in that of the enemy. The 
 Christians had been drinking over-night for joy at their victory, 
 and were buried in wine and sleep. Cloridan halted a moment, 
 and said in a whisper to his friend, " Do you see this ? Ought 1 
 to lose such an opportunity of revenging our beloved master ? 
 Keep watch, and I will do it. Look about you, and listen on 
 every side, while I make a passage for us among these sleepers 
 with my sword." 
 
 Without waiting an answer, the vigorous huntsman pushed 
 into the first tent before him. It contained, among other occu- 
 pants, a certain Alpheus, a physician and caster of nativities, 
 who had prophesied to himself a long life, and a death in the 
 bosom of his family. Cloridan cautiously put the sword's point 
 in his throat, and there was an end of his dreams. Four other 
 sleepers were despatched in like manner, without time given 
 them to utter a syllable. After them went another, who had en- 
 trenched himself between two horses ; then the luckless Grill, 
 who had made himself a pillow of a barrel which he had emp- 
 tied. He was dreaming of opening a second barrel, but, alas, 
 was tapped himself. A Greek and a German followed, who had 
 been playing late at dice ; fortunate, if they had continued to do 
 so a little longer ; but they never counted a throw like this 
 among their chances. 
 
 By this time the Saracen had grown ferocious with his bloody 
 work, and went slaughtering along like a wild beast among sheep. 
 Nor could Medoro keep his own sword unemployed ; but he dis- 
 dained to strike indiscriminately he was choice in his victims. 
 Among these was a certain Duke La Brett, who had his lady fast 
 asleep in his arms. Shall I pity them ? That will I not. Sweet 
 was their fated hour, most happy their departure ; for, embraced 
 as the sword found them, even so, I believe, it dismissed them into 
 the other world, loving and enfolded. 
 
 Two brothers were slain next, sons of the Count of Flanders,
 
 3M THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 
 
 and newly-made valorous knights. Charlemagne had seen them 
 turn red with slaughter in the field, and had augmented their 
 coat of arms with his lilies, and promised them lands beside in 
 Friesland. And he would have bestowed the lands, only Medoro 
 forbade it. 
 
 The friends now discovered that they had approached the 
 quarter in which the Paladins kept guard about their sovereign. 
 They were afraid, therefore, to continue the slaughter any fur- 
 ther ; so they put up their swords, and picked their way cau- 
 tiously through the rest of the camp into the field where the battle 
 had taken place. There they experienced so much difficulty in 
 the search for their master's body, in consequence of the horrible 
 mixture of the corpses, that they might have searched till the 
 perilous return of daylight, had not the moon, at the close of a 
 prayer of Medoro's, sent forth its beams right on the spot where 
 the king was lying. Medoro knew him by his cognizance, argent 
 and gules. The poor youth burst into tears at the sight, weeping 
 plentifully as he approached him, only he was obliged to let his 
 tears flow without noise. Not that he cared for death at that 
 moment he would gladly have embraced it, so deep was his af- 
 fection for his lord ; but he was anxious not to be hindered in his 
 pious office of consigning him to the earth. 
 
 The two friends took up the dead king on their shoulders, and 
 were hasting away with the beloved burthen, when the white- 
 ness of dawn began to appear, and with it, unfortunately, a troop 
 of horsemen in the distance, right in their path. 
 
 It was Zerbino, prince of Scotland, with a party of horse. He 
 was a warrior of extreme vigilance and activity, and was return- 
 ing to the camp after having been occupied all night in pursuing 
 such of the enemy as had not succeeded in getting into their en- 
 trenchments.* 
 
 * Ariosto elsewhere represents him as the handsomest man in the world ; say- 
 ing of him, in a line that has become famous, 
 
 " Natura il fece, e poi roppe la stampa." 
 
 Canto i. st. 84. 
 
 Nature made him, and then broke the mould. 
 (The word is generally printed ruppe; but I use the primitive text of Mr. Pan-
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 353 
 
 " My friend," exclaimed the huntsman, " we must e'en take to 
 our heels. Two living people must not be sacrificed to one who 
 is dead." 
 
 With these words he let go his share of the burden, taking for 
 granted that the friend, whose life as well as his own he was 
 thinking to secure, would do as he himself did. But attached as 
 Cloridan had been to his master, Medoro was far more so. He 
 accordingly received the whole burden on his shoulders. Clori- 
 dan meantime scoured away, as fast as feet could carry him, 
 thinking his companion was at his side : otherwise he would soon- 
 er have died a hundred times over than have left him. 
 
 In the interim, the party of the Scottish prince had dispersed 
 themselves about the plain, for the purpose of intercepting the two 
 fugitives, whichever way they went ; for they saw plainly they 
 were enemies, by the alarm they shewed. 
 
 There was an old forest at hand in those days, which, besides 
 being thick and dark, was full of the most intricate cross-paths, 
 and inhabited only by game. Into this Cloridan had plunged. 
 Medoro, as well as he could, hastened after him ; but hampered 
 as he was with his burden, the more he sought the darkest and 
 most intricate paths, the less advanced he found himself, especial- 
 ly as he had no acquaintance with the place. 
 
 On a sudden, Cloridan having arrived at a spot so quiet that he 
 became aware of the silence, missed his beloved friend. " Great 
 God !" he exclaimed, " what have I done ? Left him I know not 
 where, or how !" The swift runner instantly turned about, and, 
 retracing his steps, came voluntarily back on the road to his own 
 death. As he approached the scene where it was to take place, 
 he began to hear the noise of men and horses ; then he discern- 
 ed voices threatening ; then the voice of his unhappy friend ; 
 and at length he saw him, still bearing his load, in the midst of 
 the whole troop of horsemen. The prince was commanding them 
 to seize him. The poor youth, however, burdened as he was, 
 rendered it no such easy matter ; for he turned himself about like 
 a wheel, and entrenched himself, now behind this tree, and now 
 
 nizzi's edition.) Boiardo's handsomest man, Astolfo, was an Englishman ; Ari- 
 osto's is a Scotchman. See, in the present volume, the note on the character 
 of Astolfo, p. 23.
 
 354 THE ADVENTURES OP ANGELICA. 
 
 behind that. Finding this would not do, he laid his beloved bur- 
 den on the ground, and then strode hither and thither, over and 
 round about it, parrying the horsemen's endeavours to take him 
 prisoner. Never did poor hunted bear feel more conflicting emo- 
 tions, when, surprised in her den, she stands over her offspring 
 with uncertain heart, groaning with a mingled sound of tenderness 
 and rage. Wrath bids her rush forward, and bury her nails in 
 the flesh of their enemy ; love melts her, and holds her back in 
 the middle of her fury, to look upon those whom she bore.* 
 
 Cloridan was in an agony of perplexity what to do. He longed 
 to rush forth and die with his friend ; he longed also still to do 
 what he could, and not to let him die unavenged. He therefore 
 halted a while before he issued from the trees, and, putting an 
 arrow to his bow, sent it well-aimed among the horsemen. A 
 Scotsman fell dead from his saddle. The troop all turned to see 
 
 * " Come orsa, che 1' alpestre cacciatore 
 
 Ne la pietrosa tana assalita abbia, 
 Sta sopra i figli con incerto core, 
 
 E freme in suono di pieta e di rabbia : 
 Ira la 'nvita e natural furore 
 
 A spiegar 1' ugne, e a insanguinar le labbia ; 
 Amor la 'ntenerisce, e la ritira 
 A riguardare a i figli in mezo 1' ira." 
 
 Like as a bear, whom men in mountains start 
 In her old stony den, and dare, and goad, 
 
 Stands o'er her children with uncertain heart, 
 And roars for rage and sorrow in one mood : 
 
 Anger impels her, and her natural part. 
 To use her nails, and bathe her lips in blood ; 
 
 Love melts her, and, for all her angry roar, 
 
 Holds back her eyes to look on those she bore. 
 
 This stanza in Ariosto has become famous as a beautiful transcript of a beautiful 
 passage in Statiu?, which, indeed, it surpasses in style, but not in feeling, es- 
 pecially when we consider with whom the comparison originates : 
 
 " Ut lea, quam saevo foetam pressere cubili 
 Venantes Numidse, natos erecta superstat 
 Mente sub incerta, torvum ac miserabile frendens : 
 Ilia quidem turbare globos, et frangere morsu 
 Tela queat ; sed prolis amor crudelia vincit 
 Pectora, et in media catulos circumspicit ira." 
 
 Thebais, x. 414.
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 355 
 
 whence the arrow came ; and as they were raging and crying 
 out, a second stuck in the throat of the loudest. 
 
 " This is not to be borne," cried the prince, pushing his horse 
 towards Medoro ; " you shall suffer for this." Arid so speaking, 
 he thrust his hand into the golden locks of the youth, and dragged 
 him violently backwards, intending to kill him ; but when he 
 looked on his beautiful face, he couldn't do it. 
 
 The youth betook himself to entreaty. " For God's sake, sir 
 knight !" cried he, " be not so cruel as to deny me leave to bury 
 my lord and master. He was a king. I ask nothing for myself 
 not even my life. I do not care for my life. I care for noth- 
 ing but to bury my lord and master." 
 
 These words were spoken in a manner so earnest, that the 
 good prince could feel nothing but pity ; but a ruffian among the 
 troop, losing sight even of respect for his lord, thrust his lance 
 into the poor youth's bosom right over the prince's hand. Zer- 
 bino turned with indignation to smite him, but the villain, seeing 
 what was coming, galloped off; and meanwhile Cloridan, think- 
 ing that his friend was slain, came leaping full of rage out of the 
 wood, and laid about him with his sword in mortal desperation. 
 Twenty swords were upon him in a moment ; and perceiving 
 life flowing out of him, he let himself fall down by the side of 
 his friend.* f 
 
 * This adventure of Cloridan and Medoro is imitated from the Nisus and 
 Euryalus of Virgil. An Italian critic, quoted by Panizzi, says, that the way 
 in which Cloridan exposes himself to the enemy is inferior to the Latin poet's 
 famous 
 
 " Me, me (adsum qui feci), in me convertite ferrum." 
 Me, me ('tis I who did the deed), slay me. 
 
 And the reader will agree with Panizzi, that he is right. The circumstance, 
 also, of Euryalus's bequeathing his aged mother to the care of his prince, in 
 case he fails in his enterprise, is very touching ; and the main honour, both of 
 the invention of the whole episode and its particulars, remains with Virgil. 
 On the other hand, the enterprise of the friends in the Italian poet, which is 
 that of burying their dead master, and not merely of communicating with an 
 absent general, is more affecting, though it may be less patriotic ; the inability 
 of Zerbino to kill him, when he looked on his face, is extremely so ; and, as 
 Panizzi has shewn, the adventure is made of importance to the whole story of 
 the poem, and is not simply an episode, like that in the JEneid. It serves, too, 
 in a very particular manner to introduce Medoro worthily to the affection of
 
 356 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 
 
 The Scotsmen, supposing both the friends to be dead, now took 
 their departure ; and Medoro indeed would have been dead before 
 long, he bled so profusely. But assistance of a very unusual 
 sort was at hand. 
 
 A lady on a palfrey happened to be coming by, who observed 
 signs of life in him, and was struck with his youth and beauty. 
 She was attired with great simplicity, but her air was that of a 
 person of high rank, and her beauty inexpressible. In short, it 
 was the proud daughter of the lord of Cathay, Angelica herself. 
 Finding that she could travel in safety and independence by 
 means of the magic ring, her self-estimation had risen to such a 
 height, that she disdained to stoop to the companionship of the 
 greatest man living. She could not even call to mind that such 
 lovers as the County Orlando or King Sacripant existed : and it 
 mortified her beyond measure to think of the affection she had 
 entertained for Rinaldo. 
 
 "Such arrogance," thought Love, "is not to be endured." 
 The little archer with the wings put an arrow to his bow, and 
 stood waiting for her by the spot where Medoro lay. 
 
 Now, when the beauty beheld the youth lying half dead with 
 his wounds, and yet, on accosting him, found that he lamented 
 less for himself than for the unburied body of the king his mas- 
 ter, she felt a tenderness unknown before creep into every par- 
 ticle of her being ; and as the greatest ladies of India were ac- 
 customed to dress the wounds of their knights, she bethought her 
 of a balsam which she had observed in coming along ; and so, 
 looking about for it, brought it back with her to the spot, together 
 with a herdsman whom she had rnet on horseback in search of 
 one of his stray cattle. The blood was ebbing so fast, that the 
 poor youth was on the point of expiring ; but Angelica bruised 
 the plant between stones, and gathered the juice into her delicate 
 hands, and restored his strength with infusing it into the wounds ; 
 so that, in a little while, he was able to get on the horse belong- 
 ing to the herdsman, and be carried away to the man's cottage. 
 He would not quit his lord's body, however, nor that of his 
 
 Angelica ; for, mere female though she be, we should hardly have gone along 
 with her passion as we do, in a poem of any seriousness, had it been founded 
 merely on his beauty.
 
 THE ADVENTURES OP ANGELICA. 357 
 
 friend, till he had seen them laid in the ground. He then- went 
 with the lady, and she took up her abode with him in the cottage, 
 and attended him till he recovered, loving him more and more 
 day by day ; so that at length she fairly told him as much, and 
 he loved her in turn ; and the king's daughter married the lowly, 
 born soldier. 
 
 O County Orlando ! O King Sacripant ! That renowned val- 
 our of yours, say, what has it availed you ? That lofty honour, 
 tell us, at what price is it rated ? What is the reward ye have 
 obtained for all your services ? Shew us a single courtesy which 
 the lady ever vouchsafed, late or early, for all that you ever suf- 
 fered in her behalf. 
 
 O King Agrican ! if you could return to life, how hard would 
 you think it to call to mind all the repulses she gave you all the 
 pride and aversion and contempt with which she received your 
 advances ! 
 
 O Ferragus ! O thousands of others too numerous to speak of, 
 who performed thousands of exploits for this ungrateful one, 
 what would you all think at beholding her in the arms of the 
 courted boy ! 
 
 Yes, Medoro had the first gathering of the kiss off the lips of 
 Angelica those lips never touched before that garden of roses 
 on the threshold of which nobody ever yet dared to venture. 
 The love was headlong and irresistible ; but the priest was called 
 in to sanctify it ; and the brideswoman of the daughter of Cathay 
 was the wife of the cottager. 
 
 The lovers remained upwards of a month in the cottage. An- 
 gelica could not bear her young husband out of her sight. She 
 was for ever gazing on him, and hanging on his neck. In-doors 
 and out-of-doors, day as well as night, she had him at her side. 
 In the morning or evening they wandered forth along the banks 
 of some stream, or by the hedge-rows of some verdant meadow. 
 In the middle of the day they took refuge from the heat in a 
 grotto that seemed made for lovers ; and wherever, in their wan- 
 derings, they found a tree fit to carve and write on, by the side 
 of fount or river, or even a slab of rock soft enough for the pur, 
 pose, there they were sure to leave their names on the bark or 
 marble ; so that, what with the inscriptions in-doors and out-of- 
 
 8*
 
 358 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 
 
 doors (for the walls of the cottage displayed them also), a visitor 
 of the place could not have turned his eye in any direction with- 
 out seeing the words 
 
 " ANGELICA AND MEBORO" 
 
 written in as many different ways as true-lovers' knots could 
 run.* 
 
 Having thus awhile enjoyed themselves in the rustic solitude, 
 the Queen of Cathay (for in the course of her adventures in 
 Christendom she had succeeded to her father's crown) thought it 
 time to return to her beautiful empire, and complete the triumph 
 of love by crowning Medoro king of it. 
 
 She took leave of the cottagers with a princely gift. The 
 islanders of Ebuda had deprived her of every thing valuable 
 but a rich bracelet, which, for some strange, perhaps supersti- 
 tious, reason, they left on her arm. This she took off, and made 
 a present of it to the good couple for their hospitality ; and so 
 bade them farewell. 
 
 The bracelet was of inimitable workmanship, adorned with 
 gems, and had been given by the enchantress Morgana to a 
 favourite youth, who was rescued from her wiles by Orlando. 
 The youth, in gratitude, bestowed it on his preserver ; and the 
 hero had humbly presented it to Angelica, who vouchsafed to 
 accept it, not because of the giver, but for the rarity of the gift. 
 
 The happy bride and bridegroom, bidding farewell to France, 
 proceeded by easy journeys, and crossed the mountains into 
 Spain, where it was their intention to take ship for the Levant. 
 Descending the Pyrenees, they discerned the ocean in the dis- 
 
 * Canto xix. st. 34, &c. All the world have felt this to be a true picture of 
 first love. The inscription may be said to be that of every other pair of lovers 
 that ever existed, who knew how to write their names. 
 
 How musical, too, are the words " Angelica and Medoro!" Boiardo invented 
 the one ; Ariosto found the match for it. One has no end to the pleasure of 
 repeating them. All hail to the moment when I first became aware of their 
 existence, more than fifty years ago, in the house of the gentle artist Benjamin 
 West ! (Let the reader indulge me with this recollection.) I sighed with plea- 
 sure to look on them at that time ; I sigh now, with far more pleasure than 
 pain, to look back on them, for they never come across me but with delight ; 
 and poetry is a world in which nothing beautiful ever thoroughly forsakes us.
 
 THE ADVENTURES OP ANGELICA. 359 
 
 tance, and had now reached the coast, and were proceeding by the 
 water-side along the high road to Barcelona, when they beheld a 
 miserable-looking creature, a madman, all over mud and dirt, 
 lying naked in the sands. He had buried himself half inside 
 them for shelter from the sun j but having observed the lovers as 
 they came along, he leaped out of his hole like a dog, and came 
 raging against them. 
 
 But, before I proceed to relate who this madman was, I must 
 return to the cottage which the two lovers had occupied, and 
 recount what passed in it during the interval between their bid- 
 ding it adieu and their arrival in this place.
 
 360 THE ADVENTURES OP ANGELICA. 
 
 PART THE THIRD. 
 
 THE JEALOUSY OF ORLANDO. 
 
 DURING the course of his search for Angelica, the County 
 Orlando had just restored two lovers to one another, and was pur- 
 suing a Pagan enemy to no purpose through a wild and tangled 
 wood, when he came into a beautiful spot by a river's side, which 
 tempted him to rest himself from the heat. It was a small 
 meadow, full of daisies and butter-cups, and surrounded with 
 trees. There was an air abroad, notwithstanding the heat, whicli 
 made the shepherds glad to sit without their jerkins, and receive 
 the coolness on their naked bodies : even the hard-skinned cattle 
 were glad of it ; and Orlando, who was armed cap-a-pie, was 
 delighted to take off his helmet, and lay aside his buckler, and 
 repose awhile in the midst of a scene so refreshing. Alas ! it 
 was the unhappiest moment of his life. 
 
 Casting his eyes around him, while about to get off his horse, 
 he observed a handwriting on many of the trees which he thought 
 he knew. Riding up to the trees, and looking more closely, he 
 was sure he knew it ; and in truth it was no other than that of 
 his adored mistress Angelica, and the inscription one of those 
 numerous inscriptions of which I have spoken. The spot was 
 one of the haunts of the lovers while they abode in the shep- 
 herd's cottage. Wherever the County turned his eyes, he be- 
 held, tied together in true-lovers' knots, nothing but the words 
 
 " ANGELICA AND MEDORO." 
 
 All the trees had them his eyes could see nothing else ; and 
 every letter was a dagger that pierced his heart. 
 
 The unhappy lover tried in vain to disbelieve what he saw.
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 361 
 
 He endeavoured to compel himself to think that it was some other 
 Angelica who had written the words ; but he knew the hand- 
 writing too welL Too often had he dwelt upon it, and made 
 himself familiar with every turn of the letters. He then strove 
 to fancy that " Medoro" was a feigned name, intended for him- 
 self; but he felt that he was trying to delude himself, and that 
 the more he tried, the bitterer was his conviction of the truth. 
 He was like a bird fixing itself only the more deeply in the lime 
 in which it is caught, by struggling and beating its wings. 
 
 Orlando turned his horse away in his anguish, and paced it 
 towards a grotto covered with vine and ivy, which he looked into. 
 The grotto, both outside and in, was full of the like inscriptions. 
 It was the retreat the lovers were so fond of at noon. Their 
 names were written on all sides of it, some in chalk and coal,* 
 others carved with a knife. 
 
 The wretched beholder got off his horse and entered the grotto. 
 The first thing that met his eyes was a larger inscription in the 
 Saracen lover's own handwriting and tongue a language which 
 the slayer of the infidels was too well acquainted with. The 
 "words were in verse, and expressed the gratitude of the " poor 
 Medoro," the writer, for having had in his arms, in that grotto, 
 the beautiful Angelica, daughter of King Galafron, whom so 
 many had loved in vain. The writer invoked a blessing on every 
 part of it, its shades, its waters, its flowers, its creeping plants ; 
 and entreated every person, high and low, who should chance to 
 visit it, particularly lovers, that they would bless the place like- 
 wise, and take care that it was never polluted by foot of herd. 
 
 Thrice, and four times, did the unhappy Orlando read these 
 words, trying always, but in vain, to disbelieve what he saw. 
 Every time he read, they appeared plainer and plainer; and 
 every time did a cold hand seem to be wringing the heart in his 
 bosom. At length he remained with his eyes fixed on the stone, 
 seeing nothing more, not even the stone itself. He felt as if his 
 wits were leaving him, so abandoned did he seem of all comfort. 
 
 * " ScriUi, qua] con carbone e qual con gesso." 
 
 Canto xxiii. st. 106. 
 
 Ariosto did not mind soiling the beautiful fingers of Angelica with coal and 
 chalk. He knew that Love did not mind it.
 
 362 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 
 
 Let those imagine what he felt who have experienced the same 
 emotions who know, by their own sufferings, that this is the 
 grief which surpasses all other griefs. His head had fallen on 
 his bosom ; his look was deprived of all confidence ; he could not 
 even speak or shed a tear. His impetuous grief remained within 
 him by reason of his impetuosity like water which attempts to 
 rush out of the narrow-necked bottle, but which is so compressed 
 as it comes, that it scarcely issues drop by drop. 
 
 Again he endeavoured to disbelieve his eyes to conclude that 
 somebody had wished to calumniate his mistress, and drive her 
 lover mad, and so had done his best to imitate her handwriting. 
 With these sorry attempts at consolatioh, he again took horse, 
 the sun having now given way to the moon, and so rode a little 
 onward, till he beheld smoke rising out of the tops of the trees, 
 and heard the barking of dogs and the lowing of cattle. By 
 these signs he knew that he was approaching a village. He en- 
 tered it, and going into the first house he came to, gave his horse 
 to the care of a youth, and was disarmed, and had his spurs of 
 gold taken off, and so went into a room that was shewn him with- 
 out demanding either meat or drink, so entirely was he filled 
 with his sorrow. 
 
 Now it happened that this was the very cottage into which 
 Medoro had been carried out of the wood by the loving Angelica. 
 There he had been cured of his wounds there he had been 
 loved and made happy and there, wherever the County Orlando 
 turned his eyes, he beheld the detested writing on the walls, the 
 windows, the doors. He made no inquiries about it of the people 
 of the house : he still dreaded to render the certainty clearer than 
 he would fain suppose it. 
 
 But the cowardice availed him nothing ; for the host seeing 
 him unhappy, and thinking to cheer him, came in as he was get- 
 ting into bed, and opened on the subject of his own accord. It 
 was a story he told to every body who came, and he was accus- 
 tomed to have it admired ; so with little preface he related all the 
 particulars to his new guest how the youth had been left for 
 dead on the field, and how the lady had found him, and had him 
 brought to the cottage and how she fell in love with him as he 
 grew well and how she cojuld be content with nothing but mar-
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 363 
 
 rying him, though she was daughter of the greatest king of the 
 East, and a queen herself. At the conclusion of his narrative, 
 the good man produced the bracelet which had been given him 
 by Angelica, as evidence of the truth of all that he had been 
 saying. 
 
 This was the final stroke, the last fatal blow, given to the poor 
 hopes of Orlando by the executioner, Love. He tried to conceal 
 his misery, but it was no longer to be repressed ; so finding the 
 tears rush into his eyes, he desired to be alone. As soon as the 
 man had retired, he let them flow in passion and agony. In vain 
 he attempted to rest, much less to sleep. Every part of the bed 
 appeared to be made of stones and thorns. 
 
 At length it occurred to him, that most likely they had slept 
 in that very bed. He rose instantly, as if he had been lying on 
 a serpent. The bed, the house, the herdsman, every thing about 
 the place, gave him such horror and detestation, that, without 
 waiting for dawn, or the light of moon, he dressed himself, and 
 went forth and took his horse from the stable, and galloped on- 
 wards into the middle of the woods. There, as soon as he found 
 himself in the solitude, he opened all the flood-gates of his grief, 
 and gave way to cries and outcries. 
 
 But he still rode on. Day and night did Orlando ride on, 
 weeping and lamenting. He avoided towns and cities, and made 
 his bed on the hard earth, and wondered at himself that he could 
 weep so long. 
 
 " These," thought he, " are no tears that are thus poured forth. 
 They are life itself, the fountains of vitality ; and I am weeping 
 and dying both. These are no sighs that I thus eternally exhale. 
 Nature could not supply them. They are Love himself storming 
 in my heart, and at once consuming me and keeping me alive 
 with his miraculous fires. No more no more am I the man I 
 seem. He that was Orlando is dead and buried. His ungrate- 
 ful mistress has slain him. I am but the soul divided from his 
 body doomed to wander here in this misery, an example to those 
 that put their trust in love." 
 
 For the wits of the County Orlando were going ; and he wan- 
 dered all night round and round in the wood, till he came back to 
 the grotto where Medoro had written his triumphant verses. Mad-
 
 364 THE ADVENTURES OP ANGELICA. 
 
 ness then indeed fell upon him. Every particle of his being 
 seemed torn up with rage and fury ; and he drew his mighty 
 sword, and hewed the grotto and the writing, till the words flew in 
 pieces to the heavens. Woe to every spot in the place in which 
 were written the names of " Angelica and Medoro." Woe to the 
 place itself: never again did it afford refuge from the heat of day 
 to sheep or shepherd ; for not a particle of it remained as it was. 
 With arm and sword Orlando defaced it all, the clear and gentle 
 fountain included. He hacked and hewed it inside aud out, and 
 cut down the branches of the trees that hung over it, and tore away 
 the ivy and the vine, and rooted up great bits of earth and stone, 
 and filled the sweet water with the rubbish, iso that it was never 
 clear and sweet again ; and at the end of his toil, not having sat- 
 isfied or being able to satisfy his soul with the excess of his vio- 
 lence, he cast himself on the ground in rage and disdain, and lay 
 groaning towards the heavens. 
 
 On the ground Orlando threw himself, and on the ground he 
 remained, his eyes fixed on heaven, his lips closed in dumbness ; 
 and thus he continued for the space of three days and three 
 nights, till his frenzy had mounted to such a pitch, that it turned 
 against himself. He then arose in fury, and tore off mail and 
 breastplate, and every particle of clothing from his body, till hu- 
 manity was degraded in his heroical person, and he became na- 
 ked as the beasts of the field. 
 
 In this condition, and his wits quite gone, sword was forgotten 
 as well as shield and helm ; and he tore up fir-tree and ash, and 
 began running through the woods. The shepherds hearing the 
 cries of the strong man, and the crashing of the boughs, came 
 hastening from all quarters to know what it was ; but when he 
 saw them he gave them chase, and smote to death those whom he 
 reached, till the whole country was up in arms, though to no pur- 
 pose ; for they were seized with such terror, that while they 
 threatened and closed after him, they avoided him. He entered 
 cottages, and tore away the food from the tables ; and ran up the 
 craggy hills and down into the valleys ; and chased beasts as 
 well as men, tearing the fawn and the goat to pieces, and stuffing 
 their flesh into his stomach with fierce will. 
 
 Raging and scouring onwards in this manner, he arrived one
 
 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 365 
 
 day at a bridge over a torrent, on which the fierce Rodomont had 
 fixed himself for the purpose of throwing any one that attempted 
 to pass it into the water. It was a very narrow bridge, with 
 scarcely room for two horses. But Orlando took no heed of its 
 narrowness. He dashed right forwards against man and steed, 
 and forced the champion to wrestle with him on foot ; and, wind- 
 ing himself about him with hideous strength, he leaped backwards 
 with him into the torrent, where he left him, and so mounted the 
 opposite bank, and again rushed over the country. A more ter- 
 rible bridge than this was in his way even a precipitous pass of 
 frightful height over a valley ; but still he scoured onwards, 
 throwing over it the agonised passengers that dared, in their ig- 
 norance of his strength, to oppose him ; and so always rushing 
 and raging, he came down the mountains by the sea-side to Bar- 
 celona, where he cast his eyes on the sands, and thought, in his 
 idiot mind, to make himself a house in them for coolness and re- 
 pose ; and so he grubbed up the sand, and laid himself down in 
 it : and this was the terrible madman whom Angelica and Medo- 
 ro saw looking at them as they were approaching the city. 
 
 Neither of them knew him, nor did he know Angelica ; but, 
 with an idiot laugh, he looked at her beauty, and liked her, and 
 came horribly towards her to carry her away. Shrieking, she 
 put spurs to her horse and fled ; and Medoro, in a fury, came af- 
 ter the pursuer and smote him, but to no purpose. The great 
 madman turned round and smote the other's horse to the ground, 
 and so renewed his chase after Angelica, who suddenly regained 
 enough of her wits to recollect the enchanted ring. Instantly she 
 put it into her lips and disappeared ; but in her hurry she fell 
 from her palfrey, and Orlando forgot her in the instant, and, 
 mounting the poor beast, dashed off with it over the country till it 
 died : and so at last, after many dreadful adventures by flood and 
 field, he came running into a camp full of his brother Paladins, 
 who recognised him with tears ; and, all joining their forces, suc- 
 ceeded in pulling him down and binding him, though not without 
 many wounds ; and by the help of these friends, and the special 
 grace of the apostle St. John (as will be told in another place), 
 the wits of the champion of the church were restored, and he be-
 
 366 THE ADVENTURES OF ANGELICA. 
 
 came ashamed of that passion for an infidel beauty which the 
 heavenly powers had thus resolved to punish. 
 
 But Angelica and Medoro pursued the rest of their journey in 
 peace, and took ship on the coast of Spain for India ; and there 
 she crowned her bridegroom King of Cathay. 
 
 The description of Orlando's jealousy and growing madness is reckoned one 
 of the finest things in Italian poetry ; and very fine it surely is as strong as 
 the hero's strength, and sensitive as the heart of man. The circumstances are 
 heightened, one after the other, with the utmost art as well as nature. There 
 is a scriptural awfulness in the account of the hero's becoming naked ; and the 
 violent result is tremendous. I have not followed Orlando into his feats of 
 ultra-supernatural strength. The reader requires to be prepared for them by 
 the whole poem. Nor are they necessary, I think, to the production of the best 
 effect ; perhaps would hurt it in an age unaccustomed to the old romances.
 
 ASTOLFO'S JOURNEY TO THE MOON,
 
 Argument. 
 
 THE Paladin Astolfo ascends on the hippogriff to the top of one of the moun- 
 tains at the source of the Nile, called the Mountains of the Moon, where he 
 discovers the Terrestrial Paradise, and is welcomed by St. John the Evangelist. 
 The Evangelist then conveys him to the Moon itself, where he is shewn all the 
 things that have been lost on earth, among which is the Reason of Orlando, 
 who had been deprived of it for loving a Pagan beauty. Astolfo is favoured 
 with a singular discourse by the Apostle, and is then presented with a vial con- 
 taining the Reason of his great brother Paladin, which he conveys to earth.
 
 ASTOLFO'S JOURNEY TO THE MOON. 
 
 WHEN the hippogriff loosened itself from the tree to which 
 Ruggiero had tied it in the beautiful spot to which he descended 
 with Angelica,* it soared away, like the faithful creature it was, 
 to the house of its own master, Atlantes the magician. But not 
 long did it remain there no, nor the house itself, nor the magi- 
 cian ; for the Paladin Astolfo came with a mighty horn given 
 him by a greater magician, the sound of which overthrew all 
 such abodes, and put to flight whoever heard it; and so the 
 house of Atlantes vanished, and the enchanter fled ; and the 
 Paladin took possession of the griffin-horse, and rode away with 
 it on farther adventures. 
 
 One of these was the deliverance of Senapus, king of Ethiopia, 
 from the visitation of the dreadful harpies of old, who came in- 
 festing his table as they did those of jEneas and Phineus. Astol- 
 fo drove them with his horse towards the sources of the river Nile, 
 in the Mountains of the Moon, and pursued them with the hip- 
 pogriff till they entered a great cavern, which, by the dreadful 
 cries and lamentings that issued from the depths within it, the 
 Paladin discovered to be the entrance from earth to Hell. 
 
 The daring Englishman, whose curiosity was excited, resolved 
 to penetrate to the regions of darkness. " What have I to fear ?" 
 thought he ; " the horn will assist me, if I want it. I'll drive the 
 triple-mouthed dog out of the way, and put Pluto and Satan to 
 flight,"t 
 
 Astolfo tied the hippogriff to a tree, and pushed forward in 
 spite of a smoke that grew thicker and thicker, offending his 
 eyes and nostrils. It became, however, so exceedingly heavy 
 
 * See p. 116. 
 t Ariosto is here imitating Pulci, and bearding Dante. See vol. i. p. 200.
 
 370 ASTOLFO'S JOURNEY TO THE MOON. 
 
 and noisome, that he found it would be impossible to complete his 
 enterprise. Still he pushed forward as far as he could, especially 
 as he began to discern in the darkness something that appeared to 
 stir with an involuntary motion. It looked like a dead body 
 which has hung up many days in the rain and sun, and is waved 
 unsteadily by the wind. It turned out to be a condemned spirit 
 in this first threshold of Hell, sentenced there, with thousands of 
 others, for having been cruel and false in love. Her name was 
 Lydia, and she had been princess of the country so called.* 
 Anaxarete was among them, who, for her hard-heartedness, be- 
 came a stone ; and Daphne, who now discovered how she had 
 erred in making Apollo " run so much ;" and multitudes of other 
 women ; but a far greater number of men men being worthier 
 of punishment in offences of love, because women are proner to 
 believe. Theseus and Jason were among them ; and Amnon, the 
 abuser of Tamar and he that disturbed the old kingdom of 
 Latin us. f 
 
 Astolfo would fain have gone deeper into the jaws of Hell, but 
 the smoke grew so thick and palpable, it was impossible to move a 
 step farther. Turning about, therefore, he regained the entrance ; 
 and having refreshed himself in a fountain hard by, and re- 
 mounted the hippogriff, felt an inclination to ascend as high as he 
 possibly could in the air. The excessive loftiness of the moun- 
 tain above the cavern made him think that its top could be at no 
 great distance from the region of the Moon ; and accordingly he 
 pushed his horse upwards, and rose and rose, till at length he 
 
 * I know of no story of a cruel Lydia but the poet's own mistress of that 
 name, whom I take to be the lady here "shadowed forth." See Life, p. 114. 
 
 t The story of Anaxarete is in Ovid, lib. xiv. Every body knows that of 
 Daphne, who made Apollo, as Ariosto says, " run so much" (correr tanto). 
 Theseus and Jason are in hell, as deserters of Ariadne and Medea ; Amnon, for 
 the atrocity recorded in the Bible (2 Samuel, chap, xiii.); and ^Eneas for inter- 
 fering with Turnus and Lavinia, and taking possession of places he had no 
 right to. It is delightful to see the great, generous poet going upon grounds 
 of reason and justice in the teeth of the trumped-up rights of the "pious 
 JEneas," that shabby deserter of Dido, and canting prototype of Augustus. 
 He turns the tables, also, with brave candour, upon the tyrannical claims of the 
 stronger sex to privileges which they deny the other; and says, that there are 
 more faithless men in Hell than faithless women ; which, if personal infidelity 
 sends people there, most undoubtedly is the case beyond all comparison.
 
 ASTOLFO'S JOURNEY TO THE MOON. 371 
 
 found himself on its table-land. It exhibited a region of celestial 
 beauty. The flowers were like beds of precious stones for col- 
 our and brightness ; the grass, if you could have brought any to 
 earth, would have been found to surpass emeralds ; and the trees, 
 whose leaves were no less beautiful, were in fruit and flower at 
 once. Birds of as many colours were singing in the branches ; 
 the murmuring rivulets and dumb lakes were more limpid than 
 crystal : a sweet air was for ever stirring, which reduced the 
 warmth to a gentle temperature ; and every breath of it brought 
 an odour from flowers, fruit-trees, and herbage all at once, which 
 nourished the soul with sweetness.* 
 
 In the middle of this lonely plain was a palace radiant as fire. 
 Astolfo rode his horse round about it, constantly admiring all he 
 saw, and filled with increasing astonishment ; for he found that 
 the dwelling was thirty miles in circuit, and composed of one 
 entire carbuncle, lucid and vermilion. What became of the 
 boasted wonders of the world before this ? The world itself, in 
 the comparison, appeared but a lump of brute and fetid matter.f 
 
 As the Paladin approached the vestibule, he was met by a 
 venerable old man, clad in a white gown and red mantle, whose 
 beard descended on his bosom, and whose aspect announced him 
 as one of the elect of Paradise. It was St. John the Evangelist, 
 who lived in that mansion with Enoch and Elijah, the only three 
 mortals who never tasted death ; for the place, as the saint in- 
 formed him, was the Terrestrial Paradise ; and the inhabitants 
 were to live there till the angelical trumpet announced the com- 
 ing of Christ " on the white cloud." The Paladin, he said, had 
 
 * " Che di soiivita 1' alma notriva" is beautifiil; but the passage, as a whole, 
 is not well imitated from the Terrestrial Paradise of Dante. It is not bad in 
 itself, but it is very inferior to the one that suggested it. See vol. i. p. 123, &c. 
 Ariosto's Terrestrial Paradise was at home, among the friends who loved him, 
 and whom he made happy. 
 
 t This is better ; and the house made of one jewel thirty miles in circuit is an 
 extravagance that becomes reasonable on reflection, affording a just idea of 
 what might be looked for among the endless planetary wonders of Nature, 
 which confound all our relative ideas of size and splendour. The " lucid ver- 
 milion" of a structure so enormous, and under a sun so pure, presents a gor- 
 geous spectacle to the imagination. Dante himself, if he could have forgiven 
 the poet his animal spirits and views of the Moon so different from his own, 
 might have stood in admiration before an aboije at once so luscious and so vast.
 
 372 ASTOLFO'S JOURNEY TO THE MOON. 
 
 been allowed to visit it, by the favour of God, for the purpose of 
 fetching away to earth the lost wits of Orlando, which the cham- 
 pion of the Church had been deprived of for loving a Pagan, and 
 which had been attracted out of his brains to the neighbouring 
 sphere, the Moon. 
 
 Accordingly, after the new friends had spent two days in dis- 
 course, and meals had been served up, consisting of fruit so 
 exquisite that the Paladin could not help thinking our first parents 
 had some excuse for eating it,* the Evangelist, when the Moon 
 arose, took him into the car which had borne Elijah to heaven ; 
 and four horses, redder than fire, conveyed them to the lunar 
 world. 
 
 The mortal visitant was amazed to see in the Moon a world re- 
 sembling his own, full of wood and water, and containing even 
 cities and castles, though of a different sort from ours. It was 
 strange to find a sphere so large which had seemed so petty afar 
 off; and no less strange was it to look down on the world he had 
 left, and be compelled to knit his brows and look sharply before 
 he could well discern it, for it happened at the time to want 
 light.f 
 
 But his guide did not leave him much time to look about him. 
 He conducted him with due speed into a valley that contained, in 
 one miraculous collection, whatsoever had been lost or wasted on 
 earth. I do not speak only (says the poet) of riches and domin- 
 ions, and such like gratuities of Fortune, but of things also 
 which Fortune can neither grant nor resume. Much fame is 
 there which Time has withdrawn infinite prayers and vows 
 which are made to God Almighty by us poor sinners. There lie 
 
 * " De' frutti a lui del Paradise diero, 
 
 Di tal sapor, ch' a suo giudizdo, sanza 
 Scusa non sono i due primi parenti, 
 Se pur quei fur si poco ubbidienti." 
 
 Canto xxxiv. st. 60. 
 
 t Modern astronomers differ very much both with Dante's and Ariosto's 
 Moon ; nor do the " argent fields" of Milton appear better placed in our mys- 
 terious satellite, with its no-atmosphere and no-water, and its tremendous preci- 
 pices. It is to be hoped (and believed) that knowledge will be best for us 
 all in the end; for it is not always so by the way. It displaces beautiful igno-
 
 ASTOLFO'S JOURNEY TO THE MOON. 
 
 the tears and the sighs of lovers, the hours lost in pastimes, the 
 leisures of the dull, and the intentions of the lazy. As to desires, 
 they are so numerous that they shadow the whole place. Astolfo 
 went round among the different heaps, asking what they were. 
 His eyes were first struck with a huge one of bladders which 
 seemed to contain mighty sounds and the voices of multi- 
 tudes. These he found were the Assyrian and Persian monarch- 
 ies, together with those of Greece and Lydia.* One heap was 
 nothing but hooks of silver and gold, which were the presents, it 
 seems, made to patrons and great men in hopes of a return. 
 Another consisted of snares in the shape of garlands, the manu- 
 facture of parasites. Others were verses in praise of great lords, 
 all made of crickets which had burst themselves with singing. 
 Chains of gold he saw there> which were pretended and unhappy 
 love-matches ; and eagles' claws, which were deputed authorities ; 
 and pairs of bellows, which were princes' favours ; and over- 
 turned cities and treasuries, being treasons and conspiracies ; and 
 serpents with female faces, that were coiners and thieves ; and all 
 sorts of broken bottles, which were services rendered, in misera- 
 ble courts. A great heap of overturned soupf he found to be 
 alms to the poor, which had been delayed till the giver's death. 
 He then came to a great mount of flowers, which once had a 
 sweet smell, but now a most rank one. This (with submission) 
 was the present which the Emperor Constantine made to good 
 Pope Sylvester.^: Heaps of twigs he saw next, set with bird- 
 
 * Very fine and scornful, I think, this. Mighty monarchies reduced to 
 actual bladders, which, little too as they were, contained big sounds. 
 
 t Such, I suppose, as was given at convent-gates. 
 
 t The pretended gift of the palace of St. John Lateran, the foundation of 
 the pope's temporal sovereignty. This famous passage was quoted and trans- 
 lated by Milton. 
 
 " Di varii fiori ad un gran monte passa 
 Ch' ebbe gia buon odore, or putia forte. 
 Questo era il dono (se per6 dir lece) 
 Che Constantino al buon Silvestro fece." 
 
 Canto xxxiv. st. 80. 
 
 The lines were not so bold in the first edition. They stood thus : 
 
 " Ad un monte di rose e gigli passa, 
 
 Ch' ebbc gi&, buon odore, or putia forte, 
 PART II. 9
 
 374 ASTOLFO'S JOURNEY TO THE MOON. 
 
 lime, which, dear ladies, are your charms. In short there was 
 no end to what he saw. Thousands and thousands would not 
 complete the list. Every thing was there which was to be met 
 with on earth, except folly in the raw material, for that is never 
 exported.* 
 
 There he beheld some of his own lost time and deeds ; and yet, 
 if nobody had been with him to make him aware of them, never 
 would he have recognised them as his.f 
 
 They then arrived at something, which none of us ever prayed 
 God to bestow, for we fancy we possess it in superabundance ; yet 
 here it was in greater quantities than any thing else in the place 
 I mean, sense. It was a subtle fluid, apt to evaporate if not 
 kept closely ; and here accordingly it was kept in vials of greater 
 or less size. The greatest of them all was inscribed with the fol- 
 lowing words : " The sense of Orlando." Others, in like manner, 
 exhibited the names of the proper possessors ; and among them 
 the frank-hearted Paladin beheld the greater portion of his own. 
 But what more astonished him, was to see multitudes of the vials 
 
 
 Ch' era corrotto ; e da Giovanni intese, 
 
 Che fu un gran don ch' un gran signer mal spese." 
 
 "He came to a mount of lilies and roses, that once had a sweet smell, but now 
 stank with corruption ; and he understood from John that it was a great gift 
 which a great lord ill expended." . 
 
 The change of these lines to the stronger ones in the third edition, as they 
 now stand, served to occasion a charge against Ariosto of having got his privi- 
 lege of publication from the court of Rome for passages which never existed, 
 and which he afterwards basely introduced ; but, as Panizzi observes, the third 
 edition had a privilege also; so that the papacy put its hand, as it were, to 
 these very lines. This is remarkable ; and doubtless it would not have oc- 
 curred in some other ages. The Spanish Inquisition, for instance, erased it, 
 though the holy brotherhood found no fault with the story of Giocondo. 
 
 * " Sol la pazzia non v' e, poca nfe assai ; 
 Che sta qua giu, nfe se ne parte mai." 
 St. 78. 
 
 t Part of this very striking passage is well translated by Harrington : 
 
 " He saw some of his own lost time and deeds, 
 And yet he knew them not to be his own." 
 
 I have heard these lines more than once repeated with touching earnestness by 
 Charles Lamb.
 
 ASTOLFO'S JOURNEY TO THE MOON. 375 
 
 almost full to the stopper, which bore the names of men whom he 
 had supposed to enjoy their senses in perfection. Some had lost 
 them for love, others for glory, others for riches, others for hopes 
 from great men, others for stupid conjurers, for jewels, for paint- 
 ings, for all sorts of whims. There was a heap belonging to 
 sophists and astrologers, and a still greater to poets.* 
 
 Astolfo, with leave of the " writer of the dark Apocalypse," 
 took possession of his own. He had but to uncork it, and set it 
 under his nose, and the wit shot up to its place at once. Turpin 
 acknowledges that the Paladin, for a long time afterwards, led the 
 life of a sage man, till, unfortunately, a mistake which he made 
 lost him his brains a second time.f 
 
 The Evangelist now presented him with the vial containing the 
 wits of Orlando, and the travellers quitted the vale of Lost Trea- 
 sure. Before they returned to earth, however, the good saint 
 shewed his guest other curiosities, and favoured him with many a 
 sage remark, particularly on the subject of poets, and the neglect 
 of them by courts. He shewed him how foolish it was in princes 
 and other great men not to make friends of those who can immor- 
 talise them ; and observed, with singular indulgence, that crimes 
 themselves might be no hindrance to a good name with posterity, 
 if the poet were but feed well enough for spices to embalm the 
 criminal. He instanced the cases of Homer and Virgil. 
 
 " You are not to take for granted," said he, " that ^Eneas was 
 so pious as fame reports him, or Achilles and Hector so brave. 
 Thousands and thousands of warriors have excelled them ; but 
 their descendants bestowed fine houses and estates on great wri- 
 ters, and it is from their honoured pages that all the glory has pro- 
 ceeded. Augustus was no such religious or clement prince as the 
 trumpet of Virgil has proclaimed him. It was his good taste in 
 poetry that got him pardoned his iniquitous proscription. Nero 
 himself might have fared as well as Augustus, had he possessed 
 as much wit. Heaven and earth might have been his enemies to 
 
 * Readers need not have the points of this exquisite satire pointed out to 
 them. In noticing it, I only mean to enjoy it in then- company particularly 
 the passage about the men accounted wisest, and the emphatic " I mean, sense" 
 (lo dico, il senno). 
 t Admirable lesson to frailty !
 
 376 ASTOLPO'S JOURNEY TO THE MOON. 
 
 no purpose, had he known how to keep friends with good authors. 
 Homer makes the Greeks victorious, the Trojans a poor set, and 
 Penelope undergo a thousand wrongs rather than be unfaithful to 
 her husband ; and yet, if you would have the real truth of the 
 matter, the Greeks were beaten, and the Trojans the conquerors, 
 
 and Penelope was a .* See, on the other hand, what infamy 
 
 has become the portion of Dido. She was honest to her heart's 
 core ; and yet, because Virgil was no friend of hers, she is look- 
 ed upon as a baggage. 
 
 " Be not surprised," concluded the good saint, " if I have ex- 
 pressed myself with warmth on this subject. I love writers, and 
 look upon their cause as my own, for I was a writer myself when 
 I lived among you ; and I succeeded so well in the vocation, that 
 time and death will never prevail against me. Just therefore is 
 it, that I should be thankful to my beloved Master, who procured 
 me so great a lot. I grieve for writers who have fallen on evil 
 times men that, with pale and hungry faces, find the doors of 
 courtesy closed against all their hardships. This is the reason 
 there are so few poets now, and why nobody cares to study. Why 
 should he study ? The very beasts abandon places where there 
 is nothing to feed them." 
 
 At these words the eyes of the blessed old man grew so inflam- 
 ed with anger, that they sparkled like two fires. But he presently 
 suppressed what he felt ; and, turning with a sage and gracious 
 smile to the Paladin, prepared to accompany him back to earth 
 with his wonted serenity. 
 
 He accordingly did so in the sacred car : and Astolfo, after re- 
 ceiving his gentle benediction, descended on his hippogriff from 
 the mountain, and, joining the delighted Paladins with the vial, his 
 wits were restored, as you have heard, to the noble Orlando. 
 
 The figure which is here cut by St. John gives this remarkable satire a most 
 remarkable close. His association of himself with the fraternity of authors was 
 
 * I do not feel warranted in injuring the strength of the term here made use 
 of by the indignant apostle, and yet am withheld from giving it in all its force 
 by the delicacy, real or false, of the times. I must therefore leave it to be sup- 
 plied by the reader according to the requirements of his own feelings.
 
 ASTOLFO'S JOURNEY TO THE MOON. 377 
 
 thought a little " strong" by Ariosto's contemporaries. The lesson read to the 
 house of Este is obvious, and could hardly have been pleasant to men reputed 
 to be such "criminals" themselves. Nor can Ariosto, in this passage, be reck- 
 oned a very flattering or conscientious pleader for his brother-poets. Resent- 
 ment, and a good jest, seemed to have conspired to make him forget what was 
 due to himself. 
 
 The original of St. John's remarks about Augustus and the ancient poets 
 must not be omitted. It is exquisite of its kind, both in matter and style. 
 Voltaire has quoted it somewhere with rapture. 
 
 " Non fu si santo ne benigno Augusto 
 
 Come la tuba di Virgilio suona: 
 L' aver avuto in poesia buon gusto 
 
 La proscrizion iniqua gli perdona. 
 Nessun sapna se Neron fosse ingiusto, 
 
 Ne sua fama saria forse men buona, 
 Avesse avuto e terra e ciel nimici, 
 
 Se gli scrittor sapea tenersi auiici. 
 
 Omero Agamennon vittorioso, 
 
 E fe' i Trojan parer vili et inerti; 
 E che Penelopea fida al suo sposo 
 
 Da i prochi mille oltraggi avea sofferti : 
 E, se tu vuoi che '1 ver non ti sia ascoso, 
 
 Tutta al contrario 1' istoria convert! : 
 Che i Greci rotti, e che Troia vittrice, 
 E che Penelopea fu meretrice. 
 
 Da 1' altra parte odi che fama lascia 
 
 Elissa, ch' ebbe il cor tanto pudico ; 
 Che riputata viene una bagascia, 
 
 Solo perche Maron non le fu amico." 
 
 Canto xxxv. st. 26.
 
 WILEY AND PUTNAM'S 
 
 LIBRARY OF 
 
 CHOICE READING, 
 
 STORIES FROM THE ITALIAN POETS, 
 
 PART III.
 
 Just Published. 
 
 TASSO'S JERUSALEM DELIVERED; 
 
 TRANSLATED BY FAIRFAX. 
 
 WITH AN INTRODUCTORY ESSAY BY LEIGH HUNT, 
 
 AND LIVES OF 
 
 TASSO AND FAIRFAX BY CHARLES KNIGHT. 
 
 2 Vols. 16mo., or 1 Vol. bound in Cloth by Bradley. 
 
 How have I sat, when piped the pensive wind, 
 To hear his harp by British Fairfax strung, 
 Prevailing poet ! whose undoubting mind 
 Believed the magic wonders which he sung. 
 
 Collins. 
 
 " The harmony of Fairfax, is justly celebrated his translation of the Jeru- 
 salem forms one of the glories of Queen Elizabeth's reign." 
 
 CAMPBELL. 
 
 " We do not know a translation that is to be preferred to this, in all the es- 
 sentials of poetry." 
 
 QUARTERLY REVIEW. 
 
 " Til 3 Jerusalem Delivered of Fairfax is indeed a noble monument of the 
 genius of its author." 
 
 RETROSPECTIVE REVIEW. 
 
 Dryden introduces Spenser and Fairfax almost on a level as the leading au- 
 thors of their times ; and seems even to give the preference to the latter in 
 point of harmony. And Waller confessed he owed the music of his numbers 
 to him. 
 
 King James valued his Tasso above all other English poetry, and King 
 Charles hi the time of his confinement used to divert himself by reading it 
 
 SIR EGERTON BRYDGES. 
 
 " Some of his stanzas give the sweetness of the original with the still softer 
 sweetness of an echo ; and he blew into the rest some organ like notes, which, 
 perhaps, the original is too deficient in. He can be also quite as stately and 
 solemn in feeling ; he is as fervid in his devotion, as earnest and full of ghast- 
 ly apprehension in his supernatural agency, as wrapt up in leafiness in his syl- 
 van haunts, as luxuriant and alive to tangible shapes hi his voluptuousness." 
 
 LEIGH HUNT.
 
 STORIES 
 
 FROM THE 
 
 ITALIAN POETS: 
 
 BEING A SUMMARY IN PROSE 
 
 OP THE 
 
 POEMS OF DANTE, PULCI, BOIARDO, ARIOSTO AND TASSO; 
 
 WITH COMMENTS THROUGHOUT, 
 
 v 
 OCCASIONAL PASSAGES VERSIFIED, 
 
 AND 
 
 CRITICAL NOTICES OF THE LIVES AND GENIUS OF THE AUTHORS. 
 BY LEIGH HUNT. 
 
 IN THREE PARTS. 
 PART III. 
 
 NEW YORK : 
 WILEY AND PUTNAM, 161 BROADWAY. 
 
 1846.
 

 
 ARIODANTE AND GINEVRA. 
 
 PART in.
 
 THE Duke of Albany, pretending to be in love with a damsel in the semce of 
 Ginevra, Princess of Scotland, but desiring to marry the princess herself, and 
 not being able to compass his design by reason of her being in love with a 
 gentleman from Italy named Ariodante, persuades the damsel, in his revenge, 
 to personate Ginevra in a balcony at night, and so make her lover believe that 
 she is false. Ariodante, deceived, disappears from court. News is brought of 
 his death ; and his brother Lurcanio publicly denounces Ginevra, who, accord- 
 ing to the laws of Scotland, is sentenced to death for her supposed lawless 
 passion. Lurcanio then challenges the unknown paramour (for the duke's 
 face had not been discerned in the balcony) ; and Ariodante, who is not dead, 
 is fighting him in disguise, when the Paladin Rinaldo comes up, discloses the 
 whole affair, and slays the deceiver.
 
 ARIODANTE AND GINEVRA.* 
 
 CHARLEMAGNE had suffered a great defeat at Paris, and the 
 Paladin Rinaldo was sent across the Channel to ask succours of 
 the King of England ; but a tempest arose ere he could reach 
 the coast, and drove him northwards upon that of Scotland, where 
 he found himself in the Caledonian Forest, a place famous of old 
 for knightly adventure. Many a clash of arms had been heard 
 in its shady recesses many great things had been done there by 
 knights from all quarters, particularly the Tristans and the 
 Launcelots, and the Gawains, and others of the Round Table of 
 King Arthur. 
 
 Rinaldo, bidding the ship await him at the town of Berwick, 
 plunged into the forest with no other companion than his horse 
 Bayardo, seeking the wildest paths he could find, in the hope of 
 some strange adventure.^ He put up, for the first day, at an 
 abbey which was accustomed to entertain the knights and ladies 
 that journeyed that way ; and after availing himself of its hospi- 
 tality, he inquired of the abbot and his monks if they could direct 
 him where to find what he looked for. They said that plenty of 
 adventures were to be met with in the forest ; but that, for the 
 
 * The main point of this story, the personation of Ginevra by one of her 
 ladies, has been repeated by many writers among others by Shakspeare, in 
 Muck Ado about Nothing. The circumstance is said to have actually occurred 
 in Ferrara, and in Ariosto's own tune. Was Ariosto himself a party? " Ario- 
 dante" almost includes his name ; and it is certain that he was once in love 
 with a lady of the name of Ginevra. 
 
 t Rinaldo is an ambassador, and one upon very urgent business; yet he 
 halts by the way in search of adventures. This has been said to be in the true 
 taste of knight-errantry ; and in one respect it is so. We may imagine, how- 
 ever, that the ship is wind-bound, and that he meant to return to it on change 
 of weather. The Caledonian Forest, it is to be observed, is close at hand.
 
 382 ARIODANTE AND GINEVRA. 
 
 most part, they remained in as much obscurity as the spots in 
 which they occurred. It would be more becoming his valour, 
 they thought, to exert itself where it would not be hidden ; and 
 they concluded with telling him of one of the noblest chances for 
 renown that ever awaited a sword. The daughter of their king 
 was in need of a defender against a certain baron of the name of 
 Lurcanio, who sought to deprive her both of life and reputation. 
 He accused her of having been found in the arms of a lover with- 
 out the license of the priest ; which, by the laws of Scotland, was 
 a crime only to be expiated at the stake, unless a champion could 
 be found to disprove the charge before the end of a month. Un- 
 fortunately the month had nearly expired, and no champion yet 
 made his appearance, though the king had promised his daughter's 
 hand to anybody of noble blood who should establish her inno- 
 cence ; and the saddest part of the thing was, that she was ac- 
 counted innocent by all the world, and a very pattern of modesty. 
 
 While this horrible story was being told him, the Paladin fell 
 into a profound state of thought. After remaining silent for a lit-' 
 tie while, at the close of it he looked up, and said, " A lady then, 
 it seems, is condemned to death for having been too kind to one 
 lover, while thousands of our sex are playing the gallant with 
 whomsoever they please, and not only go unpunished for it, but 
 are admired ! Perish such infamous injustice ! The man was a 
 madman who made such a law, and they are little better who 
 maintain it. I hope in God to be able to shew them their error." 
 
 The good monks agreed, that their ancestors were very un- 
 wise to make such a law, and kings very wrong who could, but 
 would not, put an end to it. So, when the morning came, they 
 speeded their guest on his noble purpose of fighting in the lady's 
 behalf. A guide from the abbey took him a short cut through 
 the forest towards the place where the matter was to be decided ; 
 but, before they arrived, they heard cries of distress in a dark 
 quarter of (he forest, and, turning their horses thither to see what 
 it was, they observed a damsel between two vagabonds, who were 
 standing over her with drawn swords. The moment the wretches 
 saw the new comer, they fled ; and Rinaldo, after re-assuring the 
 damsel, and requesting to know what had brought her to a pass 
 so dreadful, made his guide take her up on his horse behind him,
 
 ARIODANTE AND GINEVRA. 383 
 
 in order that they might lose no more time. The damsel, who 
 was very beautiful, could not speak at first, for the horror of 
 what she had expected to undergo ; but, on Rinaldo's repeating 
 his request, she at length found words, and, in a voice of great 
 humility, began to relate her story. 
 
 But before she begins, the poet interferes with an impatient re- 
 mark. " Of all the creatures in existence," cries he, " whether 
 they be tame or wild, whether they are in a state of peace or of 
 war, man is the only one that lays violent hands on the female of 
 his species. The bear offers no injury to his ; the lioness is safe 
 by the side of the lion ; the heifer has no fear of the horns of 
 the bull. What pest of abomination, what fury from hell, lias 
 come to disturb, in this respect, the bosom of human kind ? Hus- 
 band and wife deafen one another with injurious speeches, tear 
 one another's faces, bathe the genial bed with tears, nay, some- 
 times with bloodshed. In my eyes the man who can allow him- 
 self to give a blow to a woman, or to hurt even a hair of her 
 head, is a violater of nature, and a rebel against God ; but to 
 poison her, to strangle her, to take the soul out of her body with 
 a knife, he that can do that, never will I believe him to be a 
 man at all, but a fiend out of hell with a man's face."* 
 
 Such must have been the two villains who fled at the sight of 
 Rinaldo, and who had brought the woman into this dark spot to 
 stifle her testimony for ever. 
 
 But to return to what she was going to say. 
 
 " You are to know, sir," she began, " that I have been from 
 my childhood in the service of the king's daughter, the princess 
 Ginevra. I grew up with her ; I was held in honour, and I led 
 
 * All honour and glory to the manly and loving poet ! 
 
 " Lavezzuola," says Panizzi, "doubts the conjugal concord of beasts, more 
 particularly of bears. ' Ho letto presso degno autore un orso aver cavato un 
 occhio ad un orsa con la zampa.' (I have read in an author worthy of credit, 
 that a bear once deprived a she-bear of an eye with a blow of his paw.) The 
 reader may choose between Ariosto and this nameless author, which of them is 
 to be believed. I, of course, am for my poet." Vol. i. p. 84. I am afraid, 
 however, that Lavezzuola is right. Even turtle-doves are said not to be always 
 the models of tenderness they are supposed to be. Brutes have even devoured 
 their offspring. The violence is most probably owing (at least in excessive 
 cases) to some unnatural condition of circumstances.
 
 384 ARIODANTE AND GINEVRA. 
 
 a happy life, till it pleased the cruel passion of love to envy me 
 my condition, and make me think that there was no being on 
 earth to be compared to the Duke of Albany. He pretended to 
 love me so much, that, in return, I loved him with all my heart. 
 Unable, by degrees, to refuse him anything, I let him into the 
 palace at night, nay, into the room which of all others the prin- 
 cess regarded as most exclusively her own ; for there she kept 
 her jewels, and there she was accustomed to sleep during inclem- 
 ent states of the weather. It communicated with the other 
 sleeping-room by a covered gallery, which looked out to some 
 lonely ruins ; and nobody ever passed that way, day or night. 
 
 " Our intercourse continued for several months ; and, finding 
 that I placed all my happiness in obliging him, he ventured to 
 disclose to me one day a design he had upon the princess's hand ; 
 nay, did not blush to ask my assistance in furthering it. Judge 
 how I set his wishes above my own, when I confess that I under- 
 took to do so. It is true, his rank was nearer to the princess's 
 than to mine ; and he pretended that he sought the alliance mere- 
 ly on that account ; protesting that he should love me more than 
 ever, and that Ginevra would be little better than his wife in 
 name. But, God knows, I did it wholly out of the excess of my 
 desire to please him. 
 
 " Day and night I exerted all my endeavours to recommend 
 him to the princess. Heaven is my witness that I did it in real 
 earnest, however wrong it was. But my labour was to no pur- 
 pose, for she was in love herself. She returned in all its warmth 
 the passion of a most accomplished and valiant gentleman, who 
 had come into Scotland with a younger brother from Italy, and 
 who had made himself such a favourite with every body, my 
 lover included, that the king himself had bestowed on him titles 
 and estates, and put him on a footing with the greatest lords of 
 the land. 
 
 " Unfortunately, the princess not only turned a deaf ear to all 
 I said in the duke's favour, but grew to dislike him in proportion 
 to my recommendation ; so that, finding there was no likelihood 
 of his success, his own love was secretly turned into hate and 
 rage. He studied, little as I dreamt he could be so base, how he 
 could best destroy her prospect of happiness. He resorted, for
 
 ARIODANTE AND GINEVRA. 385 
 
 this purpose, to a most crafty expedient, which I, poor fool, took 
 for nothing but what he feigned it to be. He pretended that a 
 whim had come into his head for seeming to prosper in his suit, 
 out of a kind of revenge for his not being able to do so in reality ; 
 and, in order to indulge this whim, he requested me to dress my- 
 self in the identical clothes which the princess put off when she 
 went to bed that night, and then to appear in them at my usual 
 post in the balcony, and so let down the ladder as though I were 
 her very self, and receive him into my arms. 
 
 " I did all that he desired, mad fool that I was ; and out of the 
 part which I played has come all this mischief. I have intimated 
 to you that the duke and Ariodante (for such was the other's 
 name) had been good friends before Ginevra preferred him to 
 my false lover. Pretending therefore to be still his friend, and 
 entering on the subject of a passion which he said he had long en- 
 tertained for her, he expressed his wonder at finding it interfered 
 with by so noble a gentleman, especially as it was returned by 
 the princess with a fervour of which the other, if he pleased, 
 might have ocular testimony. 
 
 " Greatly astonished at this news was Ariodante. He had re- 
 ceived all the proofs of his mistress's affection which it was pos- 
 sible for chaste love to bestow, and with the greatest scorn re- 
 fused to believe it ; but as the duke, with the air of a man who 
 could not help the melancholy communication, quietly persisted 
 in his story, the unhappy lover found himself compelled, at any 
 rate, to let him afford those proofs of her infidelity which he as- 
 serted to be in his power. The consequence was, that Ariodante 
 came with his brother to the ruins I spoke of; and there the two 
 were posted on the night when I played my unhappy part in the 
 balcony. He brought Lurcanio with him (that was the brother's 
 name), because he suspected that the duke had a design on his 
 life, not conceiving what he alleged against Ginevra to be possible. 
 Lurcanio, however, was not in the secret of his brother's engage- 
 ment with the princess. It had been disclosed hitherto neither 
 to him nor to any one, the lady not yet having chosen to divulge 
 it to the king himself. Ariodante, therefore, requested his brother 
 to take his station at a little distance, out of sight of the palace,
 
 386 ARIODANTE AND GINEVRA. 
 
 and not to come to him unless he should call : ' otherwise, my 
 dear brother,' concluded he, ' stir not a step, if you love me.' 
 
 " ' Doubt me not/ said Lurcanio ; and, with these words, the 
 latter entrenched himself in his post. 
 
 " Ariodante now stood by himself, gazing at the balcony, the 
 only person visible at that moment in all the place. In a few 
 minutes the Duke of Albany appeared below it, making the sig- 
 nal to which I had been accustomed ; and then I, in my horrible 
 folly, became visible to the eyes of both, and let down the ladder. 
 
 " Meantime Lurcanio, beginning to be very uneasy at the mys- 
 terious situation in which he found himself, and to have the most 
 alarming fears for his brother, had cautiously picked his way 
 after him at a little distance ; so that he also, though still hidden 
 in the shade of the lonely houses, perceived all that was going on. 
 
 " I was dressed, as I had undertaken to be, in the identical 
 clothes which the princess had put off that night ; and as I was 
 not unlike her in air and figure, and wore the golden net with 
 red tassels peculiar to ladies of the royal family, and the two 
 brothers, besides, were at quite sufficient distance to be deceived, 
 I was taken by both of them for her very self. The duke impa- 
 tiently mounted the ladder ; I received him as impatiently in my 
 arms ; and circumstances, though from very different feelings, 
 rendered the caresses that passed between us of unusual ardour. 
 
 " You may imagine the grief of Ariodante. It rose at once to 
 despair. He did not call out ; so that, had not his brother followed 
 him, still worse would have ensued than did ; for he drew his 
 sword, and was proceeding in distraction to fall upon it, when 
 Lurcanio rushed in and stopped him. ' Miserable brother !' ex- 
 claimed he, ' are you mad ? Would you die for a woman like 
 this ? You see what a wretch she is. I discern all your case 
 at once, and, thank God, have preserved you to turn your sword 
 where it ought to be turned, against the defender of such a pat- 
 tern of infamy." 
 
 " Ariodante put up his sword, and suffered himself to be led 
 away by his brother. He even pretended, in a little while, to be 
 able to review his condition calmly, but not the less had he se- 
 cretly resolved to perish. Next day he disappeared, nobody 
 knew whither j and about eight days afterwards, news was se-
 
 ARIODANTE AND GINEVRA. 387 
 
 cretly brought to Ginevra, by a pilgrim, that he had thrown him- 
 self from a headland into the sea. 
 
 " ' I met him by chance,' said the pilgrim, ' and we happened 
 to be standing on the top of the headland, conversing, when he 
 cried out to me, ' Relate to the princess what you beheld on part- 
 ing from me ; and add, that the cause of it was my having seen 
 too much. Happy had it been for me had I been blind !' And 
 with these words,' concluded the pilgrim, ' he leaped into the sea 
 below, and was instantly buried beneath it.' 
 
 " The princess turned as pale as death at this story, and for a 
 while remained stupified. But, alas ! what a scene was it my 
 fate to witness, when she found herself in her chamber at night, 
 able to give way to her misery. She tore her clothes, and her 
 very flesh, and her beautiful hair, and kept repeating the last 
 words of her lover with amazement and despair. 
 
 The disappearance of Ariodante, and a rumour which trans- 
 pired of his having slain himself on account of some hidden an- 
 guish, surprised and afflicted the whole court. But his brother 
 Lurcanio evinced more and more his impatience at it, and let 
 fall the most terrible words. At length he entered the court when 
 the king was holding one of his fullest assemblies, and laid open, 
 as he thought, the whole matter ; setting forth how his unhappy 
 brother had secretly, but honourably, loved the princess ; how 
 she had professed to love him in return ; and how she had grossly 
 deceived him, and played him impudently false before his own 
 eyes. He concluded with calling upon her unknown paramour 
 to come forth, and shew reasons against him with his sword why 
 she ought not to die. 
 
 " I need not tell you what the king suffered at hearing this 
 strange and terrible recital. He lost no time in sharply investi- 
 gating the truth of the allegation ; and for this purpose, among 
 other proceedings, he sent for the ladies of his daughter's cham- 
 ber. You may judge, sir, especially as, I blush to say it, I still 
 loved the Duke of Albany, that I could not await an examina- 
 tion like that. I hastened to meet the duke, who was as anxious 
 to get me out of the way as I was to go ; and to this end profess- 
 ing the greatest zeal for my security, he commissioned two men 
 to convey me secretly to a fortress he possessed in this forest. 
 
 2*
 
 388 ARIODANTE AND GINEVRA. 
 
 "Tis at no great distance from the place where Heaven sent you 
 to my deliverance. You saw, sir, how little those wretches in- 
 tended to take me anywhere except to my grave ; and by this 
 you may judge of the agonies and shame I have endured in know- 
 ing what a dupe I have been to one of the cruelest of men. But 
 thus it is that Love treats his most faithful servants." 
 
 The damsel here concluded her story ; and the Paladin, re- 
 joicing at having become possessed of all that was required to 
 establish the falsehood of the duke, proceeded with her on his road 
 to St. Andrews, where the lists had been set up for the determi- 
 nation of the question. The king and his court were anxiously 
 praying at that instant for the arrival of some champion to fight 
 with the dreaded Lurcanio ; for the month, as I have stated, was 
 nearly expired, and this terrible brother appeared to have the bu- 
 siness all his own way ; so that the stake was soon to be looked 
 for at which the hapless Ginevra was to die. 
 
 Fast and eagerly the Paladin rode for St. Andrews, with his 
 squire and the trembling damsel, who was now agitated for new 
 reasons, though the knight gave her assurances of his protection. 
 They were not far from the city when they found people talking 
 of a champion who had certainly arrived, but whose name 
 was unknown, and his face constantly concealed by his visor. 
 Even his own squire, it seems, did not know him ; for the man had 
 but lately been taken into his service. Rinaldo, as soon as he 
 entered the city, left the damsel in a place of security, and then 
 spurred his horse to the scene of action, when he found the accu- 
 ser and the champion in the very midst of the fight. The Pala- 
 din, whose horse, notwithstanding the noise of the combat, had 
 been heard coming like a tempest, and whose sudden and heroical 
 appearance turned all eyes towards him, rode straight to the royal 
 canopy, and, begging the king to stop the combat, disclosed the 
 whole state of the matter, to the enchantment of all present, ex- 
 cept the Duke of Albany ; for the villain himself was on horse- 
 back there in state as grand constable, and had been feasting his 
 miserable soul with the hope of seeing Ginevra condemned. The 
 combatants were soon changed. Instead of Lurcanio and the un- 
 known champion (whom the new comer had taken care to extol 
 for his generosity), it was the Paladin and the Duke that were op-
 
 ARIODANTE AND GINEVRA. 389 
 
 posed, and horribly did the latter's heart fail him. But he had 
 no remedy. Fight he must. Rinaldo, desirous to make short 
 work of him, took his station with fierce delight ; and at the third 
 sound of the trumpets, the Duke was forced to couch his spear 
 and meet him at full charge. Sheer went the Paladin's ashen 
 staff through the false bosom, sending the villain to the earth eight 
 feet beyond the saddle. The conqueror dismounted instantly, and 
 unlacing the man's, helmet, enabled the king to hear his dying 
 confession, which he had hardly finished when life forsook him. 
 Rinaldo then took off his own helmet ; and the king, who had seen 
 the great Paladin before, and who felt more rejoiced at his daugh- 
 ter's deliverance than if he had lost and regained his crown, lifted 
 up his hands to heaven, and thanked God for having honoured her 
 innocence with so illustrious a defender. 
 
 The other champion, who, in the mean time, had been looking 
 on through the eyelets of his visor, was now entreated to disclose 
 his own face. He did so with peculiar emotion, and king and all 
 recognised with transport the face of the loved, and, as it was 
 supposed, lost Ariodante. The pilgrim, however, had told no 
 falsehood. The lover had indeed thrown himself into the sea, and 
 disappeared from the man's eyes ; but (as oftener happens than 
 people suppose) the death which was desired when not present 
 became hated when it was so ; and Ariodante, lover as he was, 
 rising at a little distance, struck out lustily for the shore, and 
 reached it.* He felt even a secret contempt for his attempt to 
 kill himself; yet putting up at an hermitage, became interested 
 in the reports concerning the princess, whose sorrow flattered, and 
 whose danger, though he could not cease to think her guilty, af- 
 flicted him. He grew exasperated with the very brother he loved, 
 when he found that Lurcanio pursued her thus to the death ; and 
 on all these accounts he made his appearance at the place of com- 
 bat to fight him, though not to slay. His purpose was to seek his 
 own death. He concluded that Ginevra would then see who it 
 was that had really loved her, while his brother would mourn the 
 rashness which made him pursue the destruction of a woman. 
 
 * This is quite in Ariosto's high and bold taste for truth under all circumstan- 
 ces. A less great and unrnisgiving poet would have had the lover picked up by 
 a fisherman.
 
 390 ARIODANTE AND GINEVRA. 
 
 " Guilty she is," thought he, " but no such guilt can deserve so 
 cruel a punishment. Besides, I could not bear that she should 
 die before me. She is still the woman I love, still the idol of my 
 thoughts. Right or wrong, I must die in her behalf." 
 
 With this intention he purchased a suit of black armour, and 
 obtained a squire unknown in those parts, and so made his ap- 
 pearance in the lists. What ensued there I need not repeat ; but 
 the king was so charmed with the issue of the whole business, 
 with the resuscitation of the favourite whom he thought dead, and 
 the restoration of the more than life of his beloved daughter, that, 
 to the joy of all Scotland, and at the special instance of the great 
 Paladin, he made the two lovers happy without delay ; and the 
 bride brought her husband for dowry the title and estates of the 
 man who had wronged him.
 
 SUSPICION,
 
 SUSPICION.* 
 
 IT is impossible to conceive a nobler thing in the world than a 
 just prince a thoroughly good man, who shuns no part of the 
 burden of his duty, though it bend him double ; who loves and 
 cares for his people as a father does for his children, and who is 
 almost incessantly occupied in their welfare, very seldom for his 
 own. 
 
 Such a man puts himself in front of dangers and difficulties in 
 order that he may be a shield to others ; for he is not a merce- 
 nary, taking care of none but himself when he sees the wolf 
 coming ; he is the right good shepherd, staking his own life in 
 that of his flock, and knowing the faces of every One of them, 
 just as they do his own. 
 
 Such princes, in times of old, were Saturn, Hercules, Jupiter, 
 and others men who reigned gently, yet firmly, equal to all 
 chances that came, and worthy of the divine honours that awaited 
 them. For mankind could not believe that they quitted the world 
 
 * This daring and grand apologue is not in the Furioso, but in a poem which 
 Ariosto left unfinished, and which goes under the name of the Five Cantos. 
 The fragment, though bearing marks of want of correction, is in some re- 
 spects a beautiful, and altogether a curious one, especially as it seems to have 
 been written after the Furioso ; for it touches in a remarkable manner on sev- 
 eral points of morals and politics, and contains an extravagance wilder than 
 any thing in Pulci, a whale inhabited by knights ! It was most likely for 
 these reasons that his friend Bembo and others advised him to suppress it. 
 Was it written in his youth 1 The apologue itself is not one of the least 
 daring attacks on the Borgias and such scoundrels, who had just then afflicted 
 Italy. 
 
 Did Ariosto, by the way, omit Macchiavelli in his list of the friends who 
 hailed the close of his great poem, from not knowing what to make of his book 
 entitled the Prince ? It has perplexed all the world to this day, and is not un- 
 likely to have made a particularly unpleasant impression on a mind at once so 
 candid and humane as Ariosto's.
 
 394 SUSPICION. 
 
 in the same way as other men. They thought they must be 
 taken up into heaven to be the lords of demigods. 
 
 When the prince is good, the subjects are good, for they always 
 imitate their masters ; or at least, if the subjects cannot attain to 
 this height of virtue, they at least are not as bad as they would 
 be otherwise ; and, at all events, public decency is observed. 
 Oh, blessed kingdoms that are governed by such hearts ! and oh, 
 most miserable ones that are at the mercy of a man without jus- 
 tice, a fellow-creature without feelings ! 
 
 Our Italy is full of such, who will have their reward from the 
 pens of posterity. Greater wretches never appeared in the shapes 
 of Neros and Caligulas, or any other such monsters, let them 
 have been who they might. I enter not into particulars ; for it 
 is always better to speak of the dead than the living ; but I must 
 say, that Agrigentum never fared worse under Phalaris, nor 
 Syracuse under Dionysius, nor Thebes in the hand of the bloody 
 tyrant Eteocles, even though all those wretches were villains by 
 whose orders every day, without fauft, without even charge, men 
 were sent by dozens to the scaffold or into hopeless exile. 
 
 But they are not without torments of their own. At the core 
 of their own hearts there stands an inflicter of no less agonies. 
 There he stands every day and every moment one who was 
 born' of the same mother with Wrath, and Cruelty, and Rapine, 
 and who never ceased tormenting his infant brethren before they 
 saw the light. His name is Suspicion.* 
 
 Yes, Suspicion ; the cruelest visitation, the worst evil spirit 
 and pest that ever haunted with its poisonous whisper the mind of 
 human being. This is their tormentor by excellence. He does 
 not trouble the poor and lowly. He agonises the brain in the 
 proud heads of those whom fortune has put over the heads of their 
 fellow-creatures. Well may the man hug himself on his free- 
 dom who fears nobody because nobody hates him. Tyrants are 
 
 * A tremendous fancy this last ! 
 
 " Sta lor la pena, de la qua! dicea 
 
 Che nacque quando la brutt' Ira nacque, 
 La Crudeltade, e" la Rapina rea ; 
 
 E quantunque in un ventre con lor giacque, 
 Di tormentarle mai non rimanea."
 
 SUSPICION. 395 
 
 in perpetual fear. They never cease thinking of the mortal re- 
 venge ta"ken upon tormentors of their species openly or in secret. 
 The fear which all men feel of the one single wretch, makes the 
 single wretch afraid of every soul among them. 
 
 Hear a story of one of these miserables, which, whatever you 
 may think of it, is true to the letter ; such letter, at all events, as 
 is written upon the hearts of his race. He was one of the first 
 who took to the custom of wearing beards ; for, great as he was, 
 he had a fear of the race of barbers ! He built a tower in his 
 palace, guarded by deep ditches arid thick walls. It had but one 
 drawbridge and one bay-window. There was no other opening ; 
 so that the very light of day had scarcely admittance, or the in- 
 mates a place to breathe at. In this tower he slept ; and it was 
 his wife's business to put a ladder down for him when he came 
 in. A dog kept watch at the drawbridge ; and except the dog 
 and the wife, not a soul was to be discerned about the place. 
 Yet he had such little trust in her, that he always sent spies to 
 look about the room before he withdrew for the night. 
 
 Of what use was it all ? The woman herself killed him with 
 his own sword, and his soul went straight to hell. 
 
 Rhadamanthus, the judge there, thrust him under the boiling 
 lake, but was astonished to find that he betrayed no symptoms of 
 anguish. He did not weep and howl as the rest did, or cry out, 
 " I burn, I burn !" He evinced so little suffering, that Rhada- 
 manthus said, " I must put this fellow into other quarters." Ac- 
 cordingly, he sent him into the lowest pit, where the torments are 
 beyond all others. 
 
 Nevertheless, even here he seemed to be under no distress. 
 At length they asked him the reason. The wretch then candidly 
 acknowledged, that hell itself had no torments for him, compared 
 with those which suspicion had given him on earth. 
 
 The sages of hell laid their heads together at this news. 
 Amelioration of his lot on the part of a sinner was not to be 
 thought of in a place of eternal punishment ; so they called a 
 parliament together, the result of which was an unanimous con- 
 clusion, that the man should be sent back to earth, and consigned 
 to the torments of suspicion for ever. 
 
 He went ; and the earthly fiend re r entered his being anew with
 
 396 SUSPICION. 
 
 a subtlety so incorporate, that their two natures were identified, 
 and he became SUSPICION ITSELF. Fruits are thus engrafted on 
 wild stocks. One colour thus becomes the parent of many, 
 when the painter takes a portion of this and of that from his 
 palette in order to imitate flesh. 
 
 The new being took up his abode on a rock by the sea-shore, a 
 thousand feet high, girt all about with mouldering crags, which 
 threatened every instant to fall. It had a fortress on the top, the 
 approach to which was by seven drawbridges, and seven gates, 
 each locked up more strongly than the other ; and here, now this 
 moment, constantly thinking Death is upon him, Suspicion lives 
 in everlasting terror. He is alone. He is ever watching. He 
 cries out from the battlements, to see that the guards are awake 
 below, and never does he sleep day or night. He wears mail 
 upon mail, and mail again, and feels the less safe the more he puts 
 on ; and is always altering and strengthening everything on gate, 
 and on barricado, and on ditch, and on wall. And do whatever 
 he will, he never seems to have done enough. 
 
 Great poet, and good man, Ariosto ! your terrors are better than Dante's ; for 
 they warn, as far as warning can do good, and they neither afflict humanity 
 nor degrade God. 
 
 Spenser has imitated this sublime piece of pleasantry ; for, by a curious inter- 
 mixture of all which the mind can experience from such a fiction, pleasant it is 
 in the midst of its sublimity, laughable with satirical archness, as well as grand 
 and terrible in the climax. The transformation in Spenser is from a jealous 
 man into Jealousy. His wife has gone to live with the Satyrs, and a villain 
 has stolen his money. The husband, in order to persuade his wife to return, 
 steals into the horde of the Satyrs, by mixing with their flock of goats, as 
 Norandino does in a passage imitated from Homer by Ariosto. The wife flatly 
 refuses to do any such thing, and the poor wretck is obliged to steal out again. 
 
 " So soon as he the prison-door did pass, 
 
 He ran as fast as both his feet could bear, 
 
 And never looked who behind him was, 
 
 Nor scarcely who before. Like as a bear 
 
 That creeping close among the hives, to rear 
 
 An honeycomb, the wakeful dogs espy, 
 
 And him assailing, sore his carcass tear, 
 
 That hardly he away with life does fly, 
 Nor stays till safe himself he see from jeopardy.
 
 SUSPICION. 397 
 
 Nor stay'd he till he came unto the place 
 Where late his treasure he entombed had ; 
 Where, when he found it not (for Trompart base 
 Had it purloined for his master bad), 
 With extreme fury he became quite mad, 
 And ran away ran with himself away ; 
 That who so strangely had him seen bestad, 
 With upstart hair and staring eyes' dismay, 
 From Limbo-lake him late escapfcd sure would say. 
 
 High over hills and over dales he fled, 
 As if the wind him on his wings had borne ; 
 Nor bank nor bush could stay him, when he sped 
 His nimble feet, as treading still on thorn ; 
 Grief, and Despite, and Jealousy, and Scorn, 
 Did all the way him follow hard behind ; 
 And he himself himself loath'd so forlorn, 
 So shamefully forlorn of womankind, 
 That, as a snake, still lurked in his wounded mind. 
 
 Still fled he forward, looking backward still ; 
 Nor stay'd his flight nor fearful agony 
 Till that he came unto a rocky hill 
 Over the sea suspended dreadfully, 
 That living creature it would terrify 
 To look a-down, or upward to the height : 
 From thence he threw himself dispiteously, 
 All desperate of his fore-damned spright, 
 That seem'd no help for him was left in living sight 
 
 But through long anguish and self-murd'ring thought, 
 He was so wasted and forpined quite, 
 That all his substance was consumed to nought, 
 And nothing left but like an airy sprite ; 
 That on the rocks he fell so flit and light, 
 That he thereby received no hurt at all ; 
 But chanced on a craggy cliff to light ; 
 Whence he with crooked claws so long did crawl, 
 That at the last he found a cave with entrance small. 
 
 Into the same he creeps, and thenceforth there 
 Resolved to build his baleful mansion, 
 In dreary darkness, and continual fear 
 Of that rock's fall, which ever and anon 
 Threats with huge ruin him to fall upon, 
 That he dare never sleep, but that one eye 
 Still ope he keeps for that occasion ;
 
 398 SUSPICION. 
 
 Nor ever rests he in tranquillity, 
 The roaring billows beat his bower so boisterously. 
 
 Nor ever is he wont on aught to feed 
 But toads and frogs, his pasture poisonous, 
 Which in his cold complexion do breed 
 A filthy blood, or humour rancorous, 
 Matter of doubt and dread suspicious, 
 That doth with cureless care consume the heart, 
 Corrupts the stomach with gall vicious, 
 Cross-cuts the liver with internal smart, 
 And doth transfix the soul with death's eternal dart. 
 
 Yet can he never die, but dying lives, 
 And doth himself with sorrow new sustain, 
 That death and life at once unto him gives, 
 And painful pleasure turns to pleasing pain ; 
 There dwells he ever, miserable swain, 
 Hateful both to himself and every wight ; 
 Where he, through privy grief and horror vain, 
 Is waxen so deformed, that he has quite 
 Forgot he was a man, and Jealousy is hight." 
 
 Spenser's picture is more subtly wrought and imaginative than Ariosto's; 
 but it removes the man farther from ourselves, except under very special circum- 
 stances. Indeed, it might be taken rather for a picture of hypochondria than 
 jealousy, and under that aspect is very appalling. But nothing, under more 
 obvious circumstances, comes so dreadfully home to us as Ariosto's poor wretch 
 feeling himself "the less safe the more he puts on," and calling out dismally 
 from his tower, a thousand feet high, to the watchers and warders below to see 
 that all is secure.
 
 ISABELLA.
 
 ISABELLA.* 
 
 RODOMONT, King of Algiers, was the fiercest of all the enemies 
 of Christendom, not out of love for his own faith (for he had no 
 piety), but out of hatred to those that opposed him. He had now 
 quarrelled, however, with his friends too. He had been rejected 
 by a lady, in favour of the Tartar king, Mandricardo, and mor- 
 tified by the publicity of the rejection before his own lord para- 
 mount, Agramante, the leader of the infidel armies. He could 
 not bear the rejection ; he could not bear the sanction of it by 
 his liege lord ; he resolved to quit the scene of warfare and re- 
 turn to Africa ; and, in the course of his journey thither, he had 
 come into the south of France, where, observing a sequestered 
 spot that suited his humour, he changed his mind as to going 
 home, and persuaded himself he could live in it for the rest of his 
 life. He accordingly took up his abode with his attendants in a 
 chapel, which had been deserted by its clergy during the rage 
 of war. 
 
 This vehement personage was standing one morning at the 
 door of the chapel in a state of unusual thoughtfulness, when he 
 beheld coming towards him, through a path in the green meadow 
 before it, a lady of a lovely aspect, accompanied by a bearded 
 monk. They were followed by something covered with black, 
 which they were bringing along on a great horse. 
 
 Alas ! the lady was the widow of Zerbino, the Scottish prince, 
 
 * The ingenious martyrdom in this story, which has been laid by other wri- 
 ters of fiction, is taken from an alleged fact related in Barbaro's treatise De Re 
 Uxoria. It is said, indeed, to have been actually resorted to more than once ; 
 and possibly may have been so, even from a knowledge of it ; for what is more 
 natural with heroical minds than that the like outrages should produce the like 
 virtues 1 But the colouring of Ariosto's narration is peculiarly his own ; and 
 bis apostrophe at the close beautiful.
 
 402 ISABELLA. 
 
 who spared the life of Medoro, and who now himself lay dead 
 under that pall. He had expired in her arms from wounds in- 
 flicted during a combat with Mandricardo ; and she had been 
 thrown by the loss into such anguish of mind that she would 
 have died on his sword but for the intervention of the hermit now 
 with her, who persuaded her to devote the rest of her days to 
 God in a nunnery. She had now come into Provence with the 
 good man for that purpose, and to bury the corpse of her husband 
 in the chapel which they were approaching. 
 
 Though the lady seemed lost in grief, and was very pale, and 
 had her hair all about the ears, and though she did nothing but 
 weep and lament, and looked in all respects quite borne down 
 with her misery, nevertheless she was still so beautiful that love 
 and grace appeared to be indestructible in her aspect. The mo- 
 ment the Saracen beheld her, he dismissed from his mind all the 
 determinations he had made to hate and detest 
 
 The gentle bevy, that Adorns the world. 
 
 He was bent solely on obtaining the new angel before him. She 
 seemed precisely the sort of person to make him forget the one 
 that had rejected him. Advancing, therefore, to meet her with- 
 out delay, he begged, in as gentle a manner as he could assume, 
 to know the cause of her sorrow. 
 
 The lady, with all the candour of wretchedness, explained 
 who she was, and how precious a burden she was conveying to 
 its last home, and the resolution she had taken to withdraw from 
 a vain world into the service of God. The proud pagan, who 
 had no belief in a God, much less any respect for restraints or 
 fidelities of what kind soever, fcxrgot his assumed gravity when 
 he heard this determination, and laughed outright at the simplicity 
 of such a proceeding. He pronounced it, in his peremptory way, 
 to be foolish and frivolous ; compared it with the miser who, in 
 buiying a treasure, does good neither to himself nor any one 
 else : and said that lions and serpents might indeed be shut up 
 in cages, but not things lovely and innocent. 
 
 The monk, overhearing these observations, thought it his duty 
 to interfere. He calmly opposed all which the other asserted,
 
 ISABELLA, 403 
 
 and then proceeded to set forth a repast of spiritual consolation 
 not at all to the Saracen's taste. The fierce warrior interrupted 
 the preacher several times ; told him that he had nothing to do 
 with the lady, and that the sooner he returned to his cell the bet- 
 ter ; but the hermit, nothing daunted, went on with his advice 
 till his antagonist lost all patience. He laid hands on his sacred 
 person ; seized him by the beard ; tore away as much of it as he 
 grasped ; and at length worked himself up into such a pitch of 
 fury, that he griped the good man's throat with all the force of a 
 pair of pincers, and, swinging him twice or thrice round, as one 
 might a dog, flung him off the headland into the sea. 
 
 What became of the poor creature I cannot say. Reports are 
 various. Some tell us that he was found on the rocks, dashed all 
 to pieces, so that you could not distinguish foot from head ; others, 
 that he fell into the sea at the distance of three miles, and perish- 
 ed in consequence of not knowing how to swim, in spite of the 
 prayers and tears that he addressed to Heaven ; others again af- 
 firm, that a saint came and assisted him, and drew him to shore 
 before people's eyes. I must leave the reader to adopt which of 
 these accounts he looks upon as the most probable. 
 
 The Pagan, as soon as he had thus disposed of the garrulous 
 hermit, turned towards Isabella (for that was the lady's name), 
 and with a face somewhat less disturbed, began to talk to her in 
 the common language of gallantry, protesting that she was his 
 life and soul, and that he should not know what to do without 
 her ; for the sweetness of her appearance mollified even him ; 
 and indeed, with all his violence, he would rather have possessed 
 her by fair means than by foul. He therefore flattered himself 
 that, by a little hypocritical attention, he should dispose her to 
 return his inclinations. 
 
 On the other hand, the poor disconsolate creature, who, in a coun- 
 try unknown to her, and a place so remote from help, felt like a 
 mouse in the cat's claws, began casting in her mind by what possi- 
 ble contrivance she could escape from such a wretch with honour. 
 She had made up her mind to perish by her own hand, rather than 
 be faithless, however unwillingly, to the dear husband that had 
 died in her arms : but the question was, how she could protect her- 
 self from the pagan's violence, before she had secured the means 
 
 PART ra. 3
 
 404 ISABELLA. 
 
 of so doing ; for his manner was becoming very impatient, and 
 his speeches every moment less and less civil. 
 
 At length an expedient occurred to her. She told him, that if 
 he would promise to respect her virtue, she would put him in 
 possession of a secret that would redound far more to his honour 
 and glory, than any wrong which he could inflict on the innocent. 
 She conjured him not to throw away the satisfaction he would 
 experience all the rest of his life from the consciousness of having 
 done right, for the sake of injuring one unhappy creature. " There 
 were thousands of her sex," she observed, " with cheerful as well 
 as beautiful faces, who might rejoice in his affection ; whereas 
 the secret she spoke of was known to scarcely a soul on earth 
 but herself." 
 
 She then told him the secret ; which consisted in the prepara- 
 tion of a certain herb boiled with ivy and rue over a fire of cypress- 
 wood, and squeezed into a cup by hands that had never done 
 harm. The juice thus obtained, if applied fresh every month, 
 had the virtue of rendering bodies invulnerable. Isabella said 
 she had seen the herb in the neighbourhood, as she came along, 
 and that she would not only make the preparation forthwith, but 
 let its effects b proved on her own person. She only stipulated, 
 that the receiver of the gift should swear not to offend her purity 
 in deed or word. 
 
 The fierce infidel took the oath immediately. It delighted him 
 to think that he should be enabled to have his fill of war and 
 slaughter for nothing ; and the oath was the more easy to him, 
 inasmuch as he had no intention of keeping it. 
 
 The poor Isabella went into the fields to look for her miracu- 
 lous herb, still, however, attended by the Saracen, who would 
 not let her go out of his sight. She soon found it ; and then 
 going with him into his house, passed the rest of the day and the 
 whole night in preparing the mixture with busy solemnity, Ro- 
 domont always remaining with her. 
 
 The room became so hot and close with the fire of cypress- 
 wood, that the Saracen, contrary to his law and indeed to his habits, 
 indulged himself in drinking ; and the consequence was, that, as 
 soon as it was morning, Isabella lost no time in proving to him 
 the success of her operations. " Now," she said, " you shall be
 
 ISABELLA. 405 
 
 convinced how much in earnest I have been. You shall see all 
 the virtue of this blessed preparation. I have only to bathe my- 
 self thus, over the head and neck, and if you then strike me with 
 all your force, as though you intended to cut off my head, which 
 you must do in good earnest, you will see the wonderful re- 
 sult." 
 
 With a glad and rejoicing countenance the paragon of virtue 
 held forth her neck to the sword ; and the bestial pagan, giving 
 way to his natural violence, and heated perhaps beyond all 
 thought of a suspicion with his wine, dealt it so fierce a blow, tKat 
 the head leaped from the shoulders. 
 
 Thrice it bounded on the ground where it fell, and a clear 
 voice was heard to come out of it, calling the name of " Zerbino," 
 doubtless in joy of the rare way which its owner had found of 
 escaping from the Saracen. 
 
 O blessed soul, that heldest thy virtue and thy fidelity dearer 
 to thee than life and youth ! go in peace, thou soul blessed and 
 beautiful. If any words of mine could have force in them suffi- 
 cient to endure so long, hard would I labour to give them all the 
 worthiness that art can bestow, so that the world might rejoice in 
 thy name for thousands and thousands of years. Go in peace, 
 and take thy seat in the skies, and be an example to womankind 
 of faith beyond all weakness.
 
 TASSO: 
 
 Critical polite of Ijio JDife anb <B>enw0.
 
 CRITICAL NOTICE 
 
 TASSO'S LIFE AND GENIUS/ 
 
 THE romantic poetry of Italy having risen to its highest and 
 apparently its most lawless pitch in the Orlando Furioso, a re- 
 action took place in the next age in the Jerusalem Delivered. It 
 did not hurt, however, the popularity of Ariosto. It only in- 
 creased the number of poetic readers ; and under the auspices, 
 
 * My authorities for this notice are, Black's Life of Tasso (2 vols. 4to, 1810), 
 his original, Serassi, Vita di Torquato Tasso (do. 1790), arid the works of the 
 poet in the Pisan edition of Professor Rosini (33 vols. 8vo, 1832). I have been 
 indebted to nothing in Black which I have not ascertained by reference to the 
 Italian biographer, and quoted nothing stated by Tasso himself but from the 
 works. Black's Life, which is a free version of Serassi's, modified by the 
 translator's own opinions and criticism, is elegant, industrious, and interesting. 
 Serassi's was the first copious biography of the poet founded on original docu- 
 ments ; and it deserved to be translated by Mr. Black, though^ servile to the 
 house of Este, and, as might be expected, far from being always ingenuous. 
 Among other instances of this writer's want of candour is the fact of his having 
 been the discoverer and supprcsser of the manuscript review of Tasso by Gali- 
 leo. The best summary account of the poet's life and writings which I have 
 met with is Gingue'nd's, in the fifth volume of his Histoire Litteraire, &c. It 
 is written with his usual grace, vivacity, and acuteness, and contains a good 
 notice of the Tasso controversy. As to the Pisan edition of the works, it is 
 the completest, I believe, in point of contents ever published, comprises all the 
 controversial criticism, and is, of course, very useful ; but it contains no life 
 except Manso's (now known to be very inconclusive), has got a heap of feeble 
 variorum comments on the Jerusalem, no notes worth speaking of to the rest 
 of the works, and notwithstanding the claim in the title-page to the merit of a 
 " better order," has left the correspondence in a deplorable state of irregularity, 
 aa well as totally without elucidation. The learned Professor is an agreeable wri- 
 ter, and, I believe, a very pleasant man, but he certainly is a provoking editor.
 
 410 TASSO. 
 
 or rather the control, of a Luther-fearing Church, produced, if not 
 as classical a work as it claimed to be, or one, in the true sense 
 of the word, as catholic as its predecessor, yet certainly a far 
 more Roman Catholic, and at the same time very delightful fic- 
 tion. The circle of fabulous narrative was thus completed, and 
 a link formed, though in a very gentle and qualified manner, both 
 with Dante's theocracy and the obvious regularity of the Mnei&> 
 the oldest romance of Italy. 
 
 The author of this epic of the Crusades was of a family so no- 
 ble and so widely diffused, that, under the patronage of the em- 
 perors and the Italian princes, it flourished in a very remarkable 
 manner, not only in its own country, but in Flanders, Germany r 
 and Spain. There was a Tasso once in England, ambassador of 
 Philip the Second ; another, like Cervantes, distinguished himself 
 at the battle of Lepanto ; and a third gave rise to the sovereign 
 German house of Tour and Taxis. Taxus is the Latin of Tasso. 
 The Latin word, like the Italian, means both a badger and a 
 yew-tree ; and the family in general appear to have taken it in 
 the former sense. The animal is in their coat of arms. But the 
 poet, or his immediate relatives, preferred being more romantical- 
 ly shadowed forth by the yew-tree. The parent stock of the race 
 was at Bergamo in Lombardy ; and here was born the father of 
 Tasso, himself a poet of celebrity, though his fame has been 
 eclipsed by that of his son. 
 
 Bernardo Tasso, author of many elegant lyrics, of some vol- 
 umes of letters, not uninteresting but too florid, and of the Ama- 
 digi, an epic romance now little read, was a man of small prop- 
 erty, very honest and good-hearted, but restless, ambitious, and 
 with a turn for expense beyond his means. He attached himself 
 to various princes, with little ultimate advantage, particularly to 
 the unfortunate Sanseverino, Prince of Salerno, whom he faith- 
 fully served for many years. The prince had a high sense of 
 his worth, and would probably have settled him in the wealth 
 and honours he was qualified to adorn, but for those Spanish op- 
 pressions in the history of Naples which ended in the ruin of both 
 master and servant. Bernardo, however, had one happy interval 
 of prosperity ; and during this, at the age of forty-six, he married 
 Porzia di Rossi, a young lady of a rich and noble family, with a
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 411 
 
 claim to a handsome dowry. He spent some delightful years 
 with her at Sorrento, a spot so charming as to have been con- 
 sidered the habitation of the Sirens ; and here, in the midst of his 
 orange-trees, his verses, and the breezes of an aromatic coast, he 
 had three children, the eldest of whom was a daughter named 
 Cornelia, and the youngest the author of the Jerusalem Delivered. 
 The other child died young. The house distinguished by the 
 poet's birth was restored from a dilapidated condition by order of 
 Joseph Bonaparte when King of Naples, and is now an hotel. 
 
 Torquato Tasso was born March the llth, 1544, nine years 
 after the death of Ariosto, who was intimate with his father. He 
 was very devoutly brought up ; and grew so tall, and became so 
 premature a scholar, that at nine, he tells us, he might have been 
 taken for a boy of twelve. At eleven, in consequence of the 
 misfortunes of his father, who had been exiled with the Prince of 
 Salerno, he was forced to part from his mother, who remained at 
 home to look after a dowry which she never received. Her 
 brothers deprived her of it ; and in two years' time she died, 
 Bernardo thought by poison. Twenty-four years afterwards her 
 illustrious son, in the midst of his own misfortunes, remembered 
 with sighs the tears with which the kisses of his poor mother 
 were bathed when she was forced to let him go.* 
 
 * In the beautiful fragment beginning, O del grand' Apennino : 
 
 " Me dal sen della madre empia fortuna 
 Pargoletto divelse. Ah ! di que' baci, 
 Ch' ella bagno di lagrime dolenti, 
 Con sospir mi'rimembra, e degli ardenti 
 Preghi, che sen portar 1' aure fugaci, 
 Ch' io giunger non dovea piu volto a volto 
 Fra quelle braccia accolto 
 Con nodi cosl stretti e si tenaci. 
 Lasso ! e seguii con mal sicure piante, 
 Q,ual Ascanio, o Camilla, il padre errante." 
 
 Me from my mother's bosom my hard lot 
 Took when a child. Alas ! though all these years 
 I have been used to sorrow, 
 I sigh to think upon the floods of tears 
 Which bathed her kisses on that doleful morrow : 
 I sigh to think of all the prayers and cries 
 She wasted, straining me with lifted eyes : 
 3*
 
 412 TAS SO. 
 
 The little Torquato following, as he says, like another Ascanius, 
 the footsteps of his wandering father, joined Bernardo in Rome. 
 After two years' study in that city, partly under an old priest 
 who lived with them, the vicissitudes of the father's lot took away 
 the son first to Bergamo, among his relations, and then to Pesaro, 
 in the duchy of Urbino, where his education was associated for 
 nearly two years with that of the young" prince, afterwards Duke 
 Francesco Maria the Second (della Rovere), who retained a re- 
 gard for him through life. In 1559 the boy joined his father in 
 Venice, where the latter had been appointed secretary to the 
 Academy ; but next year he was withdrawn from these pleasing va- 
 rieties of scene by the parental delusion so common in the history 
 of men of letters the study of the law ; which Bernardo intended 
 him to pursue henceforth in the city of Padua. He accordingly 
 arrived in Padua at the age of sixteen and a half, and fulfilled his 
 legal destiny by writing the poem of Rinaldo, which was publish- 
 ed in the course of less than two years at Venice. The goodna- 
 tured and poetic father, convinced by this specimen of jurispru- 
 dence how useless it was to thwart the hereditary passion, per- 
 mitted him to devote himself wholly to literature, which he there- 
 fore went to study in the university of Bologna ; and there, at the 
 early age of nineteen, he began his Jerusalem Delivered ; that is 
 to say, he planned it, and wrote three cantos, several of the stan- 
 zas of which he retained when the poem was matured. He quit- 
 ted Bologna, however, in a fit of indignation at being accused of 
 the authorship of a satire ; and after visiting some friends at Cas- 
 telvetro and Correggio, returned to Padua on the invitation of his 
 friend Scipio Gonzaga, afterwards cardinal, who wished him to 
 become a member of an academy he had instituted, called the 
 Eterei (Ethereals). Here he studied his favourite philosopher, 
 Plato, and composed three Discourses on Heroic Poetry, dedica- 
 ted to his friend. He now paid a visit to his father in Mantua, 
 
 For never more on one smother's face 
 
 Was it our lot to gaze and to embrace ! 
 
 Her little stumbling boy, 
 
 Like to the child of Troy, 
 
 Or like to one doomed to no haven rather, 
 
 Followed the footsteps of his wandering father.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 413 
 
 where the unsettled man had become secretary to the duke ; and 
 here, it is said, he fell in love with a young lady of a distinguish- 
 ed family, whose name was Laura Peperara j but this did not 
 hinder him from returning to his Paduan studies, in which he 
 spent nearly the whole of the following year. He was then in- 
 formed that the Cardinal of Este, to whom he had dedicated his 
 Rinaldo, and with whom interest had been made for the purpose, 
 had appointed him one of his attendants, and that he was expected 
 at Ferrara by the 1st of December. Returning to Mantua, in 
 order to prepare for this appointment with his father, he was seiz- 
 ed with a dangerous illness, which detained him there nearly a 
 twelvemonth longer. On his recovery he hastened to Ferrara, 
 and arrived in that city on the last day of October, 1565, the first 
 of many years of glory and misery. 
 
 The cardinal of Este was the brother of the reigning Duke of 
 Ferrara, Alfonso the Second, grandson of the Alfonso of Ariosto. 
 It is curious to see the two most celebrated romantic poets of Italy 
 thrown into unfortunate connexion with two princes of the same 
 house and the same respective ranks. Tasso's cardinal, however, 
 though the poet lost his favour, and though very little is known 
 about him, left no such bad reputation behind him as Ippolito. It 
 was in the service of the duke that the poet experienced his suf- 
 ferings. 
 
 This prince, who was haughty, ostentatious, and quarrelsome, 
 was, at the time of the stranger's arrival, rehearsing the shows 
 and tournaments intended to welcome his bride, the sister of the 
 Emperor Maximilian the Second. She was his second wife. 
 The first Was a daughter of the rival house of Tuscany, which he 
 detested ; and the marriage had not been happy. The new con- 
 sort arrived in the course of a few weeks, entering the city in great 
 pomp ; and for a time all went happily with the young poet. He 
 was in a state of ecstasy with the beauty and grandeur he beheld 
 around him obtained the favourable notice of the duke's two sis- 
 ters and the duke himself went on with his Jerusalem Delivered, 
 which, in spite of the presence of Ariosto's memory, he was resolv- 
 ed to load with praises of the house of Este ; and in this tumult of 
 pride and expectation, he beheld the duke, like one of the heroes 
 of his poem, set out to assist the emperor against the Turks at the
 
 414 TASSO. 
 
 head of three hundred gentlemen, armed at all points, and mantled 
 in various-coloured velvets embroidered with gold. 
 
 To complete the young poet's happiness, or commence his dis- 
 appointments, he fell in love, notwithstanding the goddess he had 
 left in Mantua, with the beautiful Lucrezia Bendidio, who does 
 not seem, however, to have loved in return ; for she became the 
 wife of a Macchiavelii. Among his rivals was Guarini, who 
 afterwards emulated him in pastoral poetry, and who accused him 
 on this occasion of courting two ladies at once. 
 
 Guarini's accusation has been supposed to refer to the duke's 
 sister Leonora, whose name has become so romantically mixed up 
 with the poet's biography ; but the latest inquiries render it prob- 
 able that the allusion was to Laura Peperara.* The young poet, 
 however, who had not escaped the influence of the free manners 
 of Italy, and whose senses and vanity may hitherto have been 
 more interested than his heart, rhymed and flattered on all sides 
 of him, not of course omitting the charms of princesses. In 
 order to win the admiration of the ladies in a body, he sustained 
 for three days, in public, after the fashion of the times, Fifty Am- 
 orous Conclusions ; that is to say, affirmations on the subject of 
 love ; doubtless to the equal delight of his fair auditors and him- 
 self, and the creation of a good deal of jealousy and ill-will on 
 the part of such persons of his own sex as had not wit or spirits 
 enough for the display of so much logic and love-making. 
 
 In 1569, the death of his father, who had been made governor 
 of Ostiglia by the Duke of Mantua, cost the loving son a fit of 
 illness ; but the continuation of his Jerusalem, an Oration spoken 
 at the opening of the Ferrarese academy, the marriage of Leo- 
 nora's sister Lucrezia with the Prince of Urbino, and the society 
 of Leonora herself, who led the retired life of a person in delicate 
 health, and was fond of the company of men of letters, helped to 
 divert him from melancholy recollections ; and a journey to 
 France, at the close of the year following, took him into scenes 
 that were not only totally new, but otherwise highly interesting 
 to the singer of Godfrey of Boulogne. The occasion of it was a 
 visit of the cardinal, his master, to the court of his relative 
 
 * Rosini, Saggio siigli Amori di Torquato Tasso, &c., in the Professor's edi- 
 tion of his works, vol. xxxiii.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 415 
 
 Charles the Ninth. It is supposed that his Eminence went to 
 confer with the king on matters relative to the disputes which not 
 long afterwards occasioned the detestable massacre of St. Bar- 
 tholomew. 
 
 Before his departure, Tasso put into the hands of one of his 
 friends a document, which, as it is very curious, and serves to 
 illustrate perhaps more than one cause of his misfortunes, is here 
 given entire. 
 
 Memorial left by Tasso on his departure to France. 
 
 " Since life is frail, and it may please Almighty God to dispose 
 of me otherwise in this my journey to France, it is requested of 
 Signer Ercole Rondinelli that he will, in that case, undertake the 
 management of the following concerns : 
 
 " In the first place, with regard to my compositions, it is my 
 wish that all my love-sonnets and madrigals should be collected 
 and published ; but with regard to those, whether amatory or 
 otherwise, which I have written for any friend, my request is, that 
 they should be buried with myself, save only the one commencing 
 " Or che V aura mia dolce altrove spira." I wish the publication 
 of the Oration spoken in Ferrara at the opening of the academy, 
 of the four books on Heroic Poetry, of the six last cantos of the 
 Godfrey (the Jerusalem), and of those stanzas of the two first 
 which shall seem least imperfect. All these compositions, how- 
 ever, are to be .submitted to the review and consideration of 
 Signer Scipio Gonzaga, of Signer Domenico Veniero, and of 
 Signer Battista Guarini, who, I persuade myself, will not refuse 
 this trouble, when they consider the zealous friendship I have 
 entertained for themselves. 
 
 " Let them be informed, too, that it was my intention that they 
 should cut and hew without mercy whatever should appear to 
 them defective or superfluous. With regard to additions or 
 changes, I should wish them to proceed more cautiously, since, 
 after all, the poem would remain imperfect. As to my other 
 compositions, should there be any which, to the aforesaid Signer 
 Rondinelli and the other gentlemen, might seem not unworthy of 
 publication, let them be disposed of according to their pleasure.
 
 416 TASSO. 
 
 " In respect to my property, I wish that such part of it as 1 
 
 have pledged to Abram for twenty-five lire, and seven 
 
 pieces of arras, which are likewise in pledge to Signor Ascanio 
 for thirteen scudi, together with whatever I have in 'this house, 
 should be sold, and that the overplus of the proceeds should go to 
 defray the expense of the following epitaph to be inscribed on a 
 monument to my father, whose body is in St. Polo. And should 
 any impediment take place in these matters, I entreat Signor Er- 
 cole to have recourse to the favour of the most excellent Madame 
 Leonora, whose liberality I confide in, for my sake. 
 
 " I, Torquato Tasso, have written this, Ferrara, 1570." 
 
 I shall have occasion to recur to this document by and by. I will 
 merely observe, for the present, that the marks in it, both of impru- 
 dence in money-matters and confidence in the goodwill of a prin- 
 cess, are very striking. " Abram" and " Signor Ascanio" were 
 both Jews. The pieces of arras belonged to his father ; and 
 probably this was an additional reason why the affectionate son 
 wished the proceeds to defray the expense of the epitaph. The 
 epitaph recorded his father's poetry, state-services, and vicissitudes 
 of fortune. 
 
 Tasso was introduced to the French king as the poet of a French 
 hero and of a Catholic victory ; and his reception was so favourable 
 (particularly as the wretched Charles, the victim of his mother's 
 bigotry, had himself no mean poetic feeling), that, with a rash mix- 
 ture of simplicity and self-reliance (respect makes me unwilling to 
 call it self-importance), the poet expressed an impolitic amount of 
 astonishment at the favour shown at court to the Hugonots little 
 suspecting the horrible design it covered. He shortly afterwards 
 broke with his master the cardinal ; and it is supposed that this 
 unseasonable escape of zeal was the cause. He himself appears 
 to have thought so.* Perhaps the cardinal only wanted to get the 
 imprudent poet back to Italy ; for, pn Tasso's return to Ferrara, 
 he was not only received into the service of the duke with a 
 salary of some fifteen golden scudi a-month, but told that he 
 was exempted from any particular duty, and might attend in 
 
 * Lettere InedUe, p. 33, in the Opere, vol. xvii.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 417 
 
 peace to his studies. Balzac affirms, that while Tasso was at 
 the court of France, he was so poor as to beg a crown from a 
 friend ; and that, when he left it, he had the same coat on his 
 back that he came in.* The assertions of a professed wit and 
 hyperbolist are not to be taken for granted ; yet it is difficult to 
 say to what shifts improvidence may not be reduced. 
 
 The singer of the house of Este would now, it might have been 
 supposed, be happy. He had leisure ; he had money ; he had 
 the worldly honours that he was fond of; he occupied himself in 
 perfecting the Jerusalem ; and he wrote his beautiful pastoral, 
 the Aminta, which was performed before the duke and his court 
 to the delight of the brilliant assembly. The duke's sister Lu- 
 crezia, princess of Urbino, who was a special friend of the poet, 
 sent for him to read it to her at Pesaro ; and in the course of the 
 ensuing carnival it was performed with similar applause at the 
 court of her father-in-law. The poet had been as much enchanted 
 by the spectacle which the audience at Ferrara presented to his 
 eyes, as the audience with the loves and graces with which he 
 enriched their stage. The shepherd Thyrsis, by whom he meant 
 himself, reflected it back upon them in a passage of the perform- 
 ance. It is worth while dwelling on this passage a little, because 
 it exhibits a brief interval of happiness in the author's life, and 
 also shews us what he had already begun to think of courts at 
 the moment he was praising them. But he ingeniously contrives 
 to put the praise in his own mouth, and the blame in another's. 
 The shepherd's friend, Mopsus (by whom Tasso is thought to 
 have meant Speroni), had warned him against going to court : 
 
 " Per6, figlio, 
 Va su 1' avviso," &c. 
 
 " Therefore, my son, take my advice. Avoid 
 The places where thou seest much drapery, 
 Colours, and gold, and plumes, and heraldries, 
 And such new-fanglements. But, above all, 
 Take care how evil chance or youthful wandering 
 Bring thee upon the house of Idle Babble." 
 " What place is that V said I ; and he resumed ; 
 " Enchantresses dwell there, who make one see 
 
 * Eniretiens, 1663, p. 169, quoted by Serassi, pp. 175, 183.
 
 418 TASSO. 
 
 Things as they are not, ay and hear them too. 
 
 That which shall seem pure diamond and fine gold 
 
 Is glass and brass ; and coffers that look silver, 
 
 Heavy with wealth, are baskets full of bladders.* 
 
 The very walls there are so strangely made, 
 
 They answer those who talk ; and not in syllables, 
 
 Or bits of words, like echo in our woods, 
 
 But go the whole talk over, word for word, 
 
 With something else besides, that no one said.t 
 
 The tressels, tables, bedsteads, curtains, lockers, 
 
 Chairs, and whatever furniture there is 
 
 In room or bedroom, all have tongues and speech, 
 
 And are for ever tattling. Idle Babble 
 
 Is always going about, playing the child ; 
 
 And should a dumb man enter in that place, 
 
 The dumb would babble in his own despite. 
 
 And yet this evil is the least of all 
 
 That might assail thee. Thou might'st be arrested 
 
 In fearful transformation to a willow, 
 
 A beast, fire, water, fire for ever sighing, 
 
 Water for ever weeping." Here he ceased : 
 
 And I, with all this fine foreknowledge, went 
 
 To the great city ; and, by Heaven's kind will, 
 
 Came where they live so happily. The first sound 
 
 I heard was a delightful harmony, 
 
 Which issued forth, of voices loud and sweet ; 
 
 Sirens, and swans, and nymphs, a heavenly noise 
 
 Of heavenly things ; which gave me such delight, 
 
 That, all admiring, and amazed, and joyed, 
 
 I stopped awhile quite motionless. There stood 
 
 Within the entrance, as if keeping guard 
 
 Of those fine things, one of a high-souled aspect, 
 
 Stalwart withal, of whom I was in doubt 
 
 Whether to think him better knight or leader.t 
 
 He, with a look at once benign and grave, 
 
 In royal guise, invited me within ; 
 
 He, great and hi esteem ; me, lorn and lowly. 
 
 Oh, the sensations and the sights which then 
 
 Shower'd on me. Goddesses I saw, and nymphs 
 
 * Suggested by Ariosto's furniture hi the Moon. 
 
 t This was a trick which he afterwards thought he had reason to complain 
 of hi a style very different from pleasantry. 
 
 t Alfonso. The word for " leader" hi the original, duce, made the allusion 
 more obvious. The epithet " royal," hi the next sentence, conveyed a welcome 
 intimation to the ducal ear, the house of Este being very proud of its connexion 
 with the sovereigns of Europe, and very desirous of becoming royal itself.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 419 
 
 Graceful and beautiful, and harpers fine 
 
 As Linus or as Orpheus ; and more deities, 
 
 All without veil or cloud, bright as the virgin 
 
 Aurora, when she glads immortal eyes, 
 
 And sows her beams and dew-drops, silver and gold. 
 
 In the summer of 1574, the Duke of Ferrara went to Venice 
 to pay his respects to the successor of Charles the Ninth, Henry 
 the Third, then on his way to France from his kingdom of Poland. 
 Tasso went with the Duke, and is understood to have taken the 
 opportunity of looking for a printer of his Jerusalem, which was 
 now almost finished. Writers were anxious to publish in that 
 crafty city, because its government would give no security of 
 profit to books printed elsewhere. Alfonso, who was in mourn- 
 ing for Henry's brother, and to whom mourning itself only sug- 
 gested a new occasion of pomp and vanity, took with him to this 
 interview five hundred Ferrarese gentlemen, all dressed in long 
 black cloaks ; who walking about Venice (says a reporter) " by 
 twos and threes," wonderfully impressed the inhabitants with 
 their " gravity and magnificence."* The mourners feasted, 
 however ; and Tasso had a quartan fever, which delayed the 
 completion of the Jerusalem till next year. This was at length 
 effected ; and now once more, it might have been thought, that 
 the writer would have reposed on his laurels. 
 
 But Tasso had already begun to experience the uneasiness at- 
 tending superiority ; and, unfortunately, the strength of his mind 
 was not equal to that of his genius. He was of an ultra-sensitive 
 temperament, and subject to depressing fits of sickness. He could 
 not calmly bear envy. Sarcasm exasperated, and hostile criti- 
 cism afflicted him. The seeds of a suspicious temper were nour- 
 ished by prosperity itself. The author of the Armida and the 
 Jerusalem began to think the attentions he received unequal to his 
 merits ; while with a sort of hysterical mixture of demand for 
 applause, and provocation of censure, he not only condescended 
 to read his poems in manuscript wherever he went, but, in order 
 to secure the goodwill of the papal licenser, he transmitted it for 
 revisal to Rome, where it was mercilessly criticised for the space 
 of two years by the bigots and hypocrites of a court, which Lu- 
 
 * Serassi, vol. i. p. 210.
 
 4-20 TASSO. 
 
 ther had rendered a very different one from that in the time of 
 Ariosto. 
 
 This new source of chagrin exasperated the eomplexional rest- 
 lessness which now made our author think that he should be more 
 easy anywhere than in Ferrara ; perhaps more able to communi- 
 cate with and convince his critics ; and, unfortunately, he per- 
 mitted himself to descend to a weakness the most fatal of all oth- 
 ers to a mind naturally exalted and ingenuous. Perhaps it was 
 one of the main causes of all which he suffered. Indeed, he him- 
 self attributed his misfortunes to irresolution. What I mean in 
 the present instance was, that he did not disdain to adopt un- 
 derhand measures. He shewed a face of satisfaction with Alfonso, 
 at the moment that he was taking steps to exchange his court for 
 another. He wrote for that purpose to his friend Scipio Gonzaga, 
 now a prelate at the court of Rome, earnestly begging him, at the 
 same time, not to commit him in their correspondence ; and 
 Scipio, who was one of his kindest and most indulgent friends, and 
 who doubtless saw that the Duke of Ferrara and his poet were not 
 of dispositions to accord, did all he could to procure him an ap- 
 pointment with one of the family of the Medici. 
 
 Most unhappily for this speculation (and perhaps even the 
 good-natured Gonzaga took a little more pleasure in it on that 
 account), Alfonso inherited all the detestation of his house for that 
 lucky race ; and it is remarkable, that the same jealousies which 
 hindered Ariosto's advancement with the Medici were still more 
 fatal to the hopes of Tasso ; for they served to plunge him into the 
 deepest adversity. In vain he had warnings given him, both 
 friendly and hostile. The princess, now Duchess of Urbino, who 
 was his particular friend, strongly cautioned him against the 
 temptation of going away. She said he was watched. He him- 
 self thought his letters were opened ; and probably they were. 
 They certainly were at a subsequent period. Tasso, however, 
 persisted, and went to Rome. Scipio Gonzaga introduced him to 
 Cardinal Ferdinand de' Medici, afterwards Grand Duke of Tus- 
 cany ; and Ferdinand made him offers of protection so handsome, 
 that they excited his suspicion. The self-tormenting poet thought 
 they savoured more of hatred to the Este family, than honour to
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 421 
 
 himself.* He did not accept them. He did nothing at Rome but 
 make friends, in order to perplex them ; listen to his critics, in 
 order to worry himself ; and perform acts of piety in the churches, 
 by way of shewing that the love-scenes in the Jerusalem were inno- 
 cent. For the bigots had begun to find something very question- 
 able in mixing up so much love with war. The bloodshed they 
 had no objection to. The love bearded their prejudices, and ex- 
 cited their envy. 
 
 Tasso returned to Ferrara, and endeavoured to solace himself 
 with eulogising two fair strangers who had arrived at Alfonso's 
 court, Eleonora Sanvitale, who had been newly married to the 
 Count of Scandiano (a Tiene, not a Boiardo, whose line was ex- 
 tinct), and Barbara Sanseverino, Countess of Sala, her mother-in- 
 law. The mother-in-law, who was a Juno-like beauty, wore her 
 hair in the form of a crown. The still more beautiful daughter- 
 in-law had an under lip such as Anacreon or Sir John Suckling 
 would have admired, pouting and provoking, TrpoKaXovpevov <i>i\npa. 
 Tasso wrote verses on them both, but particularly to the lip ; and 
 this Countess of Scandiano is the second, out of the three Leono- 
 ras, with whom Tasso was said by his friend Manso to have been 
 in love. The third, it is now ascertained, never existed ; and his 
 love-making to the new or second Leonora, goes to shew how 
 little of real passion there was in the praises of the first (the Prin- 
 cess Leonora), or probably of any lady at court. He even pro- 
 fessed love, as a forlorn hope, to the countess's waiting-maid. 
 Yet these gallantries of sonnets are exalted into bewilderments of 
 the heart. 
 
 His restlessness returning, the poet now condescended to craft 
 a second time. Expecting to meet with a refusal, and so to be 
 afforded a pretext for quitting Ferrara, he applied for the vacant 
 office of historiographer. It was granted him ; and he then dis- 
 gusted the Medici by pleading an unlooked-for engagement, 
 which he could only reconcile to his applications for their favour 
 by renouncing his claim to be believed. If he could have de- 
 ceived others, why might he not have deceived them ? 
 
 * " Alia lor magnanimita fe convenevole il mostrar, ch' amor delle virtti, non 
 odio verso altri, gli abbia gift, mossi ad invitarmi con invito cosi largo." Opere, 
 vol. iv. p. 94.
 
 4-2-2 TASSO. 
 
 All the lurking weakness of the poet's temperament began to 
 display itself at this juncture. His perplexity excited him to a 
 degree of irritability bordering on delirium ; and circumstances 
 conspired to increase it. He had lent an acquaintance the key 
 of his rooms at court, for the purpose (he tells us) of accommo- 
 dating some intrigue ; and he suspected this person of opening 
 cabinets containing his papers. Remonstrating with him one day 
 in the court of the palace, either on that or some other account, 
 the man gave him the lie. He received in return a blow on the 
 face, and is said by Tasso to have brought a set of his kinsmen 
 to assassinate him, all of whom the heroical poet immediately put 
 to flight. At one time he suspected the Duke of jealousy respect- 
 ing the dedication of his poem, and at another, of a wish to burn 
 it. He suspected his servants. He became suspicious of the 
 truth of his friend Gonzaga. He doubted, even, whether some 
 praises addressed to him by Orazio Ariosto, the nephew of the 
 great poet, which, one would have thought, would have been to 
 him a consummation of bliss, were not intended to mystify and 
 hurt him. At length he fancied that his persecutors had accused 
 him of heresy to the Inquisition ; and, as he had gone through 
 the metaphysical doubts, common with most men of reflection 
 respecting points of faith and the mysteries of creation, he feared 
 that some indiscreet words had escaped him, giving colour to the 
 charge. He thus beheld enemies all around him. He dreaded 
 stabbing and poison ; and one day, in some paroxysm of rage or 
 horror, how occasioned it is not known, ran with a knife or dag- 
 ger at one of the servants of the Duchess of Urbino in her own 
 chamber. 
 
 Alfonso, upon this, apparently in the mildest and most reason- 
 able manner, directed that he should be confined to his apartments, 
 and put into the hands of the physician. These unfortunate 
 events took place in the summer of 1577, and in the poet's thirty- 
 third year. 
 
 Tasso shewed so much affliction at this treatment, and, at the 
 same time, bore it so patiently, that the duke took him to his 
 beautiful country-seat of Belriguardo ; where, in one of nis ac- 
 counts of the matter, the poet says that he treated him as a 
 brother j but in another, he accuses him of having taken pains to
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 423 
 
 make him criminate himself, and confess certain matters, real or 
 supposed, the nature of which is a puzzle with posterity. Some 
 are of opinion (and this is the prevailing one), that he was found 
 guilty of being in love with the Princess Leonora, perhaps of 
 being loved by herself. Others think the love out of the question, 
 and that the duke was concerned at nothing but his endeavouring 
 to transfer his services and his poetic reputation into the hands of 
 the Medici. Others see in the duke's conduct nothing but that 
 of a good master interesting himself in the welfare of an afflicted 
 servant. 
 
 It is certain that Alfonso did all he could to prevent the surrep- 
 titious printing of the Jerusalem Delivered in various towns of 
 Italy, the dread of which had much afflicted the poet ; and he 
 also endeavoured, though in vain, to ease his mind on the subject 
 of the Inquisition ; for these facts are attested by state-papers and 
 other documents, not dependent either on the testimony of third 
 persons or the partial representations of the sufferer. But Tasso 
 felt so uneasy at Belriguardo, that he requested leave to retire a 
 while into a convent. He remained there several days, apparent- 
 ly so much to his satisfaction, that he wrote to the duke to say 
 that it was his intention to become a friar ; and yet he had no 
 sooner got into the place, than he addressed a letter to the Inquisi- 
 tion at Rome, beseeching it to desire permission for him "to come 
 to that city, in order to clear himself from the charges of his 
 enemies. He also wrote to two other friends, requesting them to 
 further his petition ; and adding that the duke was enraged with 
 him in consequence of the anger of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, 
 who, it is supposed, had accused Tasso of having revealed to 
 Alfonso some indecent epithet which his highness had applied to 
 him.* These letters were undoubtedly intercepted, for they were 
 found among the secret archives of Modena, the only principality 
 
 * The application is the conjecture of Black, vol. i. p. 317. Serassi sup- 
 pressed the whole passage. The indecent word would have been known but 
 for the delicacy or courtliness of Muratori, who substituted an et-cetera in its 
 place, observing, that he had "covered" with it "an indecent word not fit to be 
 printed" (" sotto quell' et-cetera ho io coperta un' indecente parola, che non era 
 lecito di lasciar correre alle stampe." Opere del Tasso, vol. xvi. p. 114.) By 
 " covered" he seems to have meant blotted out; for in the latest edition of Tasso 
 the et-cetera is retained.
 
 434 TASSO. 
 
 ultimately remaining in the Este family ; so that, agreeably to 
 the saying of listeners hearing no good of themselves, if Alfonso 
 did not know the epithet before, he learnt it then. The reader 
 may conceive his feelings. Tasso, too, at the same time, was 
 plaguing him with letters to similar purpose ; and it is observable, 
 that while in those which he sent to Rome he speaks of Cosmo de' 
 Medici as " Grand Duke," he "takes care in the others to call him 
 simply the " Duke of Florence." Alfonso had been exasperated 
 to the last degree at Cosmo's having had the epithet " Grand" 
 added by the Pope to his ducal title ; and the reader may imagine 
 the little allowance that would be made by a haughty and angry 
 prince for the rebellious courtesy thus shewn to a detested rival. 
 Tasso, furthermore, who had not only an infantine hatred of bitter 
 " physic," but reasonably thought the fashion of the age for giv- 
 ing it a ridiculous one, begged hard, in a manner which it is hu- 
 miliating to witness, that he might not be drenched with medicine. 
 The duke at length forbade his writing to him any more ; and 
 Tasso, whose fears of every kind of ill usage had been wound up 
 to a pitch unbearable, watched an opportunity when he was care- 
 lessly guarded, and fled at once from the convent and Ferrara. 
 
 The unhappy poet selected the loneliest ways he could find, 
 and directed his course to the kingdom of Naples, where his sis- 
 ter lived. He was afraid of pursuit ; he probably had little 
 money ; and considering his ill health and his dread of the In- 
 quisition, it is pitiable to think what he may have endured while 
 picking his long way through the back states of the Church and 
 over the mountains of Abruzzo, as far as the Gulf of Naples. 
 For better security, he exchanged clothes with a shepherd ; and 
 as he feared even his sister at first, from doubting whether she 
 still loved him, his interview with her was in all its circumstan- 
 ces painfully dramatic. Cornelia Tasso, now a widow, with two 
 sons, was still residing at Sorrento, where the poet, casting his 
 eyes around him as he proceeded towards the house, must have 
 beheld with singular feelings of wretchedness the lovely spots in 
 which he had been a happy little boy. He did not announce him- 
 self at once. He brought letters, he said, from the lady's brother ; 
 and it is affecting to think, that whether his sister might or might 
 not have retained otherwise any personal recollection of him since
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 425 
 
 that time (for he had not seen her in the interval), his disguise 
 was completed by the alterations which sorrow had made in his 
 appearance. For, at all events, she did not know him. She saw 
 in him nothing but a haggard stranger who was acquainted with 
 the writer of the letters, and to whom they referred for particu- 
 lars of the risk which her brother ran, unless she could afford 
 him her protection. These particulars were given by the stran- 
 ger with all the pathos of the real man, and the loving sister faint- 
 ed away. On her recovery, the visitor said what he could to re- 
 assure her, and then by degrees discovered himself. Cornelia 
 welcomed him in the tenderest manner. She did all that he de- 
 sired ; and gave out to her friends that the gentleman was a 
 cousin from Bergamo, who had come to Naples on family af- 
 fairs. 
 
 For a little while the affection of his sister, and the beauty and 
 freshness of Sorrento, rendered the mind of Tasso more easy : but 
 his restlessness returned. He feared he had mortally offended 
 the Duke of Ferrara ; and, with his wonted fluctuation of purpose, 
 he now wished to be restored to his presence for the very reason 
 he had run away from it. He did not know with what vengeance 
 he might be pursued. He wrote to the. duke ; but received no 
 answer. The Duchess of Urbino was equally silent. Leonora 
 alone responded, but with no encouragement. These appearan- 
 ces only made him the more anxious to dare or to propitiate his 
 doom ; and he accordingly determined to put himself in the duke's 
 hands. His sister entreated him in vain to alter his resolution. He 
 quitted her before the autumn was over ; and, proceeding to Rome, 
 went directly to the house of the duke's agent there, who, in concert 
 with the Ferrarese ambassador, gave his master advice of the cir- 
 cumstance. Gonzaga, however, and another good friend, Cardinal 
 Albano, doubted whether it would ' be wise in the poet to return 
 to Ferrara under any circumstances. They counselled him to 
 be satisfied with being pardoned at a distance, and with having 
 his papers and other things returned to him ; and the two friends 
 immediataly wrote to the duke requesting as much. The duke 
 apparently acquiesced in all that was desired ; but he said that 
 the illness of his sister, the Duchess of Urbino, delayed the procu- 
 ration of the papers, which, it seems, were chiefly in her hands.
 
 436 TASSO. 
 
 The upshot was, that the papers did not come ; and Tasso, with a 
 mixture of rage and fear, and perhaps for more reasons than he has 
 told, became uncontrollably desirous of retracing the rest of his 
 steps to Ferrara. Love may have been among these reasons- 
 probably was ; though it does not follow that the passion must have 
 been for a princess. The poet now, therefore, petitioned to that ef- 
 fect ; and Alfonso wrote again, and said he might come, but only on 
 condition of his again undergoing the ducal course of medicine ; 
 adding, that if he did not, he was to be finally expelled his high- 
 ness's territories. 
 
 He was graciously received too graciously, it would seem, for 
 his equanimity ; for it gave him such a flow of spirits, that the 
 duke appears to have thought it necessary to repress them. The 
 unhappy poet, at this, began to have some of his old suspicions ; 
 and the unaccountable detention of his papers confirmed them. 
 He made an effort to keep the suspicions down, but it was by 
 means, unfortunately, of drowning them in wine and jollity ; and 
 this gave him such a fit of sickness as had nearly been his death. 
 He recovered, only to make a fresh stir about his papers, and a 
 still greater one about his poems in general, which, though his Je- 
 rusalem was yet only known in manuscript, and not even his Aminta 
 published, he believed ought to occupy the attention of mankind. 
 People at Ferrara, therefore, not foreseeing the respect that pos- 
 terity would entertain for the poet, and having no great desire 
 perhaps to encourage a man who claimed to be a rival of their 
 countryman Ariosto, now began to consider their Neapolitan guest 
 not merely an ingenious and pitiable, but an overweening and 
 tiresome enthusiast. The court, however, still seemed to be in- 
 terested in its panegyrist, though Tasso feared that Alfonso meant 
 to burn his Jerusalem. Alfonso, on the other hand, is supposed 
 to have feared that he would burn it himself, and the ducal praises 
 with it. The papers, at all events, apparently including the only 
 fair copy of the poem, were constantly withheld ; and Tasso, in 
 a new fit of despair, again quitted Ferrara. This mystery of the 
 papers is certainly very extraordinary. 
 
 The poet's first steps were to Mantua, where he met with no 
 such reception as encouraged him to stay. He then went to Ur- 
 bino, but did not stop long. The prince, it is true, was very gra-
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 427 
 
 cious ; and bandages for a cautery were applied by the fair hands 
 of his highness's sister ; but, though the nurse enchanted, the 
 surgery frightened him. The hapless poet found himself pursued 
 wherever he went by the tormenting beneficence of medicine. 
 He escaped, and went to Turin. He had no passport ; and pre- 
 sented, besides, so miserable an appearance, that the people at the 
 gates roughly refused him admittance. He was well received, 
 however, at court ; and as he had begun to acknowledge that he 
 was subject to humours and delusions, and wrote to say as much 
 to Cardinal Albano, who returned him a most excellent and af- 
 fecting letter, full of the kindest regard and good counsel, his 
 friends entertained a hope that he would become tranquil. But 
 he disappointed them. He again applied to Alfonso for permis- 
 sion to return to Ferrara again received it, though on worse than 
 the old conditions and again found himself in that city in the be- 
 ginning of the year 1579, delighted at seeing a brilliant assem- 
 blage from all quarters of Italy on occasion of a new marriage 
 of the duke's (with a princess of Mantua). He made up his mind 
 to think that nothing could be denied him, at such a moment, by 
 the bridegroom whom he meant to honour and glorify. 
 
 Alas ! the very circumstance to which he looked for success, 
 tended to throw him into the greatest of his calamities. Alfonso 
 was to be married the day after the poet's arrival. He was 
 therefore too busy to attend to him. The princesses did not at- 
 tend to him. Nobody attended to him. He again applied in 
 vain for his papers. He regretted his return ; became anxious 
 to be any where else ; thought himself not only neglected but 
 derided ; and at length became excited to a pitch of frenzy. He 
 broke forth into the most unmeasured invectives against the duke, 
 even in public ; invoked curses on his head and that of his whole 
 race ; retracted all he had ever said in the praise of any of them, 
 prince or otherwise ; and pronounced him and his whole court 
 " a parcel of ingrates, rascals, and poltroons."* The outbreak 
 was reported to the duke ; and the consequence was, that the 
 poet was sent to the hospital of St. Anne, an establishment for the 
 reception of the poor and lunatic, where he remained (with the 
 
 * Black's version (vol. ii. p. 58) is not strong enough. The words in Serassi 
 are " una ciurma di poltroni, ingrati, e ribaldi," ii. p. 33. 
 PART III. 4
 
 428 - TASSO. 
 
 exception of a few unaccountable leave-days) upwards of seven 
 years. This melancholy event happened in the March of the 
 year 1579. 
 
 Tasso was stunned by this blow as much as if he had never 
 done or suffered any thing to expect it. He could at first do 
 nothing but wonder and bewail himself, and implore to be set free. 
 The duke answered, that he must be cured first. Tasso replied 
 by fresh entreaties ; the duke returned the same answers. The 
 unhappy poet had recourse to every friend, prince, and great man 
 he could think of, to join his entreaties ; he sought refuge in com- 
 position, but still entreated ; he occasionally reproached and even 
 bantered the duke in some of his letters to his friends, all of which, 
 doubtless, were opened ; but still he entreated, flattered, adored, 
 all to no purpose, for seven long years and upwards. In time he 
 became subject to maniacal illusions ; so that if he was not actu- 
 ally mad before, he was now considered so. He was not only 
 visited with sights and sounds, such as many people have experi- 
 enced whose brains have been over-excited, but he fancied him- 
 self haunted by a sprite, and become the sport of " magicians." 
 The sprite stole his things, and the magicians would not let him 
 get well. He had a vision such as Benvenuto Cellini had, of the 
 Virgin Mary in her glory ; and his nights were so miserable, 
 that he ate too much in order that he might sleep. When he 
 was temperate, he lay awake. Sometimes he felt " as if a horse 
 had thrown himself on him." " Have pity on me," he says to 
 the friend to whom he gives these affecting accounts ; " I am 
 miserable, because the world is unjust."* 
 
 The physicians advised him to leave off wine ; but he says he 
 could not do that, though he was content to use it in moderation. 
 In truth he required something to support him against the physi- 
 cians themselves, for they continued to exhaust his strength by 
 their medicines, and could not supply the want of it with air and 
 freedom. He had ringings in the ears, vomits, and fluxes of blood. 
 It would be ludicrous, if it were not deplorably pathetic, to hear 
 so great a man, in the commonest medical terms, now protesting 
 against the eternal drenches of these practitioners, now humbly 
 
 * Opere, vol. xiv. pp. 158, 174, &c.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 429 
 
 submitting to them, and now erttreating like a child, that they 
 might at least not be " so bitter." The physicians, with the 
 duke at their head, were as mad for their rhubarbs and lancets as 
 the quacks in Moliere ; and nothing but the very imagination 
 that had nearly sacrificed the poet's life to their ignorance could 
 have hindered him from dashing his head against the wall, and 
 leaving them to the execrations of posterity. It is the only occa- 
 sion in which the noble profession of medicine has not appeared 
 in wise and beneficent connexion with the sufferings of men of 
 letters. Why did Ferrara possess no Brocklesby in those days ? 
 no Garth, Mead, Warren, or Southwood Smith ? 
 
 Tasso enabled himself to endure his imprisonment with compo- 
 sition. He supported it with his poetry and his poem, and what, 
 alas ! he had been too proud of during his liberty, the praises of 
 his admirers. His genius brought him gifts from princes, and 
 some money from the booksellers : it supported him even against 
 his critics. During his confinement the Jerusalem Delivered was 
 first published ; though, to his grief, from a surreptitious and mu- 
 tilated copy. But it was followed by a storm of applause ; and 
 if this was succeeded by as great a storm of objection and contro- 
 versy, still the healthier part of his faculties were roused, and he 
 exasperated his critics and astonished the world by shewing how 
 coolly and learnedly the poor, wild, imprisoned genius could dis- 
 cuss the most intricate questions of poetry and philosophy. The 
 disputes excited by his poem are generally supposed to have done 
 him harm ; but the conclusion appears to be ill founded. They 
 diverted his thoughts, and made him conscious of his powers and 
 his fame. I doubt whether he would have been better for entire 
 approbation : it would have put him in a state of elevation, unfit 
 for what he had to endure. He had found his pen his great sol- 
 ace, and he had never employed it so well. It would be incredi- 
 ble what a heap of things he wrote in this complicated torment 
 of imprisonment, sickness, and " physic," if habit and mental 
 activity had not been sufficient to account for much greater won- 
 ders. His letters to his friends and others would make a good- 
 sized volume ; those to his critics, another ; sonnets and odes, a 
 third ; and his Dialogues after the manner of Plato, two more. 
 Perhaps a good half of all he wrote was written in this hospital
 
 430 TASSO. 
 
 or St. Anne ; and he studied as well as composed, and had to 
 read all that was written at the time, pro and con, in the discussions 
 about his Jerusalem, which, in the latest edition of his works, 
 amount to three out of six volumes octavo ! Many of the occa- 
 sions, however, of his poems, as well as letters, are most painful 
 to think of, their object having been to exchange praise for money. 
 And it is distressing, in the letters, to see his other little wants, 
 and the fluctuations and moods of his mind. Now he is angry 
 about some book not restored, or some gift promised and delayed. 
 Now he is in want of some books to be lent him ; now of some 
 praise to comfort him ; now of a little fresh linen. He is veiy 
 thankful for visits, for respectful letters, for " sweetmeats ;" and 
 greatly puzzled to know what to do with the bad sonnets and 
 panegyrics that are sent him. They were sometimes too much 
 even for the allowed ultra courtesies of Italian acknowledgment. 
 His compliments to most people are .varied with astonishing grace 
 and ingenuity ; his accounts of his condition often sufficient to 
 bring the tears into the manliest eyes ; and his ceaseless and vain 
 efforts to procure his liberation mortifying when we think of him- 
 self, and exasperating when we think of the petty despot who 
 detained him in so long, so degrading, and so worse than useless 
 a confinement. 
 
 Tasso could not always conceal his coiiicir.pt of his imprisoner 
 from the ducal servants. Alfonso excelled the grandiloquent 
 poet himself in his love of pomp and worship ; and as he had no 
 particular merits to warrant it, his victim bantered his love of 
 titles. He says, in a letter to the duke's steward, " If it is the 
 pleasure of the Most Serene Signor Duke, Most Clement and 
 Most Invincible, to keep me in prison, may I beg that he will have 
 the goodness to return certain little things of mine, which his 
 Most Invincible, Most Clement, and Most Serene Highness has so 
 often promised me."* 
 
 But these were rare ebullitions of gaiety, perhaps rather of 
 
 * " Prego V. Signoria che si contenti, se place al Serenissimo Signor Duca, 
 Clementissimo ed Invitissimo, che io stia in prigione, di farmi dar le poche robic- 
 ciole mie, che S. A. Invitissima, Clementissima, Seienissima m' ha promesse 
 tante volte," &c. Opere, vol. xiv. p. 6.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 431 
 
 bitter despair. A playful address to a cat to lend him her eyes 
 to write by, during some hour in which he happened to be with- 
 out a light (for it does not appear to have been denied him), may 
 be taken as more probable evidence of a mind relieved at the 
 moment, though the necessity for the relief may have been very 
 sad. But the style in which he generally alludes to his situation 
 is far different. He continually begs his correspondents to pity 
 him, to pray for him, to attribute his errors to infirmity. He 
 complains of impaired memory, and acknowledges that he has 
 become subject to the deliriums formerly attributed to him by the 
 enemies that had helped to produce them. Petitioning the native 
 city of his ancestors (Bergamo) to intercede for him with the 
 duke, he speaks of the writer as "this unhappy person;" and 
 subscribes himself, 
 
 " Most illustrious Signors, your affectionate servant, Torquato 
 Tasso, a prisoner, and infirm, in the hospital of St. Anne in 
 Ferrara." 
 
 In one of his addresses to Alfonso, he says most affectingly : 
 
 "I have sometimes attributed much to myself, and consider- 
 ed myself as somebody. But now, seeing in how many ways 
 imagination has imposed on me, I suspect that it has also de- 
 ceived me in this opinion of my own consequence. Indeed, me- 
 thinks the past has been a dream ; and hence I am resolved to 
 rely on my imagination no longer." 
 
 Alfonso made no answer. 
 
 The causes of Tasso's imprisonment, and its long duration, are 
 among the puzzles of biography. The prevailing opinion, not- 
 withstanding the opposition made to it by Serassi and Black, is, 
 that the poet made love to the Princess Leonora perhaps was 
 beloved by her ; and that her brother the duke punished him for 
 his arrogance. This was the belief of his earliest biographer, 
 Manso, who was intimately acquainted with the poet in his latter 
 days ; and from Manso (though he did not profess to receive the 
 information from Tasso, but only to gather it from his poems) it 
 spread over all Europe. Milton took it on trust from him ;* and 
 so have our English translators Hoole and Wiffen. The Abbe de 
 
 * " Altera Torquatum cepit Leonora poetam," &c.
 
 432 TASSO. 
 
 Charnes, however, declined to do so ;* and Montaigne, who saw the 
 poet in St. Anne's hospital, says nothing of the love at all. He at- 
 tributes his condition to poetical excitement, hard study, and the 
 meeting of the extremes of wisdom and folly. The philosopher, how- 
 ever, speaks of the poet's having survived his reason, and become 
 unconscious both of himself and his works, which the reader knows 
 to be untrue. He does not appear to have conversed with Tasso. 
 The poet was only shewn him ; probably at a sick moment, or 
 by a new and ignorant official.! Murato'ri, who was in the ser- 
 vice of the Este family at Modena, tells us, on the authority of 
 an old acquaintance who knew contemporaries of Tasso, that the 
 " good Torquato" finding himself one day in company with the 
 duke and his sister, and going close to the princess in order to 
 answer some question which she had put to him, was so transport- 
 eb by an impulse " more than poetical," as to give her a kiss ; 
 upon which the duke, who had observed it, turned about to his 
 gentlemen, and said, " What a pity to see so great a man dis- 
 tracted !" and so ordered him to be locked up.ij: But this writer 
 adds, that he does not know what to think of the anecdote : he 
 neither denies nor admits it. Tiraboschi, who was also in the 
 service of the Este family, doubts the truth of the anecdote, and 
 believes that the duke shut the poet up solely for fear lest his 
 violence should do harm. Serassi, the second biographer of 
 Tasso, who dedicated his book to an Este princess inimical to the 
 poet's memory, attributes^he confinement, on his own shewing, to 
 the violent words he had uttered against his master. || Walker, the 
 author of the Memoir on Italian Tragedy, says, that the life by 
 Serassi himself induced him to credit the love-story :1T so does 
 
 * Vie du Tasse, 1695, p. 51. 
 
 t In the Apology for Raimond de Sebonde ; Essays, vol. ii. ch. 12. 
 
 t In his Letter to Zeno, Opere del Tasso, xvi. p. 118. 
 
 Storia de.Ua Poesia Italiana (Mathias's edition), vol. iii. part i. p. 236. 
 
 II Serassi is very peremptory, and even abusive. He charges every body 
 who has said any thing to the contrary with imposture. " Egli non v' ha dubbio, 
 che le troppe imprudenti e temerarie parole, che il Tasso si lascio uscir di bocca 
 in questo incontro, furonc la sola cagione della sua prigionia, e ch' e mera favola 
 ed impostura tutto ci6, che diversamente e stato affermato e scritto da altri in tale 
 proposito." Vol. ii. p. 33. But we have seen that the good Abbe" could prac- 
 tise a little imposition himself. IT Black, ii. 88.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 433 
 
 Ginguene.* Black, forgetting the age and illnesses of hundreds 
 of enamoured ladies, and the distraction of lovers at all times, .de- 
 rides the notion of passion on either side : because, he argues, Tasso 
 was subject to frenzies, and Leonora forty -two years of age, and not 
 in good health. f What would Madame d'Houdetot have said to 
 him ? or Mademoiselle L'Espinasse 1 or Mrs. Inchbald, who 
 used to walk up and down Sackville Street in order that she might 
 see Dr. Warren's light in his window ? Foscolo was a believer 
 in the love ;: Sismondi admits it ; and Rosini, the editor of the 
 latest edition of the poet's works, is passionate for it. He wonders 
 how any body can fail to discern it in a number of passages, 
 which, in truth, may mean a variety of other loves ; and he in- 
 sists much upon certain loose verses (lascivi) which the poet, 
 among his various accounts of the origin of his imprisonment, as- 
 signs as the cause, or one of the causes, of it.|| 
 
 I confess, after a reasonable amount of inquiry into this sub- 
 ject, that I can find no proofs whatsoever of Tasso's having made 
 love to Leonora ; though I think it highly probable. I believe 
 the main cause of the duke's proceedings was the poet's own vio- 
 lence of behaviour and incontinence of speech. I think it very 
 likely that, in the course of the poetical love-making to various 
 ladies, which was almost identical in that age with addressing 
 them in verse, Torquato, whether he was in love or not, took more 
 liberties with the princesses than Alfonso approved; and it is 
 equally probable, that one of those liberties consisted in his indul- 
 ging his imagination too far. It is not even impossible, that more 
 gallantry may have been going on at court than Alfonso could 
 
 * Hist. LUt. d'ltalie, v. 243, &c. t Vol. ii. p. 89. 
 
 t Such at least is ray impression ; but I cannot call the evidence to mind. 
 
 Literature of the South of Europe (Roscoe's translation), vol. ii. p. 165. 
 To shew the loose way in which the conclusions of a man's own mind are pre- 
 sented as facts admitted by others, Sismondi says, that Tasso's "passion" was 
 the cause of his return to Ferrara. There is not a tittle of evidence to shew 
 for it. 
 
 II Saggio sugli Amori, &c. ut sup. p. 84, and passim. As specimens of the 
 learned professor's reasoning, it may be observed that whenever the words 
 hutnble, daring, high, noble, and royal, occur in the poet's love-verses, he thinks 
 they must allude to the Princess Leonora ; and he argues, that Alfonso never 
 could have been so angry with any "versi lascivi," if they had not had the same 
 direction.
 
 434 TASSO. 
 
 endure to see alluded to, especially by an ambitious pen. But 
 there is no evidence that such was the case. Tasso, as a gentle- 
 man, could not have hinted at such a thing on the part of a prin- 
 cess of staid reputation ; and, on the other hand, the "love" he 
 speaks of as entertained by her for him, and warranting the ap- 
 plication to her for money in case of his death, was too plainly 
 worded to mean any thing but love in the sense of friendly regard. 
 " Per amor mio " is an idiomatical expression, meaning " for my 
 sake ;" a strong one, no doubt, and such as a proud man like Al- 
 fonso might think a liberty, but not at all of necessity an amatory 
 boast. If it was, its very effrontery and vanity were presump- 
 tions of its falsehood. The lady whom Tasso alludes to in the 
 passage quoted on his first confinement is complained of for her 
 coldness towards him ; and, unless this was itself a gentlemanly 
 blind, it might apply to fifty other ladies besides the princess. 
 The man who assaulted him in the streets, and who is supposed 
 to have been the violator of his papers, need not have found any 
 secrets of love in them. The servant at whom he aimed the knife 
 or the dagger might be as little connected with such matters ; 
 and the sonnets which the poet said he wrote for a friend, and 
 which he desired to be buried with him, might be alike innocent 
 of all reference to Leonora, whether he wrote them for a friend 
 or not. Leonora's death took place during the poet's confine- 
 ment ; and, lamented as she was by the verse-writers according 
 to custom, Tasso wrote nothing on the event. This silence has 
 been attributed to the depth of his passion ; but how is the fact 
 proved ? and why may it not have been occasioned by there hav- 
 ing been no passion at all ? 
 
 All that appears certain is, that Tasso spoke violent and con- 
 temptuous words against the duke ; that he often spoke ill of him 
 in his letters ; that he endeavoured, not with perfect ingenuous- 
 ness, to exchange his service for that of another prince ; that he 
 asserted his madness to have been pretended in the first instance 
 purely to gratify the duke's whim for thinking it so (which was 
 one of the reasons perhaps why Alfonso, as he complained, would 
 not believe a word he said) ; and finally, that, whether the mad- 
 ness was or was not so pretended, it unfortunately became a con- 
 firmed though milder form of mania, during a long confinement.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 435 
 
 Alfonso, too proud to forgive the poet's contempt, continued thus to 
 detain him, partly perhaps because he was not sorry to have a pre- 
 text for revenge, partly because he did not know what to do with 
 him consistently either with his own or the poet's safety. He had 
 not been generous enough to put Tasso above his wants ; he had 
 not address enough to secure his respect ; he had not merit enough 
 to overlook his reproaches. If Tasso had been as great a man as 
 he was a poet, Alfonso would not have been reduced to these per- 
 plexities. The poet would have known how to settle quietly down 
 on his small court-income, and wait patiently in the midst of his 
 beautiful visions for what fortune had or had not in store for him. 
 But in truth, he, as well as the duke, was weak ; they made 
 a bad business of it between them ; and Alfonso the Second closed 
 the accounts of the Este family with the Muses, by keeping his 
 panegyrist seven years in a mad-house, to the astonishment of 
 posterity, and the destruction of his own claims to renown. 
 
 It does not appear that Tasso was confined in any such dungeon 
 as they now exhibit in Ferrara. The conduct of the Prior of the 
 Hospital is more doubtful. His name was Agostino Mosti ; and, 
 strangely enough, he was the person who had raised a monument 
 to Ariosto, of whom he was an enthusiastic admirer. To this predi- 
 lection has been attributed his alleged cruelty to the stranger from 
 Sorrento, who dared to emulate the fame of his idol ; an extraor- 
 dinary, though perhaps not incredible, mode of shewing a critic's 
 regard for poetry. But Tasso, while he laments his severity, 
 wonders at it in a man so well bred and so imbued with literature, 
 and thinks it can only have originated in "orders."* Perhaps 
 there were faults of temper on both sides ; and Mosti, not liking 
 his office, forgot the allowance to be made for that of a prisoner 
 and sick man. His nephew Giulio Mosti, became strongly attach- 
 ed to the poet, and was a great comfort to him. 
 
 At length the time for liberation arrived. In the summer of 
 1586, Don Vincenzo Gonzaga, Prince of Mantua, kinsman of the 
 poet's friend Scipio, came to Ferrara for the purpose of compli- 
 menting Alfonso's heir on his nuptials. The whole court of Man- 
 tua, with hereditary regard for Tasso, whose father had been one 
 
 * Opere, vol. xvii. p. 32. 
 4*
 
 436 TASSO. 
 
 of their ornaments, were desirous of having him among them ; 
 and the prince extorted Alfonso's permission to take him away, 
 on condition (so hard did he find this late concession to humanity, 
 and so fearful was he of losing the dignity of jailor) that his de- 
 liverer should not allow him to quit Mantua without obtaining 
 leave. A young and dear friend, his most frequent visitor, An- 
 tonio Constantini, secretary to the Tuscan ambassador, went to 
 St. Anne's to prepare the captive by degrees for the good news. 
 He told him that he really might look for his release in the course 
 of a few days. The sensitive poet, now a premature old man of 
 forty-two, was thrown into a transport of mingled delight and 
 anxiety. He had been disappointed so often that he could 
 scarcely believe his good fortune. In a day or two he writes 
 thus to his visitor : 
 
 " Your kindness, my dear friend, has so accustomed me to 
 your precious and frequent visits, that I have been all day long 
 at the window expecting your coming to comfort me as you are 
 wont. But since you have not yet arrived, and in order not to 
 remain altogether without consolation, I visit you with this letter. 
 It encloses a sonnet to the ambassador, written with a trembling 
 hand, and in such a manner that he will not, perhaps, have less 
 difficulty in reading it than I had in writing." 
 
 Two days afterwards, the prince himself came again, requested 
 of the poet some verses on a given subject, expressed his esteem 
 for his genius and virtues, and told him that, on his return to 
 Mantua, he should have the pleasure of conducting him to that 
 city. Tasso lay awake almost all night, composing the verses ; 
 and next day enclosed them, with a letter, in another to Constan- 
 tini, ardently begging him to keep the prince in mind of his prom- 
 ise. The prince had not forgotten it ; and two or three days 
 afterwards, the order for the release arrived, and Tasso quitted 
 his prison. He had been confined seven years, two months, and 
 several days. He awaited the prince's departure for a week or 
 two in his friend's abode, paying no visits, probably from inability 
 to endure so much novelty. Neither was he inclined or sent for 
 to pay his respects to the duke. Two such parties could hardly 
 have been desirous to look on each other. The duke must es- 
 pecially have disliked the thought of it ; though Tasso afterwards
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 437 
 
 fancied otherwise, and that he was offended at his non-appearance. 
 But his letters, unfortunately, differ with themselves on this point, 
 as on most others. About the middle of July 1586, the poet quit- 
 ted Ferrara for ever. 
 
 At Mantua Tasso was greeted with all the honours and atten- 
 tions which his love of distinction could desire. The good old 
 duke, the friend of his father, ordered handsome apartments to be 
 provided for him in the palace ; the prince made him presents of 
 costly attire, including perfumed silken hose (kindred elegancies 
 to the Italian gloves of Queen Elizabeth) ; the princess and her 
 mother-in-law were declared admirers of his poetry ; the courtiers 
 caressed the favourite of their masters ; Tasso found literary so- 
 ciety ; he pronounced the very bread and fruit, the fish and the 
 flesh, excellent ; the wines were sharp and brisk (" such as his 
 father was fond of") ; and even the physician was admirable, for 
 he ordered confections. One might imagine, if circumstances 
 had not proved the cordial nature of the Gonzaga family, and the 
 real respect and admiration entertained for the poet's genius by 
 the greatest men of the time, in spite of the rebuke it had received 
 from Alfonso, that there had been a confederacy to mock and 
 mystify him, after the fashion of the duke and duchess with Don 
 Quixote (the only blot, by the way, in the book of Cervantes ; if, 
 indeed, he did not intend it as a satire on the mystifiers). 
 
 For a while, in short,, the liberated prisoner thought himself 
 happy. He corrected his prose works, resumed and finished the 
 tragedy of Torrismond, which he had begun some years be- 
 fore, corresponded with princes, and completed and published a 
 narrative poem left unfinished by his father. Torquato was as 
 loving a son as Mozart or Montaigne. Whenever he had a 
 glimpse of felicity, he appears to have associated the idea of it 
 with that of his father. In the conclusion of his fragment, " O 
 del grand' Apennino," he affectingly begs pardon of his blessed 
 spirit for troubling him with his earthly griefs.* 
 * " Padre, o buon padre, che dal ciel rimiri, 
 
 Egro e morto ti piansi, e ben tu il sai ; 
 
 E gemendo scaldai 
 
 La tomba e il letto. Or che negli altri giri 
 
 Tu godi, a te si deve onor, non lutto : 
 
 A me versato il mio dolor sia tutto."
 
 438 TASSO. 
 
 But, alas, what had been an indulgence of self-esteem had now 
 become the habit of a disease ; and in the course of a few months 
 the restless poet began to make his old discovery, that he was not 
 sufficiently cared for. The prince had no leisure to attend to 
 him ; the nobility did not " yield him the first place," or at least 
 (he adds) they did not allow him to be treated " externally as 
 their equal ; and he candidly confessed that he could not live in 
 a place where such was the custom.* He felt also, naturally 
 enough, however well it might have been intended, that it was 
 not pleasant to be confined to the range of the city of Mantua, 
 attended by a servant, even though he confessed that he was now 
 subject to " frenzy." He contrived to stay another half-year by 
 help of a brilliant carnival and of the select society of the prince's 
 court, who were evidently most kind to him ; but at the end of 
 the twelvemonth he was in Bergamo among his relations. The 
 prince gave him leave to go ; and the Cavaliere Tasso, his kins- 
 man, sent his chariot on purpose to fetch him. 
 
 Here again he found himself at a beautiful country-seat, which 
 the family of Tasso still possesses near that city ; and here again, in 
 the house of his father, he proposed to be happy, " having never 
 desired," he says, " any journey more earnestly than this." He 
 left it in the course of a month, to return to Mantua. 
 
 And it was only to wander still. Mantua he quitted in less 
 than two months to go to Rome, in spite of the advice of his best 
 friends. He vindicated the proceeding by a hope of obtaining 
 some permanent settlement from the Pope. He took Loretto by 
 the way, to refresh himself with devotion ; arrived in a transport 
 at Rome ; got nothing from the Pope (the hard-minded Sixtus the 
 Fifth) ; and in the spring of the next year, in the triple hope of 
 
 O father, my good father, looking now 
 
 On thy poor son from heaven, well knowest thou 
 
 What scalding tears I shed 
 
 Upon thy grave, upon thy dying bed ; 
 
 But since thou dwellest in the happy skies, 
 
 'Tis fit I raise to thee no sorrowing eyes : 
 
 Be all my grief on my own head. 
 
 * " Non posso viver in citta, ove tutti i nobili, o non mi concedano i primi 
 luoghi, o almeno non si contentino che la cosa in quel che appartiene a queste 
 esteriori dimostrazioni, vada del pari." Opere, vol. xiii. p. 153.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 439 
 
 again embracing his sister, and recovering the dowry of his mo- 
 ther and the confiscated property of his father, he proceeded to 
 Naples. 
 
 Naples was in its most beautiful vernal condition, and the Ne- 
 apolitans welcomed the poet with all honour and glory ; but his 
 sister, alas, was dead ; he got none of his father's property, 
 nor (till too late) any of his mother's ; and before the year was 
 out, he was again in Rome. He acquired in Naples, however, 
 another friend, as attached to him and as constant in his attentions 
 as his beloved Constantini, to wit, Giambattista Manso, Marquis 
 of Villa, who became his biographer, and who was visited and 
 praised for his good offices by Milton. In the society of this gen- 
 tleman he seemed for a short while to have become a new man. 
 He entered into field sports, listened to songs and music, nay, 
 danced, says Manso, with "the girls." (One fancies a poetical 
 Dr. Johnson with the two country damsels on his knees.) la 
 short, good air and freedom, and no medicine, had conspired with 
 the lessons of disappointment to give him, before he died, a glimpse 
 of the power to be pleased. He had not got rid of all his spirit- 
 ual illusions, even those of a melancholy nature ; but he took the 
 latter more quietly, and had grown so comfortable with the race 
 in general, that he encouraged them. He was so entirely freed 
 from his fears of the Inquisition and of charges of magic, that 
 whereas he had formerly been anxious to shew that he meant 
 nothing but a poetical fancy by the spirit which he introduced as 
 communing with him in his dialogue entitled the Messenger, he 
 now maintained its reality against the arguments of his friend 
 Manso ; and these arguments gave rise to the most poetical scene 
 in his history. He told Manso that he should have ocular testi- 
 mony of the spirit's existence ; and accordingly one day while 
 they were sitting together at the marquis's fireside, " he turned 
 his eyes," says Manso, " towards a window, and held them a long 
 time so intensely on it, that, when I called him, he did not answer. 
 At last, ' Behold,' said he, ' the friendly spirit which has courteous- 
 ly come to talk with me. Lift up your eyes and see the truth. 1 
 I turned my eyes thither immediately (continues the marquis) ; 
 but though I endeavoured to look as keenly as I could, I beheld 
 nothing but the rays of the sun, which streamed through the panes
 
 440 TASSO. 
 
 of the window into the chamber. Whilst I still looked around, 
 without beholding any object, Torquato began to hold, with this 
 unknown something, a most lofty converse. I heard, indeed, and 
 saw nothing but himself; nevertheless his words, at one time ques- 
 tioning, at another replying, were such as take place between those 
 who reason strictly on some important subject, And from what was 
 said by the one, the reply of the other might be easily compre- 
 hended by the intellect, although it was not heard by the ear. 
 The discourses were so lofty and marvellous, both by the sub- 
 limity of their topics and a certain unwonted manner of talking, 
 that, exalted above myself in a kind of ecstasy, I did not dare to 
 interrupt them, nor ask Tasso about the spirit, which he had an- 
 nounced to me, but which I did not see. In this way, while I 
 listened between stupefaction and rapture, a considerable time 
 had elapsed ; till at last the spirit departed, as I learned from the 
 words of Torquato ; who, turning to me, said, ' From this day 
 forward all your doubts will have vanished from your mind.' 
 ' Nay,' said I, ' they are rather increased ; since, though I have 
 heard many things worthy of marvel, I have seen nothing of what 
 you promised to shew me to dispel them.' He smiled, and said, 
 
 ' You have seen and heard more of him than perhpas ,' and 
 
 here he paused. Fearful of importuning him with new questions, 
 the discourse ended ; and the only conclusion I can draw is, what 
 I before said, that it is more likely his visions or frenzies will dis- 
 order my own mind than that I shall extirpate his true" or imagi- 
 nary opinion."* 
 
 Did the " smile" of Tasso at the close of this extraordinary 
 scene, and the words which he omitted to add, signify that his 
 friend had seen and heard more, perhaps, than the poet would, 
 have liked to explain ? Did he mean that he himself alone had 
 been seen and heard, and was author of the whole dialogue ? 
 Perhaps he did ; for credulity itself can impose ; can take 
 pleasure in seeing others as credulous as itself. On the other 
 hand, enough has become known in our days of the phenomena 
 of morbid perception, to render Tassp's actual belief in such 
 visions not at all surprising. It is not uncommon for the sanest 
 
 * Black, vol. ii. p. 240.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 441 
 
 people off delicate organisation to see faces before them while 
 going to sleep, sometimes in fantastical succession. A stronger 
 exercise of this disposition in temperaments more delicate will 
 enlarge the face to figure ; and there can be no question that an 
 imagination so heated as Tasso's, so full of the speculations of the 
 later Platonists, and accompanied by a state of body so " nerv- 
 ous," and a will so bent on its fancies, might embody whatever 
 he chose to behold. The dialogue he could as easily read in the 
 vision's looks, whether he heard it or not with ears. If Nicholay, 
 the Prussian bookseller, who saw crowds of spiritual people go 
 through his rooms, had been a poet, and possessed of as wilful an 
 imagination as Tasso, he might have gifted them all with speak- 
 ing countenances as easily as with coats and waistcoats. Sweden- 
 borg founded a religion on this morbid faculty ; and the Catholics 
 worship a hundred stories of the like sort in the Lives of the 
 Saints, many of which are equally true and false ; false in reali- 
 ty, though true in supposition. Luther himself wrote and 
 studied till he saw the Devil ; only the great reformer retained 
 enough of his naturally sturdy health and judgment to throw an 
 inkstand at Satan's head, a thing that philosophy has been doing 
 ever since. 
 
 Tasso's principal residence while at Naples had been in the 
 beautiful monastery of Mount Olivet, on which the good monks 
 begged he would write them a poem ; which he did. A cold 
 reception at Rome, and perhaps the difference of the air, brought 
 back his old lamentations ; but here again a monastery gave him 
 refuge, and he set himself down to correct his former works and 
 compose new ones. He missed, however, the comforts of society 
 and amusement which he had experienced at Naples. Neverthe- 
 less, he did not return thither. He persuaded himself that it was 
 necessary to be in Rome in order to expedite the receipt of some 
 books and manuscripts from Bergamo and other places ; but his 
 restlessness desired novelty. He thus slipped back from the 
 neighbourhood of Rome to the city itself, and from the city back 
 to the monastery, his friends in both places being probably tired 
 of his instability. He thought of returning to Mantua ; but a 
 present from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, accompanied by an 
 invitation to his court, drew him, in one of his short-lived-trans-
 
 442 TASSO. 
 
 ports, to Florence. He returned, in spite of the best and most 
 generous reception, to Rome ; then left Rome for Mantua, on 
 invitation from his ever-kind deliverer from prison, now the reign- 
 ing duke ; tired again, even of him ; returned to Rome ; then 
 once more to Naples, where the Prince of Conca, Grand Admiral 
 of the kingdom, lodged and treated him like an equal ; but he 
 grew suspicious of the admiral, and went to live with his friend 
 Manso ; quitted Manso for Rome again ; was treated with rever- 
 ence on the way, like Ariosto, by a famous leader of banditti ; 
 was received at Rome into the Vatican itself, in the apartments 
 of his friend Cintio Aldobrandino, nephew of the new pope 
 Clement the Eighth, where his hopes now seemed to be raised at 
 once to their highest and most reasonable pitch ; but fell ill, and 
 was obliged to go back to Naples for the benefit of the air. A 
 life so strangely erratic to the last (for mortal illness was ap- 
 proaching) is perhaps unique in the history of men of letters, and 
 might be therefore worth recording even in that of a less man 
 than Tasso ; but when we recollect that this poet, in spite of all 
 his weaknesses, and notwithstanding the enemies they provoked 
 and the friends they cooled, was really almost adored for his 
 genius in his own time, and instead of refusing jewels one day 
 and soliciting a ducat the next, might have settled down almost any 
 where in quiet and glory, if he had but possessed the patience to 
 do so, it becomes an association of weakness with power, and of 
 adversity with the means of prosperity, the absurdity of which 
 admiration itself can only drown in pity. 
 
 He now took up his abode in another monastery, that of San 
 Severino, where he was comforted by the visits of his friend Man- 
 so, to whom he had lately inscribed a dialogue on Friendship ; 
 for he continued writing to the last. He had also the consolation, 
 such as it was, of having the lawsuit for his mother's dowry set- 
 tled in his favour, though under circumstances that rendered it of 
 little importance, and only three months before his death. So 
 strangely did Fortune seem to take delight in sporting with a man 
 of genius, who had thought both too much of her and too little ; 
 too much for pomp's sake, and too little in prudence. Among 
 his new acquaintances were the young Marino, afterwards the 
 corrupter of Italian poetry, and the Prince of Venosa, an amateur
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 443 
 
 composer of music. The dying poet wrote madrigals for him so 
 much to his satisfaction, that, being about to marry into the house 
 of Este, he wished to reconcile him with the Duke of Ferrara ; 
 and Tasso, who to the last moment of his life seems never to have 
 been able to resist the chance of resuming old quarters, apparently 
 from the double temptation of renouncing them, wrote his old 
 master a letter full of respects and regrets. But the duke, who 
 himself died in the course of the year, was not to be moved from 
 his silence. The poet had given him the last possible offence by 
 recasting his Jerusalem, omitting the glories of the house of Este, 
 and dedicating it to another patron. Alfonso, who had been ex- 
 travagantly magnificent, though not to poets, had so weakened 
 his government, that the Pope wrested Ferrara from the hands of 
 his successor, and reduced the Este family to the possession of 
 Modena, which it still holds and dishonours. The duke and the 
 poet were thus fading away at the same time ; they never met 
 again in this world ; and a new Dante would have divided them 
 far enough in the next.* 
 
 The last glimpse of honour and glory was now opening in a 
 very grand manner on the poet the last and the greatest, as if on 
 purpose to give the climax to his disappointments. Cardinal Cin- 
 tio requested the Pope to give him the honour of a coronation. 
 It had been desired by the poet, it seems, three years before. He 
 was disappointed of it at that time ; and now that it was granted, 
 he was disappointed of the ceremony. Manso says he no longer 
 cared for it ; and, as he felt himself dying, this is not improbable. 
 Nevertheless he went to Rome for the purpose ; and though the 
 severity of the winter there delayed the intention till spring, 
 wealth and honours seemed determined to come in floods upon the 
 poor expiring great man, in order to take away the breath which 
 they had refused to support. The Pope assigned him a yearly 
 pension of a hundred scudi ; and the withholders of his mother's 
 dowry came to an accommodation by which he was to have an 
 annuity of a hundred ducats, and a considerable sum in hand. 
 
 * The world in general have taken no notice of Tasso's re-construction of his 
 Jerusalem, which he called the Gerusalemme Conquistata. It never "obtained," 
 as the phrase is. It was the mere tribute of his declining years to bigotry and 
 new acquaintances ; and therefore I say no more of it.
 
 444 TASSO. 
 
 His hand was losing strength enough to close upon the money. 
 Scarcely was the day for the coronation about to dawn, when the 
 poet felt his dissolution approaching. Alfonso's doctors had killed 
 him at last by superinducing a habit of medicine-taking, which 
 defeated its purpose. He requested leave to return to the monas- 
 tery of St. Onofrio^wrote a farewell letter to Constantini re- 
 ceived the distinguished honour of a plenary indulgence from the 
 Pope said (in terms very like what Milton might have used, had 
 he died a Catholic), that " this was the chariot upon which he 
 hoped to go crowned, not with laurel as a poet into the capitol, 
 but with glory as a saint to heaven " and expired on the 25th 
 of April, 1575, and the fifty-first year of his age, closely embra- 
 cing the crucifix, and imperfectly uttering the sentence begin- 
 ning, " Into thy hands, O Lord !"* 
 
 Even after death, success mocked him ; for the coronation took 
 place on the senseless dead body. The head was wreathed with 
 laurel ; a magnificent toga delayed for a while the shroud ; and 
 a procession took place through the city by torchlight, all the in- 
 habitants pouring forth to behold it, and painters crowding over 
 the bier to gaze on the poet's lineaments, from which they pro- 
 duced a multitude of portraits. The corpse was then buried in 
 the church of St. Onofrio ; and magnificent monuments talked of, 
 which never appeared. Manso, however, obtained leave to set 
 up a modest tablet ; and eight years afterwards a Ferrarese car- 
 dinal (Bevilacqua) made what amends he could for his country- 
 men, by erecting the stately memorial which is still to be seen. 
 
 Poor, illustrious Tasso ! weak enough to warrant pity from his 
 inferiors great enough to overshadow in death his once-fancied 
 superiors. He has been a by- word for the misfortunes of genius ; 
 but genius was not his misfortune ; it was his only good, and might 
 have brought him all happiness. It is the want of genius, as far 
 as it goes, and apart from martyrdoms for conscience' sake, which 
 produces misfortunes even to genius itself the want of as much 
 wit and balance on the common side of things, as genius is sup- 
 posed to confine to the uncommon. 
 
 Manso has left a minute account of his friend's person and 
 
 * In manus tuas, Domine. One likes to know the actual words ; at least so 
 it appears to me.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 445 
 
 manners. He was tall, even among the tall ; had a pale com- 
 plexion, sunken cheeks, lightish brown hair, head bald at the top, 
 large blue eyes, square forfihead, big nose inclining towards the 
 mouth, lips pale and thin, white teeth, delicate white hands, long 
 arms, broad chest and shoulders, legs rather strong than fleshy, 
 and the body altogether better proportioned than in good condi- 
 tion ; the result, nevertheless, being an aspect of manly beauty 
 and expression, particularly in the countenance, the dignity of 
 which marked him for an extraordinary person even to those who 
 did not know him. His demeanour was grave and deliberate ; 
 he laughed seldom ; and though his tongue was prompt, his de- 
 li veiy was slow ; and he was accustomed to repeat his last words. 
 He was expert in all manly exercises, but not equally graceful ; 
 and the same defect attended his otherwise striking eloquence in 
 public assemblies. His putting to flight the assassins in Ferrara 
 gave him such a reputation for courage, that there went about in 
 his honour a popular couplet : 
 
 "Colla penna e colla spada 
 Nessun val quanto Torquato." 
 
 For the sword as well as pen 
 Tasso is the man of men. 
 
 He was a little eater, but not averse to wine, particularly such as 
 combined piquancy with sweetness ; and he always dressed in 
 black. 
 
 Manso's account is still more particular, and yet it does not tell 
 all ; for Tasso himself informs us that he stammered, and was 
 near-sighted ;* and a Neapolitan writer who knew him adds to 
 the near-sightedness some visible defect in the eyes.f I should 
 doubt, from what Tasso says in his letters, whether he was fond 
 of speaking in public, notwithstanding his debut in that line with 
 the Fifty Amorous Conclusions. Nor does he appear to have 
 
 * Serassi, ii. 276. 
 
 t " Quern cernis, quisquis es, procera statura virum, luscis oculis, &c. hie 
 Torquatus est." Cappacio, Illustrium, Literis Virorum Elogia et Judicia, 
 quoted by Serassi, ut sup. The Latin word luscus, as well as the Italian losco, 
 means, I believe, near-sighted ; but it certainly means also a great deal more ; 
 and unless the word cernis (thou beholdest) is a mere form of speech implying 
 a foregone conclusion, it shews that the defect was obvious to the spectator.
 
 446 TASSO. 
 
 been remarkable for his conversation. Manso has left a collec- 
 tion of one hundred of his pithy sayings a suspicious amount, 
 and unfortunately more than warranting the suspicion ; for al- 
 most every one of them is traceable to some other man. They 
 come from the Greek and Latin philosophers, and the apothegms 
 of Erasmus. The two following have the greatest appearance 
 of being genuine : 
 
 A Greek, complaining that he had spoken ill of his country, 
 and maintaining that all the virtues in the world had issued out 
 of it, the poet assented ; with the addition, that they had not left 
 one behind them. 
 
 A foolish young fellow, garnished with a number of golden 
 chains, coming into a room where he was, and being overheard 
 by him exclaiming, " Is this the great man that was mad ?" 
 Tasso said, " Yes ; but that people had never put on him more 
 than one chain at a time/' 
 
 His character may be gathered, but not perhaps entirely, from 
 what has been written of his life ; for some of his earlier letters 
 shew him to have been not quite so grave and refined in his way 
 of talking as readers of the Jerusalem might suppose. He was 
 probably at that time of life not so scrupulous in his morals as he 
 professed to be during the greater part of it. His mother is 
 thought to have died of chagrin and impatience at being separated 
 so long from her husband, and not knowing what to do to save her 
 dowry from her brothers ; and I take her son to have combined 
 his mother's ultra-sensitive organisation with his father's worldly 
 imprudence and unequal spirits. The addition of the nervous 
 temperament of one parent to the aspiring nature of the other 
 gave rise to the poet's trembling eagerness for distinction ; and 
 Torquato's very love for them both hindered him from seeing 
 what should have been corrected in the infirmities which he in- 
 herited. Falling from the highest hopes of prosperity into the 
 most painful afflictions, he thus wanted solid principles of action 
 to support him, and was forced to retreat upon an excess of self- 
 esteem, which allowed his pride to become a beggar, and his nat- 
 urally kind, loving, just, and heroical disposition to condescend to 
 almost every species of inconsistency. The Duke of Ferrara,
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 447 
 
 he complains, did not believe a word he said ;* and the fact is, 
 that, partly from disease, and partly from a want of courage to 
 look his defects in the face, he beheld the same things in so many 
 different lights, and according as it suited him at the moment, 
 that, without intending falsehood, his statements are really not to 
 be relied on. He degraded even his verses, sometimes with 
 panegyrics for interest's sake, sometimes out of weak wishes to 
 oblige, of which he was afterwards ashamed ; and, with the ex- 
 ception of Constantini, we cannot be sure that any one person 
 praised in them retained his regard in his last days. His suspi- 
 cion made him a kind of Rousseau ; but he was more amiable 
 than the Genevese, and far from being in the habit of talking 
 against old acquaintances, whatever he might have thought of 
 them. It is observable, not only that he never married, but he 
 told Manso he had led a life of entire continence ever since he 
 entered the walls of his prison, being then in his thirty-fifth year.f 
 Was this out of fidelity to some mistress ? or the consequence of 
 a previous life the reverse of continent ? or was it from some 
 principle of superstition ? He had become a devotee, apparently 
 out of a dread of disbelief; and he remained extremely religious 
 for the rest of his days. The two unhappiest of Italian poets, 
 Tasso and Dante, were the two most superstitious. 
 
 As for the once formidable question concerning the compara- 
 tive merits of this poet and Ariosto, which anticipated the modern 
 quarrels of the classical and romantic schools, some idea of the 
 treatment which Tasso experienced may be conceived by sup- 
 posing all that used to be sarcastic and bitter in the periodical party- 
 criticism among ourselves some thirty years back, collected into 
 one huge vial of wrath, and poured upon the new poet's head. 
 Even the great Galileo, who was a man of wit, bred up in the 
 pure Tuscan school of Berni and Casa, and who was an idolater 
 of Ariosto, wrote, when he was young, a " review " of the Jeru- 
 salem Delivered, which it is painful to read, it is so unjust and 
 
 * " II Signer Duca non crede ad alcuna mia parola." Opera, xiv. 161. 
 
 t " Fui da bocca di lui medesimo rassicurato, che dal tempo del suo ritegno 
 in sant' Anna, ch' avenne negli anni trentacinque della sua vita e sedici avanti la 
 morte, egli intieramente fu casto : degli anni primi non mi favellb mai di modo 
 ch' io possa alcuna cosa di certo qui raccontare." Opere, xxxiii. 235.
 
 448 TASSO. 
 
 contemptuous.* But now that the only final arbiter, posterity, 
 has accepted both the poets, the dispute is surely the easiest thing 
 in the world to settle ; not, indeed, with prejudices of creeds or 
 temperaments, but before any judges thoroughly sympathising 
 with the two claimants. Its solution is the principle of the 
 greater including the less. For Ariosto errs only by having an 
 unbounded circle to move in. His sympathies are unlimited ; 
 and those who think him inferior to Tasso, only do so in conse- 
 quence of their own want of sympathy with the vivacities that de- 
 grade him in their eyes. Ariosto can be as grave and exalted as 
 Tasso when he pleases, and he could do a hundred things which 
 Tasso never attempted. He is as different in this respect as 
 Shakspeare from Milton. He had far more knowledge of man- 
 kind than Tasso, and he was superior in point of taste. But it is 
 painful to make disadvantageous comparisons of one great poet 
 with another. Let us be thankful for Tasso's enchanted gardens, 
 without being forced to vindicate the universal world of his pre- 
 decessor. Suffice it to bear in mind, that the grave poet himself 
 agreed with the rest of the Italians in calling the Ferrarese the 
 " divine Ariosto ;" a title which has never been popularly given 
 to his rival. 
 
 The Jerusalem Delivered is the history of a Crusade, related 
 with poetic license. The Infidels are assisted by unlawful arts ; 
 and the libertinism that brought scandal on the Christians, is con- 
 verted into youthful susceptibility, led away by enchantment. 
 The author proposed to combine the ancient epic poets with Ari- 
 osto, or a simple plot, and uniformly dignified style, with roman- 
 tic varieties of adventure, and the luxuriance of fairy-land. He 
 did what he proposed to do, but with a judgment inferior to Vir- 
 gil's ; nay, in point of the interdependence of the adventures, to 
 Ariosto, and with far less general vigour. The mixture of affec- 
 tation with his dignity is so frequent, that, whether Boileau's fa- 
 mous line about Tasso's tinsel and Virgil's gold did or did not 
 mean to imply that the Jerusalem was nothing but tinsel, and the 
 JEneid all gold, it is certain that the tinsel is so interwoven with 
 the gold, as to render it more of a rule than an exception, and 
 
 * It is to be found in the collected works, ut supra, both of the philosopher 
 and the poet.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 449 
 
 put a provoking distance between Tasso's epic pretensions and 
 those of the greatest masters of the art. People who take for 
 granted the conceits because of the " wildness" of Ariosto, and 
 the good taste because of the "regularity" of Tasso, just assume 
 the reverse of the fact. It is a rare thing to find a conceit in 
 Ariosto ; and, where it does exist, it is most likely defensible on 
 some Shakspearian ground of subtle propriety. Open Tasso in 
 almost any part, particularly the love-scenes, and it is marvellous 
 if, before long, you do not see the conceits vexatiously interfering 
 with the beauties. 
 
 " Oh maraviglia ! Amor, che appena e nato, 
 Gia grande vola, e gia trionfa armato." Canto i. st. 47. 
 
 Oh, miracle ! Love is scarce born, when, lo, 
 He flies full wing'd, and lords it with his bow ! 
 
 " Se '1 miri fulminar ne 1' arme avvolto, 
 Marte lo stiini ; Amor, se scopre il volto." St. 58. 
 
 Mars you would think him, when his thund'ring race 
 In arms he ran ; Love, when he shew'd his face. 
 
 Which is as little true to reason as to taste ; for no god of war 
 could look like a god of love. The habit of mind would render 
 it impossible. But the poet found the prettiness of the Greek 
 Anthology irresistible. 
 
 Olindo, tied to the stake amidst the flames of martyrdom, can 
 say to his mistress : 
 
 " Altre fiamme, altri nodi amor promise." Canto ii. st. 34. 
 Other flames, other bonds than these, love promised. 
 
 The sentiment is natural, but the double use of the " flames" on 
 such an occasion, miserable. 
 
 In the third canto the fair Amazon Clorinda challenges her love 
 to single combat. 
 
 " E di due morti in un punto lo sfida." St. 23. 
 
 " And so at once she threats to kill him twice." Fairfax. 
 
 That is to say, with her valour and beauty. 
 
 Another twofold employment of flame, with an exclamation
 
 450 TASSO. 
 
 to secure our astonishment, makes its appearance in the fourth 
 canto : 
 
 " Oh miracol d' amor ! che le faville 
 Tragge del pianto, e i cor' ne 1' acqua accende." St. 76. 
 
 Oh, miracle of love ! that draweth sparks 
 
 Of fire from tears, and kindlest hearts in water ! 
 
 This puerile antithesis ofjire and water ,Jire and tee, light in dark- 
 ness, silence in speech, together with such pretty turns as wound- 
 ing one's-self in wounding others, and the worse sacrifice of con- 
 sistency and truth of feeling, lovers making long speeches on 
 the least fitting occasions, and ladies retaining their rosy cheeks 
 in the midst of fears of death, is to be met with, more or less, 
 throughout the poem. I have no doubt they were the proximate 
 cause of that general corruption of taste which was afterwards 
 completed by Marino, the acquaintance and ardent admirer of 
 Tasso when a boy. They have been laid to the charge of Pe- 
 trarch ; but, without entering into the question, how far and in 
 what instances conceits may not be natural to lovers haunted, as 
 Petrarch was, with one idea, and seeing it in every thing they 
 behold, what had the great epic poet to do with the faults of the 
 lyrical ? And what is to be said for his standing in need of the 
 excuse of bad example ? Homer and Milton were in no such 
 want. Virgil would not have copied the tricks of Ovid. There 
 is an effeminacy and self reflection in Tasso, analogous to his 
 Rinaldo, in the enchanted garden ; where the hero wore a looking- 
 glass by his side, in which he contemplated his sophisticated self, 
 and the meretricious beauty of his enchantress.* 
 
 Agreeably to this tendency to weakness, the style of Tasso, 
 when not supported by great occasions (and even the occasion 
 itself sometimes fails him), is too apt to fall into lameness and 
 commonplace, to want movement and picture ; while, at the 
 same time, with singular defect of enjoyment, it does not possess 
 
 * It is an extraordinary instance of a man's violating, in older life, the better 
 critical principles of his youth, that Tasso. in his Discourses on Poetry, should 
 have objected to a passage in Ariosto about sighs and tears, as being a " conceit 
 too lyrical," (though it was warranted by the subtleties of madness, see present 
 volume, p. 131), and yet afterwards riot in the same conceits when wholly 
 without warrant.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 451 
 
 the music which might be expected from a lyrical and voluptuous 
 poet. Bernardo prophesied of his son, that, however he might 
 surpass him in other respects, he would never equal him in sweet- 
 ness ; and he seems to have judged him rightly. I have met 
 with a passage in Torquato's prose writings (but I cannot lay my 
 hands on it), in which he expresses a singular predilection for 
 verses full of tlie same vowel. He seems, if I remember rightly, 
 to have regarded it, not merely as a pleasing variety, which it is 
 on occasion, but as a reigning principle. Voltaire (I think, in 
 his treatise on Epic Poetry) has noticed the multitude of o's in 
 the exordium of the Jerusalem. This apparent negligence seems 
 to have been intentional. 
 
 " Cant6 1' armi piet&se e '1 capitani) 
 
 Che '1 gran Sepi>lcr6 libcrb di Crist6 ; 
 Mf)lt6 egli 6pr6 c6l sennft e c6n la man6, 
 
 M6lto s&ffri nel gl6ri6s6 acquisti) ; 
 E invaii 1' infern& a lui s' 6pp6se ; e invan6 
 
 S' arm& d' Asia e di Libia il p6p6l mist& ; 
 Che il ciel gli die fev&re, e s6tt6 ai santi 
 Segni ridusse i su&i cbmpagni erranti." 
 
 The reader will not be surprised to find, that he who could thus 
 confound monotony with music, and commence his greatest poem 
 with it, is too often discordant in the rest of his versification. It 
 has been thought, that Milton might have taken from the Italians 
 the grand musical account to which he turns a list of proper 
 names, as in his enumerations of realms and deities ; but I have 
 been surprised to find how little the most musical of languages 
 appears to have suggested to its poets anything of the sort. I am 
 not aware of it, indeed, in any poets but our own. All others, 
 from Homer, with his catalogue of leaders and ships, down to 
 Metastasio himself, though he wrote for music, appear to have 
 overlooked this opportunity of playing a voluntary of fine sounds, 
 where they had no other theme ort which to modulate. Its in- 
 ventor, as far as I am aware, is that great poet, Marlowe.* 
 
 * A'i.auy(cji> ar' Tjp^tv, rfj w 
 Airtiaj' TOV iir' Ay^lfflJ TGKC li 
 lins cv (ci'rj^oio-i, 6c<i ftfiora e 
 PART III. 5
 
 452 TASSO. 
 
 There are faults of invention as well as style in the Jerusalem. 
 The Talking Bird, or bird that sings with a human voice (can- 
 to iv. 13), is a piece of inverisimilitude, which the author, perhaps, 
 thought justifiable by the speaking horses of the ancients. But 
 
 Our oiof* apd ryyt vta AvTqvOpos vie, 
 Ap^iXo^os T\ Aa/iaj TC, paxiS cv ttiorc ffaffijy. 
 
 Iliad, ii. 819. 
 
 It is curious that these five lines should abound as much in o's as Tasso's firet 
 stanza does in o's. Similar monotonies are strikingly observable in the nomen- 
 clatures of Virgil. See his most perfect poem, the Georgics : 
 
 " Omnia. secum 
 
 'Armentarius x Afer agit. tectumque, Laremque, 
 'Armaque, 'Amyclsumque canem, Cressamque pharetram." 
 
 Lib. iii. 343. 
 
 It is clear that Dante never thought of this point. See his Mangiadore, San- 
 vittore, Natan, Raban, &<. at the end of the twelfth canto of the Paradiso. Yet 
 in his time poetry was recttatlced to music. So it was in Petrarch's, who was a 
 lutenist, and who " tried" his verses, to see how they would go to the instrument. 
 Yet Petrarch could allow himself to write such a quatrain as the following 
 list of rivers : 
 
 " Non Tesin, P6, Varo, Arno, Adige e Tebro, 
 Eufrate, Tigre, Nilo, Enno, Indo e Gange, 
 Tana, Istro, Alfeo, Garrona, e '1 mar che frange, 
 Rodano, Ibero, Ren, Senna, Albia, Era, Ebro!" 
 
 In Tasso's Sette Gwrnate, to which Black thinks Milton indebted for his grand 
 use of proper names, the following is the way in which the poet writes : 
 
 " Di Silvani 
 
 Di Pani. e d' Egiplni, e d' altri erranti, 
 Ch' empier le solitarie incultfe selve 
 D' antiche maraviglie ; e quell' acc6lt6 
 Esercit6 di Bacco in 6riente 
 Ond' egli vinse, e trionfo degl' Indi, 
 Tornand6 gl6ri6so ai Greci lidi, 
 Sicc6m' e favol6so antico grido." 
 
 The most diversified passage of this kind (as far as I am aware) is Ariosto's list 
 of his friends at the close of the Orlando ; and yet such writing as follows 
 would seem to shew that it was an accident : 
 
 " 16 veggio il Fracast&ri), il Bevazzano, 
 Trifbn Gabriel, e il Tasso piu lontano ; 
 Veggb Niccolo Tiepoli, e c6n ess6 
 Niccolo Amanio in me affissar le ciglia ;
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 453 
 
 the latter were moved supernaturally for the occasion, and for a 
 very fine occasion. Tasso's bird is a mere born contradiction to 
 nature and for no necessity. The vulgar idea of the devil with 
 horns and a tail (though the retention of it argued a genius in 
 Tasso very inferior to that of Milton) is defensible, I think, on the 
 plea of the German critics, that malignity should be made a thing 
 low and deformed ; but as much cannot be said for the storehouse 
 in heaven, where St. Michael's spear is kept with which he slew 
 the dragon, and the trident which is used for making earthquakes 
 (canto vii. st. 81). The tomb which supernaturally comes out 
 of the ground, inscribed with the name and virtues of Sueno, 
 (canto viii. st. 39), is worthy only of a pantomime ; and the wiz- 
 ard in robes, with beech-leaves on his head, who walks dry-shod 
 on water, and superfluously helps the knights on their way to 
 Armida's retirement (xiv. 33), is almost as ludicrous as the 
 burlesque of the river-god in the Voyage of Bachaumont and 
 Chapelle. 
 
 But let us not wonder, nevertheless, at the effect which the 
 Jerusalem has had upon the world. It could not have had it with- 
 out great nature and power. Rinaldo, in spite of his aberrations 
 with Armida, knew the path to renown, and so did -his poet. 
 Tasso's epic, with all its faults, is a noble production, and justly 
 
 Aut6n Fulg6s6, ch' a vedermi appress6 
 Al lito, m&stra gaudifc e maraviglia. 
 II mi& Valeric) e quel che la s' 6 messo 
 Fu6r de le d&nne," &c. 
 
 Even Metastasio, who wrote expressly for singers, and often with exquisite 
 modulation, especially in his songs, forgets himself when he comes to the names 
 of his dramatis personce, " 'Artaserse, 'Aratbano ,'Arbace, Mandane, Semira, 
 Megabise," all in one play. 
 
 " Gran cose io temo. II mio germano 'Arbace 
 Parte pria de 1" aurora. II padre armato 
 Incontro, e non mi parla. 'Accusa il cielo 
 'Agitato 'Artaserse, e m' abbandona." Atto i. sc. 6. 
 
 I am far from intending to say that these reiterations are not sometimes allow- 
 able, nay, often beautiful and desirable. Alliteration itself may be rendered an 
 exquisite instrument of music. I am only speaking of monotony or discord in 
 the enumeration of proper names.
 
 MM 
 
 one of the poems of the world. Each of those poems 
 hit some one great point of universal attraction, at least in their 
 reapecthe cmmtiir and among the givers of fame in oners. 
 Homer's poemisthat of action; Dante's* of passion; Virgil's, 
 of judgment; Mfiton's, of religion; Spenser's, of poetry itself; 
 A.-. .-.<::'. :r'aninm1 m|dh I .:: Ml mmn. ^ aamaalftgBJn^ ;c'.y. 
 but in strength and readiness of accord with the whole play of 
 B) ; TasoD looked round with an ultra-sensitive temperament, 
 an amhninn which required encouragement, and his poem is 
 that of tenderness. Every thing inclines to this point in hob cir- 
 cle, with the tremulousness of the needle. Love is its all in all, 
 even to the design of the religious war which is to rescue the 
 >::_... :_:r ;:' mt -,r:<: ::' Chmn^f fnm) an| :_...-.; ::' :h.r Mnlpfflmj 
 ri_-? her.'irs ire afl L; Ipwai :-.'. '.-ra..^' :h>;r?e :c. :h.e ri^at sic-r : his 
 lender, Godfrey, notwithstanding his prudence, narrowly escapes 
 the passion, and is full of a loving consideration ; his amazoo, 
 Qnrmda, inspires the truest passion, and dies taking her lover's 
 Ins Enninia, is all love for an enemy ; his enchantress 
 . fidls from pretended love into real, and forsakes her re- 
 '..^.:-. :.:::.? -..::-:-. A.; U Uksf ----' -'- IOHnk|| |m mm 
 in hattfa>and dies on their dead bodies of a wound which he has 
 provoked on purpose. Tancred cannot achieve the enterprise of 
 ~.~-~ r.n;.". i--".rO F : rr^". .-: \ --.-.- ...- ::/. : mistress seems tc come 
 out of one of the trees. (Mindothmksn happiness to be martyred 
 at the same stake with Sophronia. The reconciliation of Rinaldo 
 with his enchanrjeai taam alnef winVni i mm mmam ::' Mai -;!:^ 
 of the poem, as if contesting its interest with religion. The Jent- 
 aninm DeKrertJ? in short, is the favourite epic of the young : all 
 the lovers in Europe have loved it. The French have forgiven 
 the author his conceits lor the sake of Ms gallantry : he is the 
 -<::-. : :' v. _ .-toilers; and Spenser, the most luxurious of his 
 brethren, plundered his bowers of bliss. Read Tasso's poem by 
 tMs gentle bght of h genius, and you pity him twenty-fold, and 
 know not what excuse to find for his jailer. 
 
 The stories translated in the present volume, though including 
 war and magic, are all love-stories. They were not selected on that 
 aMiro*. They suggested thrmnrlyc* fir selection, as containing 
 : of the finest things in the poem. They are conducted with
 
 HIS LIFE AND GENIUS. 456 
 
 great art, and the characters and affections happily varied. The 
 first (Olindo and Sophronia) is perhaps unique for the hopelessness 
 of its commencement (I mean with regard to the lovers), and the 
 perfect, and at the same time quite probable, felicity of the con- 
 clusion. There is no reason to believe that the staid and devout 
 Sophronia would have loved her adorer at all, but for the circum- 
 stance that first dooms them both to a shocking death, and then 
 sends them, with perfect warrant, from the stake to the altar. 
 Clorinda is an Amazon, the idea of whom, as such, it is impossible 
 for us to separate from very repulsive and unfeminine images ; yet, 
 under the circumstances of the story, we call to mind in her be- 
 half the possibility of a Joan of Arc's having loved and been be- 
 loved ; and her death is a surprising and most affecting variation 
 upon that of Agrican in Boiardo. Tasso's enchantress Armida is 
 a variation of the Angelica of the same poet, combined with Ari- 
 osto's Alcina ; but her passionate voluptuousness makes her quite 
 a new character in regard to the one ; and she is as different 
 from the painted hag of the Orlando as youth, beauty, and patri- 
 otic intention can make her. She is not very sentimental ; but 
 all the passion in the world has sympathised with her ; and it was 
 manly and honest in the poet not to let her Paganism and ve- 
 hemence hinder him from doing justice to her claims as a human 
 being and a deserted woman. Her fate is left in so pleasing a 
 state of doubt, that we gladly avail ourselves of it to suppose her 
 married to Rinaldo, and becoming the mother of a line of Chris- 
 tian princes. I wish they had treated her poet half so well as she 
 would infallibly have treated him herself. 
 
 But the singer of the Crusades can be strong as well as gentle. 
 You discern in his battles and single combats the poet ambitious 
 of renown, and the accomplished swordsman. The duel of Tan- 
 cred and Argantes. in which the latter is slain, is as earnest and 
 fiery writing throughout as truth and passion could desire ; that of 
 Tancred and Clorinda is also very powerful as well as affecting ; 
 and the whole siege of Jerusalem is admirable for the strength of 
 its interest. Every body knows the grand verse (not, however, 
 quite original) that summons the devils to council, " Chiama gli 
 abitator," &c. ; and the still grander, though less original one,
 
 456 TASSO. 
 
 describing the desolations of time, " Giace 1' alta Cartago."* The 
 forest filled with supernatural terrors by a magician, in order that 
 the Christians may not cut wood from it to make their engines of 
 war, is one of the happiest pieces of invention in romance. It is 
 founded in as true human feeling as those of Ariosto, and is made 
 an admirable instrument for the aggrandizement of the character 
 of Rinaldo. Godfrey's attestation of all time, and of the host of 
 heaven, when he addresses his army in the first canto, is in the 
 highest spirit of epic magnificence. So is the appearance of the 
 celestial armies, together with that of the souls of the slain Chris- 
 tian warriors, in the last canto, where they issue forth in the air 
 to assist the entrance into the conquered city. The classical 
 poets are turned to great and frequent account throughout the 
 poem ; and yet the work has a strong air of originality, partly 
 owing to the subject, partly to the abundance of love-scenes, and 
 to a certain compactness in the treatment of the main story, not- 
 withstanding the luxuriance of the episodes. The Jerusalem 
 Delivered is stately, well-ordered, full of action and character, 
 sometimes sublime, always elegant, and very interesting more 
 so, I think, as a whole, and in a popular sense, than any other 
 story in verse, riot excepting the Odyssey. For the exquisite do- 
 mestic attractiveness of the second Homeric poem is injured, like 
 the hero himself, by too many diversions from the main point. 
 There is an interest, it is true, in that very delay ; but we become 
 too much used to the disappointment. In the epic of Tasso the 
 reader constantly desires to learn how the success of the enter- 
 prise is to be brought about ; and he scarcely loses sight of any 
 of the persons but he wishes to see them again. Even in the 
 love-scenes, tender and absorbed as they are, we feel that the he- 
 roes are fighters, or going to fight. When you are introduced to 
 Armida in the Bower of Bliss, it is by warriors who come to take 
 her lover away to battle. 
 
 One of the reasons why Tasso hurt the style of his poem by a 
 manner too lyrical was, that notwithstanding its deficiency in 
 sweetness, he was one of the profusest lyrical writers of his na- 
 tion, and always having his feelings turned in upon himself. I 
 
 * See them both in the present volume, pp. 420 and 445.
 
 HIS LIFE AND GEMUS. 457 
 
 am not sufficiently acquainted with his odes arid sonnets to speak 
 of them in the gross ; but I may be allowed to express my belief 
 that they possess a great deal of fancy and feeling. It has been 
 wondered how he could write so many, considering the troubles 
 he went through : but the experience was the reason. The con- 
 stant succession of hopes, fears, wants, gratitudes, loves, and 
 the necessity of employing his imagination, accounts for all. 
 Some of his sonnets, such as those on the Countess of Scandiano's 
 lip (" Quel labbro," &c.) ; the one to Stigliano, concluding with 
 the affecting mention of himself and his lost harp ; that beginning 
 
 " Io veggio in cicla scintillar le stelle," 
 
 recur to my mind oftener than any others except Dante's " Tanto 
 gentile" and Filicaia's Lament on Italy ; and, with the exception 
 of a few of the more famous odes of Petrarch, and one or two of 
 Filicaia's and Guidi's, I know of none in Italian like several of 
 Tasso's, including his fragment " O del grand' Apennino," and 
 the exquisite chorus on the Golden Age, which struck a note in 
 the hearts of the world. 
 
 His Aminta, the chief pastoral poem of Italy, though, with the 
 exception of that ode, not equal in passages to the Faithful Shep- 
 erdess (which is a Pan to it compared with a beardless shepherd), 
 is elegant, interesting, and as superior to Guarini's more sophisti- 
 cate yet still beautiful Pastor Fido as a first thought may be sup- 
 posed to be to its emulator. The objection of its being too elegant 
 for shepherds he anticipated and nullified by making Love himself 
 account for it in a charming prologue, of which the god is the 
 speaker : 
 
 " duestc selve oggi ragionar d' Amore 
 S' udranno in nuova guisa ; e ben parassi, 
 Che la mia Deita sia qul presente 
 In se medesma, e non ne' suoi ministri. 
 Spirero nobil sensi a rozzi petti ; 
 Raddolcir6 nelle lor lingue il suono : 
 Perche, ovunque i' mi sia, io sono Amore 
 Ne' pastori non men che ncgli eroi ; 
 E la disagguaglianza de' soggetti, 
 Come a me piace, agguaglio : e questa e pure
 
 458 TASSO. 
 
 Supreraa gloria, e gran miracol mio, 
 Render simili alle piu dotte cetre 
 Le rustiche sampogne." 
 
 After new fashion shall these woods to-day 
 
 Hear love discoursed ; and it shall well be seen 
 
 That my divinity is present here 
 
 In its own person, not its ministers. 
 
 I will inbreathe high fancies in rude hearts ; 
 
 I will refine and render dulcet sweet 
 
 Their tongues ; because, wherever I may be, 
 
 Whether with rustic or heroic men, 
 
 There am I Love ; and inequality, 
 
 As it may please me, do I equalise ; 
 
 And 'tis my crowning glory and great miracle 
 
 To make the rural pipe as eloquent 
 
 Even as the subtlest harp. 
 
 
 
 I ought not to speak of Tasso's other poetry, or of his'prose, for 
 I have read little of either ; though, as they are not popular with 
 his countrymen, a foreigner may be pardoned for thinking his 
 classical tragedy, Torrismondo, not attractive his Sette Giornate 
 (Seven Days of the Creation) still less so and his platonical 
 and critical discourses better filled with authorities than reasons. 
 
 Tasso was a lesser kind of Milton, enchanted by the Sirens. 
 We discern the weak parts of his character, more or less, in all 
 his writings ; but we see also the irrepressible elegance and su- 
 periority of the mind, which, in spite of all weakness, was felt to 
 tower above its age, and to draw to it the homage as well as the 
 resentment of princes.
 
 OLINDO AND SOPHRONIA,
 
 Argument. 
 
 THE Mahomedan king of Jerusalem, at the instigation of Ismeno, a magician, 
 deprives a Christian church of its image of the Virgin, and sets it up in a 
 mosque, under a spell of enchantment, as a palladium against the Crusaders. 
 The image is stolen in the night ; and the king, unable to discover who has 
 taken it, orders a massacre of the Christian portion of his subjects, which is 
 prevented by Sophronia's accusing herself of the offence. Her lover, Olindo, 
 finding her sentenced to the stake in consequence, disputes with her the right 
 of martyrdom. He is condemned to suffer with her. The Amazon Clorinda, 
 who has come to fight on the side of Aladin, obtains their pardon in acknow- 
 ledgment of her services ; and Sophronia, who had not loved Olindo before, 
 now returns his passion, and goes with him from the stake to the marriage-altar.
 
 OLINDO AND SOPHRONIA. 
 
 GODFREY of Boulogne, the leader of the Crusaders, was now in 
 full march for Jerusalem with the Christian army ; and Aladin, 
 the old infidel king, became agitated with wrath and terror. He 
 had heard nothing but accounts of the enemy's irresistible ad- 
 vance. There were many Christians within his walls whose in- 
 surrection he dreaded ; and though he had appeared to grow 
 milder with age, he now, in spite of the frost in his veins, felt as 
 hot for cruelty, as the snake excited by the fire of summer. He 
 longed to stifle his fears of insurrection by a massacre, but dread- 
 ed the consequence in the event of the city's being taken. He 
 therefore contented himself, for the present, with laying waste the 
 country round about it, destroying every possible receptacle of 
 the invaders, poisoning the wells, and doubly fortifying the only 
 weak point in his fortifications. 
 
 At this juncture the renegade Ismeno stood before him a bad 
 old man who had studied unlawful arts. He could bind and 
 loose evil spirits, and draw the dead out of their tombs, restoring 
 to them breath and perception. This man told the king, that in 
 the church belonging to his Christian subjects there was an altar 
 underground, on which stood a veiled image of the woman whom 
 they worshipped the mother, as they called her, of their dead 
 and buried God. A dazzling light burnt for ever before it ; and 
 the walls were hung with the offerings of her credulous devotees. 
 If this image, he said, were taken away by the king's own hand, 
 and set up in a mosque, such a spell of enchantment could be 
 thrown about it as should render the city impregnable so long as 
 the idol was kept safe. 
 
 Aladin proceeded instantly to the Christian temple, and, treat- 
 ing the priests with violence, tore the image from its shrine and
 
 462 OLINDO AND SOPHRONIA. 
 
 conveyed it to his own place of worship. The necromancer then 
 muttered before it his blasphemous enchantment. 
 
 But the light of morning no sooner appeared in the mosque, 
 than the official to whose charge the palladium had been commit- 
 ted missed it from its place, and in vain searched every other to 
 find it. In truth it never was found again ; nor is it known to 
 this day how it went. Some think the Christians took it ; others 
 that Heaven interfered in order to save it from profanation. And 
 well (says the poet) does it become a pious humility so to think 
 of a disappearance so wonderful. 
 
 The king, who fell into a paroxysm of rage, not doubting that 
 some Christian was the offender, issued a proclamation setting a 
 price on the head of any one who concealed it. But no discovery 
 was made. The necromancer resorted to his art with as little 
 effect. The king then ordered a general Christian massacre. 
 His savage wrath hugged itself on the reflection, that the criminal 
 would be sure to perish, perish else who might. 
 
 The Christians heard the order with an astonishment that took 
 away all their powers of resistance. The suddenness of the pres- 
 ence of death stupified them. They did not resort even to an en- 
 treaty. They waited, like sheep, to be butchered. Little did 
 they think what kind of saviour was at hand. 
 
 There was a maiden among them of ripe years, grave and beau- 
 tiful ; one who took no heed of her beauty, but was altogether ab- 
 sorbed in high and holy thoughts. If she thought of her beauty 
 ever, it was only to subject it to the dignity of virtue. The 
 greater her worth, the more she concealed it from the world, liv- 
 ing a close life at home, and veiling herself from all eyes. 
 
 But the rays of such a jewel could not but break through their 
 casket. Love would not consent to have it so locked up. Love 
 turned her very retirement into attraction. There was a youth 
 who had become enamoured of this hidden treasure. His name 
 was Olindo ; Sophronia was that of the maiden. Olindo, like 
 herself, was a Christian ; and the humbleness of his passion was 
 equal to the worth of her that inspired it. He desired much, 
 hoped little, asked nothing.* He either knew not how to disclose 
 
 * " Brama assai, proco spera, e nulla chiede." Canto ii. st. 16. 
 A line justly famous.
 
 OLINDO AND SOPHRONIA. 463 
 
 his love, or did not dare it. And she either despised it, or did 
 not, or would not, see it. The poor youth, up to this day, had 
 got nothing by his devotion, not even a look. 
 
 The maiden, who was nevertheless as generous as she was 
 virtuous, fell into deep thought how she might save her Christian 
 brethren. She soon came to her resolve. She delayed the exe- 
 cution of it a little, only out of a sense of virgin decorum, which, 
 in its turn, made her still more resolute. She issued forth by 
 herself, in the sight of all, not muffling up her beauty, nor yet 
 exposing it. She withdrew her eyes beneath a veil, and, attired 
 neither with ostentation nor carelessness, passed through the 
 streets with unaffected simplicity, admired by all save herself. 
 She went straight before the king. His angry aspect did not re- 
 pel her. She drew aside the veil, and looked him steadily in the 
 face. 
 
 " I am come," she said, " to beg, sir, that you will suspend 
 your wrath, and withhold the orders given to your people. I 
 know and will give up the author of the deed which has offended 
 you, on that condition." 
 
 At the noble confidence thus displayed, at the sudden appari- 
 tion of so much lofty and virtuous beauty, the king's countenance 
 was confused, and its angry expression abated. Had his spirit 
 been less stern, or the look she gave him less firm in its purpose, 
 he would have loved her. But haughty beauty and haughty be- 
 holder are seldom drawn together. Glances of pleasure are the 
 baits of love. And yet, if the ungentle king was not enamoured, 
 he was impressed. He was bent on gazing at her ; he felt an 
 emotion of delight. 
 
 " Say on," he replied ; "I accept the condition." 
 
 "Behold then," said she, "the offender. The deed was the 
 work of this hand. It was I that conveyed away the image. I 
 am she whom you look for. I am the criminal to be punished." 
 
 And as she spake, she bent her head before him, as already 
 yielding it to the executioner. 
 
 Oh, noble falsehood ! when was truth to be compared with 
 thee ?* 
 
 * " Magnanima mengogna ! or quando 6 il vero 
 Si bello, che si possa a te preporre 1"
 
 464 OLINDO AND SOPHRONIA. 
 
 The king was struck dumb. He did not fall into his accus- 
 tomed transports of rage. When he recovered from his astonish- 
 ment, he said, " Who advised you to do this ? Who was your 
 accomplice ?" 
 
 " Not a soul," replied the maiden. " I would not have allowed 
 another person to share a particle of my glory. I alone knew 
 of the deed ; I alone counselled it ; I alone did it." 
 
 " Then be the consequence," cried he, " on your own head." 
 
 " 'Tis but just," returned Sophronia. " Mine was the sole 
 honour ; mine, therefore, should be the only punishment." 
 
 The tyrant at this began to feel the accession of his old wrath. 
 " Where," he said, " have you hidden the image ?" 
 
 " I did not hide it," she replied, " I burnt it. I thought it 
 fit and righteous to do so. I knew of no other way to save it 
 from the hands of the unbelieving. Ask not for what will never 
 again be found. Be content with the vengeance you have before 
 you." 
 
 Oh, chaste heart ! oh, exalted soul ! oh, creature full of noble- 
 ness ! think not to find a forgiving moment return. Beauty itself 
 is thy shield no longer. 
 
 The glorious maiden is taken and bound. The cruel king 
 has condemned her to the stake. Her veil, and the mantle that 
 concealed her chaste bosom, are torn away, and her soft arms 
 tied with a hard knot behind her. She said nothing ; she was not 
 terrified ; but yet she was not unmoved. Her bosom heaved 
 in spite of its courage. Her lovely colour was lost in a pure 
 white. 
 
 The news spread in an instant, and the city crowded to the 
 sight, Christians and all, Olindo among them. He had thought 
 within himself, " What if it should be Sophronia !" But when 
 he beheld that it was she indeed, and not only condemned, but 
 already at the stake, he made through the crowd with violence, 
 crying out, " This is not the person, this poor simpleton ! She 
 never thought of such a thing ; she had not the courage to do it ; 
 she had not the strength. How was she to carry the sacred im- 
 age away ? Let her abide by her story if she dare. I did it." 
 
 Such was the love of the poor youth for her that loved him 
 not.
 
 OLINDO AND SOPHRONIA. 465 
 
 When he came up to the stake, he gave a formal account of 
 what he pretended to have done. " I climbed in," he said, " at 
 the window of your mosque at night, and found a narrow passage 
 round to the image, where nobody could expect to meet me. I 
 shall not suffer the penalty to be usurped by another. I did the 
 deed, and I will have the honour of doing it, now that it comes to 
 this. Let our places be exchanged." 
 
 Sophronia had looked up when she heard the youth call out, 
 and she gazed on him with eyes of pity. " What madness is 
 this !" exclaimed she. " What can induce an innocent person to 
 bring destruction on himself for nothing ? Can I not bear the 
 thing by myself? Is the anger of one man so tremendous, that 
 one person cannot sustain it ? Trust me, friend, you are mistaken. 
 I stand in no need of your company." 
 
 Thus spoke Sophronia to her lover ; but not a whit was he dis- 
 posed to alter his mind. Oh, great and beautiful spectacle ! Love 
 and virtue at strife ; death the prize they contend for j ruin 
 itself the salvation of the conqueror ! 
 
 But the contest irritated the king. He felt himself set at 
 nought ; felt death itself despised, as if in despite of the inflictor. 
 " Let them be taken at their words," cried he ; " let both have 
 the prize they long for." 
 
 The youth is seized on the instant, and bound like the maiden. 
 Both are tied to the stake, and set back to back. They behold 
 not the face of one another. The wood is heaped round about 
 them ; the fire is kindled. 
 
 The youth broke out into lamentations, but only loud enough 
 to be heard by his fellow-sufferer. " Is this, then," said he, " the 
 bond which I hoped might join us ? Is this the fire which I 
 thought might possibly warm two lovers' hearts ?* Too long (is it 
 not so ?) have we been divided, and now too cruelly are we united : 
 too cruelly, I say, but not as regards me ; for since I am not to 
 be partner of thy existence, gladly do I share thy death. It is 
 thy fate, not mine, that afflicts me. Oh ! too happy were it to 
 me, too sweet and fortunate, if I could obtain grace enough to be 
 set with thee heart to heart, and so breathe out my soul into thy 
 
 * This conceit is more dwelt upon in the original, coupled with the one no- 
 ticed at p. 217.
 
 466 OLINDO AND SOPHRONIA. 
 
 lips ! Perhaps thou wouldst do the like with mine, and so give 
 me thy last sigh." 
 
 Thus spoke the youth in tears ; but the maiden gently reproved 
 him. 
 
 She said : " Other thoughts, my friend, and other lamentations 
 befit a time like this. Why thinkest thou not of thy sins, and of 
 the rewards which God has promised to the righteous ? Meet 
 thy sufferings in his name ; so shall their bitterness be made sweet, 
 and thy soul be carried into the realms above. Cast thine eyes 
 upwards, and behold them. See how beautiful is the sky ; how 
 the sun seems to invite thee towards it with its splendour." 
 
 At words so noble and piteous as these the Pagans them- 
 selves, who stood within hearing, began to weep. The Christians 
 wept too, but in voices more lowly. Even the king felt an un- 
 usual emotion of pity ; but disdaining to give way to it, turned 
 aside and withdrew. The maiden alone partook not of the com- 
 mon grief. She for whom every body wept wept not for herself. 
 
 The flames were now beginning to approach the stake, when 
 there appeared, coming through the crowd, a warrior of noble 
 mien, habited in the arms of another country. The tiger, which 
 formed the crest of his helmet, drew all eyes to it, for it was a 
 cognizance well known. They began to think that it was a hero- 
 ine instead of a hero which they saw, even the famous Clorinda. 
 Nor did they err in the supposition. 
 
 A despiser of feminine habits had Clorinda been from her 
 childhood. She disdained to put her hand to the needle and the 
 distaff. She renounced every soft indulgence, every timid retire- 
 ment, thinking that virtue could be safe wherever it went in its 
 own courageous heart ; and so she armed her countenance with 
 pride, and pleased herself with making it stern, but not to the 
 effect she looked for, for the sternness itself pleased. While yet 
 a child her little right hand would control the bit of the charger, 
 and she wielded the sword and spear, and hardened her limbs 
 with wrestling, and made them supple for the race ; and then as 
 she grew up, she tracked the footsteps of the bear and lion, and 
 followed the trumpet to the wars ; and in those and in the depths 
 of the forest she seemed a wild creature to mankind, and a man 
 to the wildest creature. She had now come out of Persia to
 
 OLINDO AND SOPHRONIA. 467 
 
 wreak her displeasure on the Christians, who had already felt the 
 sharpness of her sword ; and as she arrived near this assembled 
 multitude, death was the first thing that met her eyes, but in a 
 shape so perplexing, that she looked narrowly to discern what it 
 was, and then spurred her horse towards the scene of action. 
 The crowd gave way as she approached, and she halted as she 
 entered the circle round the stake, and sat gazing on the youth 
 and maiden. She wondered to see the male victim lamenting, 
 while the female was mute. But indeed she saw that he was 
 weeping not out of grief but pity ; or at least, not out of grief 
 for himself; and as to the maiden, she observed her to be so wrapt 
 up in the contemplation of the heavens at which she was gazing, 
 that she appeared to have already taken leave of earth. 
 
 Pity touched the heart of the Amazon, and the tears came into 
 her eyes. She felt sorry for both the victims, but chiefly for the 
 one that said nothing. She turned to a white-headed man beside 
 her, and said, " What is this ? Who are these two persons whom 
 crime, or their ill-fortune, has brought hither ?" 
 
 The man answered her briefly, but to the purpose ; and she 
 discerned at once that both must be innocent. She therefore de- 
 termined to save them. She dismounted, and set the example of 
 putting a stop to the flames, and then said to the officers, " Let 
 nobody continue this work till I have spoken to the king. Rest 
 assured he will hold you guiltless of the delay." The officers 
 obeyed, being struck with her air of confidence and authority ; 
 and she went straight towards the king, who had heard of her arri- 
 val, and who was coming to bid her welcome. 
 
 " I am Clorinda," she said. " Thou knowest me ? Then thou 
 knowest, sir, one who is desirous to defend the good faith and the 
 king of Jerusalem. I am ready for any duty that may be assigned 
 me. I fear not the greatest, nor do I disdain the least. Open 
 field or walled city, no post will come amiss to the king's ser- 
 vant." 
 
 " Illustrious maiden," answered the king, " who knoweth not 
 Clorinda ? What region is there so distant from Asia, or so far 
 away out of the paths of the sun, to which the sound of thy 
 achievements has not arrived ? Joined by thee and by thy sword 
 I fear nothing. Godfrey, methinks, is too slow to attack me.
 
 468 OLINDO AND SOPHRONIA. 
 
 Dost thou ask to which post thou shalt be appointed ? To the 
 greatest ! None else become thee. Thou art lady and mistress 
 of the war."'' 
 
 Clorinda gave the king thanks for his courtesy, and then re- 
 sumed. " Strange is it, in truth," she said, " to ask my reward 
 before I have earned it ; but confidence like this reassures me. 
 Grant me, for what I propose to do in the good cause, the lives of 
 those two persons. I wave the uncertainty of their offence ; I 
 wave the presumption of innocence afforded by their own behaviour. 
 I ask their liberation as a favour. And yet it becomes me, at the 
 same time, to confess, that I do not believe the Christians to have 
 taken the image out of the mosque. It was an impious thing of 
 the magician to put it there. An idol has no business in a Mus- 
 sulman temple, much less the idols of unbelievers ; and my 
 opinion is, that the miracle was the work of Mahomet himself, out 
 of scorn and hatred of the contamination. Let Ismeno prefer his 
 craft, if he will, to the weapons of a man ; but let him not take 
 upon himself the defence of a nation of warriors." 
 
 The warlike damsel was silent ; and the king, though he could 
 with difficulty conquer his anger, yet did so, to please his guest. 
 " They are free," said he ; " I can deny nothing to such a peti- 
 tioner. Whether it be justice or not to absolve them, absolved 
 they are. If they are innocent, I pronounce them so ; if guilty, I 
 concede their pardon." 
 
 At these words the youth and the maiden were set free ; and 
 blissful indeed was the fortune of Olindo ; for love so proved as 
 his awoke love in the noble bosom of Sophronia, and so he passed 
 from the stake to the marriage-altar, a husband, instead of a wretch 
 condemned a lover beloved, instead of a hopeless adorer.
 
 r 
 
 ' EKATE Q 
 
 TANCRED AND CLOR1NDA.
 
 , 
 
 Argument. 
 
 THE Mussulman Amazon Clorinda, who is beloved by the Christain chief 
 Tancred, goes forth in disguise at night to burn the battering tower of the 
 Christian army. She effects her purpose : but, in retreating from its discov- 
 erers, is accidentally shut out of the gate through which she had left the city. 
 She makes her way into the open country, trusting to get in at one of the other 
 gates ; but, having been watched by Tancred, who does not know her in the 
 armour in which she is disguised, a combat ensues between them, in which she 
 is slain. She requests baptism in her last moments, and receives it from the 
 hands of her despairing lover.
 
 TANCRED AND CLORINDA. 
 
 THE Christians, in their siege of Jerusalem, had brought a huge 
 rolling tower against the walls, from which they battered and 
 commanded the city with such deadly effect that the generous Am- 
 azon Clorinda resolved to go forth in disguise and burn it. She 
 disclosed her design to the chieftain Argantes, for the purpose of 
 recommending to him the care of her damsels, in case any mis- 
 fortune should happen to her ; but the warrior, jealous of the 
 glory of such an enterprise, insisted on partaking it. The old 
 king, weeping for gratitude, joyfully gave them leave ; and the 
 Soldan of Egypt, with a generous emulation, would fain join 
 them. Argantes was about to give him a disdainful refusal, 
 when the king interposed, and persuaded the Soldan to remain 
 behind, lest the city should miss too many of its best defenders at 
 a time ; adding, that the risk of sallying forth should be his, in 
 case the burners of the tower were pursued on their return. Ar- 
 gantes and the Amazon then retired to prepare for the exploit, and 
 the magician Ismeno compounded two balls of sulphur for the work 
 of destruction. 
 
 Clorinda took off her beautiful helmet, and her surcoat of cloth 
 of silver, and laid aside all her haughty arms, and dressed her- 
 self (unfortunate omen !) in black armour without polish, the 
 better to conceal herself from the enemy. Her faithful servant, 
 the good old eunuch Arsetes, who had attended her from infancy, 
 and was now following her about as well as he could with his 
 accustomed zeal, anxiously noticed what she was doing, and 
 guessing it was for some desperate enterprise, entreated her, by 
 his white hairs and all the love he had shewn her, to give it up. 
 Finding his prayers to no purpose, he requested with great emo- 
 tion that she would give ear to certain matters in her family his-
 
 472 TANCRED AND CLORINDA. 
 
 tory, which he at length felt it his duty to disclose. " It would 
 then," he said, " be for herself to judge, whether she would per- 
 sist in the enterprise -or renounce it." Clorinda, at this, looked 
 at the good man, and listened with attention. 
 
 " Not long ago," said he, " there reigned in Ethiopia, and per- 
 haps is still reigning, a king named Senapus, who in common 
 with his people professed the Christian religion. They are a 
 black, though a handsome people, and the king and his queen 
 were of the same colour. The king loved her dearly, but was 
 unfortunately so jealous, that he concealed her from the sight of 
 mankind. Had it been in his power, I think he would have hin- 
 dered the very eyes of heaven from beholding her. The sweet 
 lady, however, was wise and humble, and did every thing she 
 could to please him. 
 
 " I was not a Christian myself. I was a Pagan slave, em- 
 ployed among the women about the queen, and making one of her 
 special attendants. 
 
 " It happened that the royal bed-chamber was painted with the 
 story of a holy knight saving a maiden from a dragon ;* and the 
 maiden had a face beautifully fair, with blooming cheeks. The 
 queen often prayed and wept before this picture ; and it made so 
 great an impression on her, particularly the maiden's face, that 
 when she bore a child, she saw with consternation that the in- 
 fant's skin was of the same fair colour. This child was thyself. f 
 
 " Terrified with the thoughts of what her husband would feel 
 at such a sight, what a convincing proof he would hold it of a 
 faith on her part the reverse of spotless, she procured a babe of 
 her own colour by means of a confidant ; and before thou wert 
 baptised (which is a ceremony that takes place in Ethiopia later 
 than elsewhere) committed thee to my care to be brought up at a 
 distance. Who shall relate the tears which thy mother poured 
 forth, and the sighs and sobs with which they were interrupted ? 
 
 * St. George. 
 
 t This fiction of a white Ethiop child is taken from the Greek romance of 
 Heliodorus, book the fourth. The imaginative principle on which it is founded 
 is true to physiology, and Tasso had a right to use it ; but the particular and 
 excessive instance does not appear happy in the eyes of a modern reader ac- 
 quainted with the history of albinos.
 
 TANCRED AND CLORINDA. 473 
 
 How many times, when she thought she had given thee the last 
 embrace, did she not gather thee to her bosom once more !* At 
 length, raising her eyes to heaven, she said, ' O thou that seest 
 into the hearts of mortals, and knowest in this matter the spot- 
 lessness of mine, dark though it be otherwise with frailty and with 
 sin, save, I pray thee, this innocent creature who is denied the 
 milk of its mother's breast. Vouchsafe that she resemble her 
 hapless parent in nothing but a chaste life. And thou, celestial 
 warrior, that didst deliver the maiden out of the serpent's mouth, 
 if I have ever lit humble taper on thine altar, and set before thee 
 offerings of gold and incense, be, I implore thee, her advocate. 
 Be her advocate to such purpose, that in every turn of fortune 
 she may be enabled to count on thy good help.' Here she ceased, 
 tore to her very heart-strings, with a face painted of the colour of 
 death ; and I, weeping myself, received thee, and bore thee away 
 hidden in a sweet covering of flowers and leaves. 
 
 " I journeyed with thee along a forest, where a tiger came 
 upon us with fury in its eyes. I betook me, alas ! to a tree, and 
 left thee lying on the ground, such terror was in me ; and the 
 horrible beast looked down upon thee. But it fell to licking thee 
 with its dreadful tongue, and thou didst smile to it, and put thy 
 little hand to its jaws ; and lo ! it gave thee suck, being a mother 
 itself, and then, wonderful to relate, it returned into the woods, 
 leaving me to venture down from the tree, and bear thee onward 
 to my place of refuge. There, in a little obscure cottage, I had 
 thee nursed for more than a year ; till, feeling that I grew old, I 
 resolved to avail myself of the riches the queen had given me, 
 and go into my own country, which was Egypt. I set out for it 
 accordingly, and had to cross a torrent where thieves threatened 
 me on one side, and the fierce water on the other. I plunged in, 
 holding thee above the torrent with one hand, till I came to an 
 eddy that tore thee from me. I thought thee lost. What was 
 my delight and astonishment, on reaching the bank, to find that 
 the water itself had tossed thee upon it in safety ! 
 
 * The conceit is more antithetically put in the original : 
 
 " Ch' egli avria del candor che in te si vede 
 Argomentato in lei non bianca fede." 
 
 Canto xii. st. 34.
 
 474 TANCRED AND CLORINDA. 
 
 " But I had a dream at night, which seemed to shew me the 
 cause of thy good fortune. A warrior appeared before me with a 
 threatening countenance, holding a sword in my face, and saying 
 in an imperious voice, ' Obey the commands of the child's mother 
 and of me, and baptise it. She is favoured of Heaven, and jier 
 lot is in my keeping. It was I that put tenderness in the heart 
 of the wild beast, and even a will to save her in the water. Woe 
 to thee, if thou believest not this vision. It is a message from the 
 skies.' 
 
 " The spirit vanished, and I awoke and pursued my journey ; 
 but thinking my own creed the true one, and therefore concluding 
 the dream to be false, I baptised thee not ; I bred thee what I was 
 myself, a Pagan ; and thou didst grow up, and become great and 
 wonderful in arms, surpassing the deeds of men, and didst acquire 
 riches and lands ; and what thy life has been since, thou knowest 
 as well as I ; ay, and thou knowest mine own ways too, how I 
 have followed and cautiously waited on thee ever, being to thee 
 both as a servant and father. 
 
 " Now yesterday morning, as I lay heavily asleep, in conse- 
 quence of my troubled mind, the same figure of the warrior made 
 its appearance, but with a countenance still more threatening, and 
 speaking in a louder voice. ' Wretch,' it exclaimed, ' the hour 
 is approaching when Clorinda shall end both her life and her be- 
 lief. She is mine in despite of thee. Misery be thine.' With 
 these words it darted away as though it flew. 
 
 " Consider then, delight of my soul, what these dreams may 
 portend. They threaten thee terrible things ; for what reason I 
 know not. Can it be, that mine own faith is the wrong one, and 
 that of thy parents the right ? Ah ! take thought at least, and 
 repress this daring courage. Lay aside these arms that frighten 
 me." 
 
 Tears hindered the old man from saying more. Clorinda grew 
 thoughtful, and felt something of dread, for she had a like kind of 
 dream. At length, however, cheerfully looking up, she said, " I 
 must follow the faith I was bred in ; the faith which thou thyself 
 bred'st me in, although thy words would now make me doubt it. 
 Neither can I give up the enterprise that calls me forth. Such
 
 TANCRED AND CLORINDA. 475 
 
 a withdrawal is not to be expected of an honourable soul. Death 
 may put on the worst face it pleases. I shall not retreat." 
 
 The intrepid maiden, however, did her best to console her good 
 friend ; but the time having arrived for the adventure, she finally 
 bade him be of good heart, and so left him. 
 
 Silently, and in the middle of the night, Argantes and Clorinda 
 took their way down the hills of Jerusalem, and, quitting the gates, 
 went stealthily towards the site of the tower. But its ever-watch- 
 ful guards were alarmed. They demanded the watch-word ; 
 and, not receiving it, cried out, " To arms ! to arms !" The 
 dauntless adventurers plunged forwards with their swords ; they 
 dashed aside every assailant, pitched the balls of sulphur into the 
 machine, and in a short time, in the midst of a daring conflict, had 
 the pleasure of seeing the smoke and the flame arise, and the 
 whole tower blazing to its destruction. A terrible sight it was to the 
 Christians. Waked up, they came crowding to the place ; and 
 the two companions, notwithstanding their skill and audacity, 
 were compelled to make a retreat. The besieged, with the king 
 at their head, now arrived also, crowding on the walls ; and the 
 gate was opened to let the adventurers in. The Soldan issued 
 forth at the same moment to cover the retreat. Argantes was 
 forced through the gate by Clorinda in spite of himself ; and she, 
 but for a luckless antagonist, would have followed him ; but a 
 soldier aiming at her a last blow, she rushed back to give the 
 man his death ; and, in the confusion of the moment, the warders, 
 believing her to have entered, shut up the gate, and the heroine 
 was left without. 
 
 Behind Clorinda was the gate before and round about her was 
 a host of foes ; and surely at that moment she thought that her 
 life was drawing to its end. Finding, however, that her dark 
 armour befriended her in the tumult, she mingled with the enemy 
 as though she had been one of themselves, and so, by degrees, 
 picked her way through the confusion caused by the fire. As the 
 wolf, with its bloody mouth, seeks covert in the woods, even so 
 Clorinda got clear out of the multitude into the darkness and the 
 open country. 
 
 Not, however, so clear, alas ! but that Tancred perceived her 
 Tancred, her foe in creed, but her adoring lover, whose heart 
 PART HI. 6
 
 476 TANCRED AND CLORINDA. 
 
 she had conquered in the midst of strife, and whose passion for 
 her she knew. But now she knew not that he had seen her ; nor 
 did he, poor valiant wretch, know that the knight in black armour 
 whom he pursued was a woman, and Clorinda. Tancred had 
 seen the warrior strike down the assailant at the gate ; he had 
 watched him as he picked his way to escape ; and Clorinda now 
 heard the unknown Tancred coming swiftly on horseback behind 
 her as she was speeding round towards another gate in hopes of 
 being let in. 
 
 The heroine at length turned, and said, " How now, friend ? 
 what is thy business ?" 
 
 " Death !" answered the pursuer. 
 
 " Thou shall have it," replied the maiden. 
 
 The knight, as his enemy was on foot, dismounted, in order to 
 render the combat equal ; and their swords are drawn in fury, 
 and the fight begins.* 
 
 Worthy of the brightest day-time was that fight worthy of a 
 theatre full of valiant beholders. Be not displeased, O Night I 
 that I draw it out of thy bosom, and set it in the serene light of 
 renown : the splendour will but the more set off the great shade 
 of thy darkness. 
 
 No trial was this of skill no contest of warding and traversing 
 and taking heed no artful interchange of blows now pretended, 
 now given in earnest, now glancing. Night-time and rage cast 
 aside all consideration. The swords horribly clashed and ham- 
 mered on one another. Not a cut descended in vain not a thrust 
 was without substance. Shame and fury aggravated one another. 
 Every blow became fiercer than the last. They closed they 
 could use their blades no longer ; they dashed the pummels of 
 their swords at one another's faces ; they butted and shouldered 
 with helm and buckler. Three times the man threw his arms 
 round the woman with other embraces than those of love three 
 
 * The poet here compares his hero and heroine to two jealous " bulls," no 
 happy comparison certainly. 
 
 " Vansi a ritrovar non altrimenti 
 Che duo tori gelosi." 
 
 St. 53.
 
 TANCRED AND CLOR1NDA. 477 
 
 times they returned to their swords, and cut and slashed one an- 
 other's bleeding bodies ; till at length they were obliged to hold 
 back for the purpose of taking breath. 
 
 Tancred and Clorinda stood fronting one another in the dark 
 ness, leaning on their swords for want of strength. The last stai 
 in the heavens was fading in the tinge of dawn ; and Tancred 
 saw that his enemy had lost more blood than himself, and it made 
 him proud and joyful. Oh, foolish mind of us humans, elated at 
 every fancy of success ! Poor wretch ! for what dost thou re. 
 joice ? ^How sad will be thy victory ! What a misery to look 
 back upon, thy delight ! Every drop of that blood will be paid 
 for with worlds of tears ! 
 
 Dimly thus looking at one another stood the combatants, bleed- 
 ing a while in peace. At length Tancred, who wished to know 
 his antagonist, said, " It hath been no good fortune of ours to be 
 compelled thus to fight where nobody can behold us ; but we have 
 at least become acquainted with the good swords of one another. 
 Let me request, therefore (if to request any thing at such a time 
 be not unbecoming), that I may be no stranger to thy name. 
 Permit me to learn, whatever be the result, who it is that shall 
 honour my death or my victory." 
 
 " I am not accustomed," answered the fierce maiden, "to dis- 
 close who I am ; nor shall I disclose it now. Suffice to hear that 
 thou seest before thee one of the burners of the tower." 
 
 Tancred was exasperated at this discovery. " In an evil mo- 
 ment," cried he, " hast thou said it. Thy silence and thy speech 
 alike disgust me." 
 
 Into the combat again they dash, feeble as they were. Fero- 
 cious indeed is the strife in which skill is not thought of, and 
 strength itself is dead ; in which valour rages instead of contends, 
 and feebleness becomes hate and fury. Oh, the gates of blood 
 that were set open in wounds upon wounds ! If life itself did 
 not come pouring forth, it was only because scorn withheld it. 
 
 As in the /Egean Sea, when the south and north winds have 
 lost the violence of their strength, the billows do not subside nev- 
 ertheless, but retain the noise and magnitude of their first motion ; 
 so the continued impulse of the combatants carried them still
 
 478 TANCRED AND CLORINDA. 
 
 against one another, hurling them into mutual injury, though they 
 had scarcely life in their bodies.* 
 
 And now the fatal hour has come when Clorinda must die. 
 The sword of Tancred is in her bosom to the very hilt. The 
 stomacher under the cuirass which enclosed it is filled with a hot 
 flood. Her legs give way beneath her. She falls she feels that 
 she is departing. The conqueror, with a still threatening coun- 
 tenance, prepares to follow up his victory, and treads on her as 
 she lies. 
 
 But a new spirit had come upon her the spirit whicjj called 
 the beloved of Heaven to itself; and, speaking in a sorrowing 
 voice, she thus uttered her last words : 
 
 " My friend, thou hast conquered I forgive thee. Forgive 
 thou me, not for my body's sake, which fears nothing, but for the 
 sake, alas ! of my soul. Baptise me, I beseech thee." 
 
 There was something in the voice, as the dying person spake 
 these words, that went, he knew not why, to the heart of Tan- 
 cred. The tears forced themselves into his eyes. Not far off 
 there was a little stream, and the conqueror went to it and filled 
 his helmet ; and returning, prepared for the pious office by un- 
 lacing his adversary's helmet. His hands trembled when he first 
 beheld the forehead, though he did not yet know it ; but when the 
 vizor was all down, and the face disclosed, he remained without 
 speech and motion. 
 
 Oh, the sight ! Oh, the recognition ! 
 
 He did not die. He summoned up all the powers within him 
 to support his heart for that moment. He resolved to hold up his 
 duty above his misery, and give life with the sweet water to her 
 whom he had slain with sword. He dipped his fingers in it, and 
 marked her forehead with the cross, and repeated the words of 
 
 * " Q,ual 1' alto Egeo, perche Aquilone o Noto 
 
 Cessi, che tutto prima il volse e scosse, 
 Non s' accheta peri), ma '1 suono e '1 moto 
 Ritien de 1' onde anco agitate e grosse ; 
 Tal, se ben manca in lor col sangue voto 
 
 Q,uel vigor che le braccia ai colpi mosse, 
 Serbano ancor 1' impeto primo, e vanno 
 Da quel sospinti a giunger danno a danno." 
 
 St. 63.
 
 TANCRED AND CLORINDA. 479 
 
 the sacred office ; and while he was repeating them, the sufferer 
 changed countenance for joy, and smiled, and seemed to say, in 
 the cheerfulness of her departure, " The heavens are opening I 
 go in peace." A paleness and a shade together then came over 
 her countenance, as if lilies had been mixed with violets. She 
 looked up at heaven, and heaven itself might be thought for very 
 tenderness to be looking at her ; and then she raised a little her 
 hand towards that of the knight (for she could not speak), and so 
 gave it him in sign of goodwill ; and with his pressure of it her 
 soul passed away, and she seemed asleep. 
 
 But Tancred no sooner beheld her dead than all the strength 
 of mind which he had summoned up to support him fell flat on 
 the instant. He would here give way to the most frantic outcries ; 
 but life and speech seemed to be shut up in one point in his heart ; 
 despair seized him like death, and he fell senseless beside her : 
 and surely he would have died indeed, had not a party of his 
 countrymen happened to come up. They were looking for wa- 
 ter, and had found it, and they discovered the bodies at the same 
 time. The leader knew Tancred by his arms. The beautiful body 
 of Clorinda, though he deemed her a Pagan, he would not leave 
 exposed to the wolves ; and so he directed both to be carried to 
 the pavilion of Tancred, and there placed in separate chambers. 
 
 Dreadful was the waking of Tancred not for the solemn 
 whispering before him not for his aching wounds, terrible as 
 they were, but for the agony of the recollection that rushed upon 
 him. He would have gone staggering out of the pavilion to seek 
 the remains of his Clorinda, and save them from the wolves ; but 
 his friends told him they were at hand, under the curtain of his 
 own dwelling. A gleam of pleasure shot across his face, and he 
 staggered into the chamber ; but when he beheld the body gored 
 with his own hand, and the face, calm indeed, but calm like a 
 pale night without stars, he trembled so, that he would have sunk 
 to the ground but for his supporters. 
 
 " O sweet face !" he exclaimed ; " thou may'st be calm now, 
 but what is to calm me ? O hand that was held up to me in sign 
 of peace and forgiveness ! to what have I brought thee ? Wretch 
 that I am, I do not even weep. Mine eyes are as cruel as my 
 hands. My blood shall be shed instead."
 
 480 TANCRED AND CLORINDA. 
 
 And with these words he began tearing off the bandages which 
 the surgeons had put upon him ; and he thrust his fingers into 
 his wounds, and would have slain himself thus outright, had not 
 the pain made him faint away. 
 
 He was then taken back to his own chamber. Godfrey came 
 in the mean time with the venerable hermit Peter ; and when the 
 sufferer awoke, they addressed him in kind words, which even 
 his impatience respected ; but it was not to be calmed till the 
 preacher put on the terrors of religion, remonstrating with him as 
 an ingrate to God, and threatening him with the doom of a sinner. 
 The tears then crept into his eyes, and he tried to be patie'nt, and 
 in some degree was so only breaking out ever and anon, now 
 with exclamations of horror, and now with fond lamentations, 
 talking as if with the shade of his beloved. 
 
 Thus lay Tancred for days together, ever moaning and woful ; 
 till, falling asleep one night towards the dawn, the shade of Clo- 
 rinda did indeed appear more beautiful than ever, and clad in 
 light and joy. She seemed to stoop and wipe the tears from his 
 eyes ; and then said, " Behold how happy I am. Behold me, O 
 beloved friend, and see how happy, and bright, and beautiful I 
 am ; and consider that it is all owing to thyself. 'Twas thou 
 that took'st me out of the false path, and made me worthy of ad- 
 mission among saints and angels. There, in heaven, I love and 
 rejoice ; and there I look to see thee in thine appointed time ; 
 after which we shall both love the great God and one another for 
 ever and ever. Be faithful, and command thyself, and look to 
 the end ; for, lo ! as far as it is permitted to a blessed spirit to 
 love mortality, even now I love thee !" 
 
 With these words the eyes of the vision grew bright beyond 
 mortal beauty ; and then it turned and was hidden in the depth 
 of its radiance, and disappeared. 
 
 Tancred slept a quiet sleep ; and when he awoke he gave 
 himself patiently up to the will of the physician ; and the re- 
 mains of Clorinda were gathered into a noble tomb.* 
 
 * This tomb, Tancred says, in an address which he makes to it, " has his 
 flames inside of it, and his tears without." 
 
 " Che dentro hai le mie fiamme, e fuori il pianto." St. 96. 
 I am loath to disturb the effect of a really touching story ; but if I do not occa- 
 sionally give instances of these conceits, my translations will belie my criticism.
 
 RINALDO AND ARMIDA:
 
 Argument. 
 
 PART I. Satan assembles the fiends in council to consider the best means 
 of opposing the Christians. Armida, the niece of the wizard king of Damas- 
 cus, is incited to go to their camp under false pretences, and endeavour to 
 weaken it ; which she does by seducing away many of the knights, and sowing 
 a discord which ends in the flight of Rinaldo. 
 
 PART II. --Armida, after making the knights feel the power of her magic, 
 dismisses them bound prisoners for Damascus. They are rescued on their way 
 by Rinaldo. Armida pursues him in wrath, but falls in love with him. 
 
 PART III. The magician Ismeno succeeds in frightening the Christians in 
 their attempt to cut wood from the enchanted forest. Rinaldo is sent for as the 
 person fated to undo the enchantment. 
 
 PART IV. Rinaldo and Armida, in love with each other, pass their time in 
 a bower of bliss. He is fetched away by two knights, and leaves her in despair. 
 
 PART V. Rinaldo disenchants the forest, and has the chief hand in the 
 taking of Jerusalem. He meets and reconciles Armida.
 
 RINALDO AND ARMIDA, ETC. 
 
 PART THE FIRST. 
 ARMIDA IN THE CHRISTIAN CAMP. 
 
 THE Christians had now commenced their attack on Jerusa- 
 lem, and brought a great rolling tower against the walls, built 
 from the wood of a forest in the neighbourhood ; when the Ma- 
 lignant Spirit, who has never ceased his war with Heaven, cast 
 in his mind how he might best defeat their purpose. It was ne- 
 cessary to divide their forces ; to destroy their tower ; to hinder 
 them from building another ; and to make one final triumphant 
 effort against the whole progress of their arms. 
 
 Forgetting how the right arm of God could launch its thunder- 
 bolts, the Fiend accordingly seated himself on his throne, and 
 ordered his powers to be brought together. 
 
 The Tartarean trumpet, with its hoarse voice, called up the 
 dwellers in everlasting darkness. The huge black caverns 
 trembled to their depths, and the blind air rebellowed with the 
 thunder. The bolt does not break forth so horribly when it 
 comes bursting after the flash out of the heavens ; nor had the 
 world before ever trembled with such an earthquake.* 
 
 * " Chiama gli abitator' de 1' ombre eterne 
 II rauco suon de la tartarea tromba. 
 Treman le spaziose atre caverne, 
 
 E 1 'aer cieco a quel romor rimbomba. 
 N6 si stridendo mai da le superne 
 
 Region! del cielo il folgor piomba : 
 Nfc si scossa gia mai trema la terra, 
 Quando i vapori in sen gravida serra." 
 
 Canto iv. st. 3. 
 
 The trump of Tartarus, with iron roar, 
 
 Called to the dwellers the black regions under : 
 6*
 
 484 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 
 
 The gods of the abyss came thronging up on all sides through 
 the gates ; terrible-looking beings with unaccountable aspects, 
 dispensers of death and horror with their eyes ; some stamping 
 with hoofs, some rolling on enormous spires, their faces human, 
 their hair serpents. There were thousands of shameless Har- 
 pies, of pallid Gorgons, of barking Scyllas, of Chimeras that 
 vomited ashes, and of monsters never before heard or thought of, 
 with perverse aspects all mixed up in one. 
 
 The Power of Evil sat looking down upon them, huger than a 
 rock in the sea, or an alp with forked summits. A certain hor- 
 rible majesty augmented the terrors of his aspect. His eyes 
 reddened; his poisonous look hung in the air like a comet; the 
 mouth, as it opened in the midst of clouds of beard, seemed an 
 abyss of darkness and blood ; and out of it, as from a volcano, 
 issued fires, and vapours, and disgust. 
 
 Satan laid forth to his dreadful hearers his old quarrel with 
 Heaven, and its new threats of an extension of its empire. Chris- 
 tendom was to be brought into Asia ; their worshippers were to 
 perish ; souls were, to be rescued from their devices, and Satan's 
 
 Hell through its caverns trembled to the core, 
 
 And the blind air rebellowed to the thunder : 
 Never yet fiery bolt more fiercely tore 
 
 The crashing firmament, like rocks, asunder ; 
 Nor with so huge a shudder earth's foundations 
 Quake to their mighty heart, lifting the nations. 
 
 The tone of this stanza was caught from a fine one in Politian, the fourth 
 verse of which (about the cataracts of the Nile) has the grandest " echo to the 
 sense" which I have met with in Italian poetry : 
 
 " Con tal romor, qualor 1' aer di scorda, 
 
 Di Giove il foco d' alta nube pioruba : 
 Con tal tumulto, onde la gente assorda, 
 
 Da 1' alte cataratte il Nil rimbomba : 
 Con tal orror del Latin sangue ingorda 
 
 Sono Megera la tartarea tromba." 
 
 Fragment on the Jousting of Guiliano de' Medici. 
 Such is the noise, when through his cloudy floor 
 
 The bolt of Jove falls on the pale world under ; 
 So shakes the land where Nile with deafening roar 
 
 Plunges his clattering cataracts in thunder; 
 Horribly so, through Latium's realm of yore, 
 
 The trump of Tartarus blew ghastly wonder.
 
 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 485 
 
 kingdom on earth put an end to. He exhorted them therefore to 
 issue forth once for all and prevent this fatal consummation by 
 the destruction of the Christian forces. Some of the leaders he 
 bade them do their best to disperse, others to slay, others to draw 
 into effeminate pleasures, into rebellion, into the ruin of the whole 
 camp, so that not a vestige might remain of its existence. 
 
 The assembly broke up with the noise of hurricanes. They 
 issued forth to look once more upon the stars, and to sow seeds 
 every where of destruction to the Christians. Satan himself 
 followed them, and entered the heart of Hydraotes, king of Da- 
 mascus. 
 
 Hydraotes was a wizard as well as a king, and held the Chris- 
 tians in abhorrence. But he was wise enough to respect their 
 valour ; and with Satan's help he discerned the likeliest way to 
 counteract it. He had a niece, who was the greatest beauty of 
 the age. He had taught her his art : and he concluded, that the 
 enchantments of beauty and magic united would prove irresist- 
 ible. He, therefore, disclosed to her his object. He told her 
 that every artifice was lawful, when the intention was to serve 
 one's country and one's faith ; and he conjured her to do uer ut- 
 most to separate Godfrey himself from his army, or in the event 
 of that not being possible, to bring away as many as she could of 
 his noblest captains. 
 
 Armida (for that was her name), proud of her beauty, and of 
 the unusual arts that she had acquired, took her way the same 
 evening, alone, and by the most sequestered paths, a female in 
 gown and tresses issuing forth to conquer an army.* 
 
 She had not travelled many days ere she came in sight of the 
 Christian camp, the outskirts of which she entered immediately. 
 The Frenchmen all flocked to see her, wondering who she was, 
 and who could have sent them so lovely a messenger. Armida 
 passed onwards, not with a misgiving air, not with an unalluring 
 
 * " La bella Armida, di sua forma altiera, 
 
 E de' doni del sesso e de 1' etate, 
 L' impresa prende : e in su la prima sera 
 
 Parte, e tiene sol vie chiuse e celate : 
 E 'n treccia e 'n gonna femminile spcra 
 Vincer popoli invitti e schiere armate." 
 
 Id. st. 27.
 
 486 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 
 
 and yet not with an immodest one. Her golden tresses she suf- 
 fered at one moment to escape from under veil, and at another 
 gathered them again within it. Her rosy mouth breathed sim- 
 plicity as well as voluptuousness. Her bosom was so artfully 
 draped, as to let itself be discerned without seeming to intend it. 
 And thus she passed along, surprising and transporting every 
 body. Coming at length among the tents of the officers, she 
 requested to be shewn that of the leader ; and Eustace eagerly 
 stepped forward to conduct her. 
 
 Eustace was the younger brother of Godfrey. He had all the 
 ardour of his time of life, and the gallantry, in every respect, of 
 a Frenchman. After paying her a profusion of compliments, 
 and learning that she was a fugitive in distress, he promised her 
 every thing which his brother's authority and his own sword 
 could do for her ; and so led her into Godfrey's presence. 
 
 The pretended fugitive made a lowly obeisance, and then stood 
 mute and blushing, till the general re-assured her. She then told 
 him, that she was the rightful queen of Damascus, whose throne 
 was usurped by an uncle ; that her uncle sought her death, from 
 which she had been saved by the man who was bribed to inflict 
 it ; and that although her creed was Mahometan, she had brought 
 her mind to conclude, that so noble an enemy as Godfrey would 
 take pity on her condition, and permit some of his captains to 
 aid the secret wishes of her people, and seat her on the throne. 
 Ten selected chiefs would overcome, she said, all opposition ; 
 and she promised in return to become his grateful and faithful 
 vassal. 
 
 The leader of the Christian army sat a while in deliberation. 
 His heart was inclined to befriend the lady, but his prudence was 
 afraid of a Pagan artifice ; and he thought it did not become his 
 piety to turn aside from the great enterprise which God had fa- 
 voured. He therefore gave her a gentle refusal ; but added, that 
 should success attend him, and Jerusalem be taken, he would in- 
 stantly do what she required. 
 
 Armida looked down, and wept. A mixture of indignation 
 and despair appeared to seize her ; and exclaiming that she had 
 no longer a wish to live, she accused, she said, not a heart so re- 
 nowned for generosity as his, but Heaven itself which had steeled
 
 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. '187 
 
 it against her. ' What was she to do ? She could not remain in 
 his camp. Virgin modesty forbade that. She was not safe out 
 of its bounds. Her enemies tracked her steps. It was fit that 
 she should die by her own hand. 
 
 An indignant pity took possession of the French officers. They 
 wondered how Godfrey could resist the prayers of a creature so 
 beautiful; and Eustace openly, though respectfully, remonstrated. 
 He said, that if ten of the best of his captains could not be spared, 
 ten others might ; that it especially became the Christian to re- 
 dress the wrongs of the innocent ; that the death of a tyrant, in- 
 stead of being a deviation from the service of God, was one of 
 the directest means of performing it ; and that France would 
 never endure to hear, that a lady had applied to her knights for 
 assistance, and found her suit refused. 
 
 A murmur of approbation followed the words of Eustace. His 
 companions pressed nearer to the general, and warmly urged his 
 request. 
 
 Godfrey assented to a wish expressed by so many, but not with 
 perfect good will. He bade them remember, that the measure 
 was the result of their own opinion, not his ; and concluded by 
 requesting them at all events, for his sake, to moderate the excess 
 of their confidence. The transported warriors had scarcely any 
 answer to make but that of congratulations to the lady. She, on 
 her side, while mischief was rejoicing in her heart, first expressed 
 her gratitude to all in words intermixed with smiles and tears, 
 and then carried herself towards every one in particular in the 
 manner which she thought most fitted to ensnare. She behaved 
 to this person with cordiality, to that with comparative reserve ; 
 to one with phrases only, to another with looks besides, and inti- 
 mations of secret preference. The ardour of some she repressed, 
 but still in a manner to rekindle it. To others she was all gaiety 
 and attraction ; and when others again had their eyes upon her, 
 she would fall into fits of absence, and shed tears, as if in secret, 
 and then look up suddenly and laugh, and put on a cheerful pa- 
 tience. And then she drew them all into her net. 
 
 Yet none of all these men confessed that passion impelled them ; 
 every body laid his enthusiasm to the account of honour Eus- 
 tace particularly, because he was most in love. He was also
 
 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 
 
 very jealous, especially of the heroical Rinaldo, Prince of Este ; 
 and as the squadron of horse to which they both belonged the 
 greatest in the army had lately been deprived of its chief, Eus- 
 tace . cast in his mind how he might keep Rinaldo from going 
 with Armida, and at the same time secure his own attendance on 
 her, by advancing him to the vacant post. He offered his ser- 
 vices to Rinaldo for the purpose, not without such emotion as let 
 the hero into his secret ; but as the latter had no desire to wait 
 on the lady, he smilingly assented, agreeing at the same time to 
 assist the wishes of the lover. The emissaries of Satan, however, 
 were at work in all quarters. If Eustace was jealous of Rinaldo 
 as a rival in love, Gernando, Prince of Norway, another of the 
 squadron that had lost its chief, was no less so of his gallantry in 
 war, and of his qualifications for being his commander. Ger. 
 nando was a haughty barbarian, who thought that every sort of 
 pre-eminence was confined to princes of blood royal. He heard 
 of the proposal of Eustace with a disgust that broke into the un- 
 worthiest expressions. He even vented it in public, in the open 
 part of the camp, when Rinaldo was standing at no great dis- 
 tance ; and the words coming to the hero's ears, and breaking 
 down the tranquillity of his contempt, the latter darted towards 
 him, sword in hand, and defied him to single combat. Gernando 
 beheld death before him, but made a show of valour, and stood 
 on his defence. A thousand swords leaped forth to back him, 
 mixed with as many voices ; and half the camp of Godfrey tried 
 to withhold the impetuous youth who was for deciding his quarrel 
 without the general's leave. But the hero's transport was not to 
 be stopped ; he dashed through them all, forced the Norwegian 
 to encounter him, and after a storm of blows that dazzled the 
 man's eyes and took away his senses, ran his sword thrice 
 through the prince's body. He then sent the blade into his 
 sheath reeking as it was, and, taking his way back to his tent, 
 reposed in the calmness of his triumph. 
 
 The victor had scarcely gone when the general arrived on the 
 ground, where he beheld the slain Prince of Norway with acute 
 feelings of regret. What was to become of his army, if the 
 leaders thus quarrelled among themselves, and his authority was 
 set at nought ? The friends of the slain man increased his an-
 
 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 489 
 
 ger against Rinaldo, by charging him with all the blame of the 
 catastrophe. The hero's friend, Tancred, assuaged it somewhat 
 by disclosing the truth, and then ventured to ask pardon for the 
 outbreak. But the wise commander shewed so many reasons 
 why such an offence could not be overlooked, and his countenance 
 expressed such a determination to resent it, that the gallant youth 
 hastened secretly to his friend, and urged him to quit the camp 
 till his services should be needed. Rinaldo at first called for his 
 arms, and was bent on resisting every body who came to seize 
 him, had it been even Godfrey himself; but Tancred shewing 
 him how unjust that would be, and how fatal to the Christian 
 cause, he consented with an ill grace to depart. He would take 
 nobody with him but two squires ; and he went away raging with 
 a sense of ill requital for his achievements, but resolving to prove 
 their value by destroying every infidel prince that he could 
 encounter. 
 
 Armida now tried in vain to make an impression on the heart 
 of Godfrey. He was insensible to all her devices ; but she suc- 
 ceeded in quitting the camp with her ten champions. Lots were 
 drawn to determine who should go ; and all who failed to be in 
 the list Eustace among them were so jealous of the rest, that 
 at night-time, after the others had been long on the road, they set 
 out to overtake them, each by himself, and all in violation of their 
 soldierly words. The ten opposed them as they came up, but to 
 no purpose. Armida reconciled them all in appearance, by 
 feigning to be devoted to each in secret ; and thus she rode on 
 with them many a mile, till she came to a castle on the Dead Sea, 
 where she was accustomed to practise her unfriendliest arts. 
 
 Meanwhile news came to Godfrey that his Egyptian enemies 
 were at hand with a great fleet, and that his caravan of provisions 
 had been taken by the robbers of the desert. His army was thus 
 threatened with ruin from desertion, starvation, and the sword. 
 He maintained a calm and even a cheerful countenance ; but in 
 his- thoughts he had great anxiety.
 
 490 AINALDO AND ARMIDA. 
 
 PART THE SECOND. 
 
 ARMIDA'S WRATH AND LOVE WITH RINALDO. 
 
 THE castle to which Armida took her prisoners occupied an 
 island close to the shore in the loathsome Dead Sea. They en- 
 tered it by means of a narrow bridge ; but if their pity had been 
 great at seeing her forced to take refuge in a spot so desolate and 
 repulsive, how pleasingly was it changed into as great a surprise 
 at finding a totally different region within the walls ! The gar- 
 dens were extensive and lovely ; the rivulets and fountains as 
 sweet as the flowery thickets they watered ; the breezes refresh- 
 ing, the skies of a sapphire blue, and the birds were singing round 
 about them in the trees. Her riches astonished them no less. 
 The side of the castle that looked on the gardens was all marble 
 and gold ; a banquet awaited them beside a water on a shady 
 lawn, consisting of the exquisites! viands on the costliest plate ; and 
 a hundred beautiful maidens attended them while they feasted. 
 The enchantress was all smiles and delight ; and such was her 
 art, that although she bestowed no favour on any body beyond 
 his banquet and his hopes, every body thought himself the favour- 
 ed lover. 
 
 But no sooner was the feast over, than the greatest and worst 
 of their astonishments ensued. The lady quitted them, saying 
 she should return presently. She did so with a troubled and un- 
 friendly countenance, having a book in one hand, and a little 
 wand in the other. She read in the book in a low voice, and 
 while she was reading shook the little wand ; and the guests, al- 
 tering in every part of their being, and shrinking into minute 
 bodies, felt an inclination, which they obeyed, to plunge into the 
 water beside them. They were fish. In a little while they 
 were again men, looking her in the face with dread and amaze-
 
 RINALDO AND ARJVUDA. 491 
 
 ment. She had restored them to their humanity. She regarded 
 them with a severe countenance, and said : " You have tasted 
 my power ; I can exercise it far more terribly can put you in 
 dungeons for ever can turn you to roots in the ground to 
 flints within the rock. Beware of my wrath, and please me ; 
 quit your faiths for mine, and fight against the blasphemer 
 Godfrey." 
 
 Every Christian but one rejected her alternative with abhor- 
 rence. Him she made one of her champions ; the rest were tied 
 and bound, and after being kept a while in a dungeon were sent 
 off as a present to the King of Egypt, with an escort that came 
 from Damascus to fetch them. 
 
 Exulting was left the fair and bigoted magician ; but she little 
 guessed what a new fortune awaited them on the road. The dis- 
 cord with which the powers of evil had seconded her endeavours 
 to weaken the Christian camp had turned in this instance against 
 herself. It had made Rinaldo a wanderer ; it had brought his 
 wanderings into this very path ; and he now met the prisoners, 
 and bade defiance to the escort. A battle ensued, in which the 
 hero won his accustomed victory. The Christians, receiving the 
 armour of their foes, joyfully took their way back to the camp ; 
 and one of the escort who escaped the slaughter, returned to Ar- 
 mida with news of the deliverance of her captives. 
 
 The mortified enchantress took horse and went in pursuit of 
 Rinaldo, with wrath and vengeance in her heart. She tracked 
 him from place to place, till she knew he must arrive on the 
 banks of the Orontes ; and there, making a stealthy circuit, she 
 cast a spell, and lay in wait for him in a little island which di- 
 vided the stream in two.* 
 
 Rinaldo came up with his squires ; he beheld on the bank a 
 pillar of white marble, and beside it on the water a little boat. 
 The pillar presented an inscription, inviting travellers to cross to 
 the island and behold a wonder of the world. The hero accepted 
 the invitation ; but as the boat was too small to hold more than 
 
 * " That sweet grove '^ * ' 
 
 Of Daphne by Orontes." Parad. Lost, book iv. 
 
 It was famous for the most luxurious worship of antiquity. Vide Gibbon, vol. 
 in. p. 198.
 
 492 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 
 
 one person, and the circumstance probably an appeal to his cour- 
 age, he bade his squires wait for him, and proceeded by himself. 
 
 On reaching the island and casting his eyes eagerly round 
 about, the adventurer could discern nothing but trees, and grottos, 
 flowers, and grass, and water. He thought himself trifled with ; 
 but as the spot was beautiful and refreshing, he took off" his hel- 
 met, resolving to stay a little and repose. He crossed to the 
 farther side of the island, and lay down on the river-side. 
 
 On a sudden he observed the water bubble and gurgle in a man- 
 ner that was very strange ; and presently the top of a head arose, 
 with beautiful hair, then the face of a damsel, then the bosom. 
 The fair creature stood half out of the stream, and warbled a 
 song so luxurious and so lulling, that the little wind there was 
 seemed to fall in order to listen ; and the young warrior was so 
 drowsed with the sweetness, that languor crept through all his 
 senses, and he slept. 
 
 Armida came from out a thicket and looked on him. She had 
 resolved that he should perish. 
 
 But when she saw how placidly he breathed, and what an inti- 
 mation of beautiful eyes there was in his very eyelids, she hung 
 over him, still looking. 
 
 In a little while she sat down by his side, always looking. She 
 hung over him as Narcissus did over the water, and indignation 
 melted out of her heart. She cooled his face with her veil ; she 
 made a fan of it ; she gave herself up to the worship of those 
 hidden eyes. Of an enemy she became a lover.* 
 
 Armida gathered trails of roses and lilies from the thickets 
 around her, and cast a spell on them, and made bands with which 
 she fettered his sleeping limbs ; and then she called her nymphs, 
 and they put him into her car, and she went away with him 
 through the air far off, even to one of the Fortunate Islands in the 
 great ocean, where her jealousy, assisted by her art, would be in 
 dread of no visitors, no discovery. She bore him to the top of a 
 mountain, and cast a spell about the mountain, to make the top 
 lovely and the sides inaccessible. She put shapes of wild beasts 
 
 * I omit a point about " fires" of love, and " ices" of the heart ; and I will 
 here observe, once for all, that I omit many such in these versions of Tasso, for 
 the reason given in the Preface.
 
 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 493 
 
 and monsters in the woods of the lowest region ; and heaps of ice 
 in the second ; and alluring and betraying shapes and enchant- 
 ments towards the summit ; and round the summit she put walls 
 and labyrinths of inextricable error ; and in the heart of these 
 was a palace by a lake, and the loveliest of gardens. 
 
 Here Rinaldo was awaked by love and beauty, and here for 
 the present he is left.
 
 4VM RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 
 
 PART THE THIRD. 
 
 MEANTIME the siege of the Holy City had gone on, with various 
 success on either side, but chiefly to the loss of the Christians. 
 The machinations of Satan were prevailing. Rinaldo, in his 
 absence, was thought to have been slain by the contrivance of 
 Godfrey, which nearly produced a revolt of the forces. Godfrey 
 was himself wounded in battle by Clorinda ; and now the great 
 wooden tower was burnt, and Clorinda slain in consequence (as 
 you have heard in another place), which oppressed the courage 
 of Tancred with melancholy. 
 
 On the other hand, the Powers of Evil were far from being as 
 prosperous as they wished. They had lost the soul of Clorinda. 
 They had seen Godfrey healed by a secret messenger from 
 Heaven, who dropt celestial balsam into his wound. They had 
 seen the return of Armida's prisoners, who had arrived just in 
 time to change the fortune of a battle, and drive the Pagans back 
 within their walls. And worse than all, they had again felt the 
 arm of St. Michael, who had threatened them with worse conse- 
 quences if they reappeared in the contest. 
 
 The fiends, however, had colleagues on earth, who plotted for 
 them meanwhile. The Christians had set about making another 
 tower ; but in this proceeding they were thwarted by the en- 
 chanter Ismeno, who cast his spells to better purpose this time 
 than he had done in the affair of the stolen image. The forest in 
 which the Christians obtained wood for these engines lay in a 
 solitary valley, not far from the camp. It was very old, dark, 
 and intricate ; and had already an evil fame as the haunt of im- 
 pure spirits. No shepherd ever took his flock there ; no Pagan 
 would cut a bough from it ; no traveller approached it, unless he
 
 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 495 
 
 had lost his way : he made a large circuit to avoid it, and pointed 
 it out anxiously to his companions. 
 
 The necessity of the Christians compelled them to defy this 
 evil repute of the forest ; and Ismeno hastened to oppose them. 
 He drew his line, and uttered his incantations, and called on the 
 spirits whom St. Michael had rebuked, bidding them come and 
 take charge of the forest every one of his tree, as a soul of its 
 body. The spirits delayed at first, not only for dread of the great 
 angel, but because they resented the biddings of mortality, even 
 in their own cause. The magician, however, persisted ; and his 
 spells becoming too powerful to be withstood, presently they came 
 pouring in by myriads, occupying the whole place, and rendering 
 the very approach to it a task of fear and labour. The first party 
 of men that came to cut wood were unable to advance when they 
 beheld the trees, but turned like children, and became the mock- 
 ery of the camp. Godfrey sent them back, with a chosen squad- 
 ron to animate them to the work ; but the squadron themselves, 
 however boldly they affected to proceed, had no sooner ap- 
 proached the spot than they found reason to forgive the fears of the 
 wood-cutters. The earth shook ; a great wind began rising, 
 with a sound of waters ; and presently, every dreadful noise ever 
 heard by man seemed mingled into one, and advancing to meet 
 them roarings of lions, hissings of serpents, Dealings and rolls 
 of thunder. The squadron went back to Godfrey, and plainly 
 confessed that it had not courage enough to enter such a place. 
 
 A leader, of the name of Alcasto, shook his head at this can- 
 dour with a contemptuous smile. He was a man of the stupider 
 sort of courage, without mind enough to conceive danger. " Pretty 
 soldiers !" exclaimed he, " to be afraid of noises and sights ! Give 
 the duty to me. Nothing shall stop Alcasto, though the place be 
 the mouth of hell." 
 
 Alcasto went ; and he went farther than the rest, and the trem- 
 bling woodcutters once more prepared L eir axes ; but, on a sud- 
 den, there sprang up between them and Oie trees a wall of fire 
 wkich girded the whole forest. It had glowing battlements and 
 towers; and on these there appeared armed spirits, with the 
 strangest and most bewildering aspects. Alcasto retired slowly 
 indeed, but with shame and terror ; nor had he the courage to re-
 
 496 UINALDO AND ARMIDA. 
 
 appear before his commander. Godfrey had him brought, but 
 could hardly get a word from his lips. The man talked like one 
 in a dream. 
 
 At last Tancred went. He would have gone before; but he 
 had neither thought the task so difficult, nor did he care for any 
 thing that was going forward. His mind was occupied with the 
 dead Clorinda. He had now work that aroused him ; and he set 
 out in good earnest for the forest, not unmoved in his imagina- 
 tion, but resolved to defy all appearances. 
 
 Arrived at the wall of fire, Tancred halted a moment, and 
 looked up at the visages on its battlements, not without alarm. 
 Many reflections passed swiftly through his mind, some urging 
 him forward, others withholding ; but he concluded with stepping 
 right through the fire. It did not resist him : he did not feel it. 
 
 The fire vanished ; and, in its stead, there poured down a storm 
 of hail and rain, black as midnight. This vanished also. 
 
 Tancred stood amazed for an instant, and then passed on. He 
 was soon in the thick of the wood, and for some time made his 
 way with difficulty. On a sudden, he issued forth into a large 
 opea glade, like an ampitheatre, in which there was nothing but 
 a cypress-tree that stood in the middle. The cypress was marked 
 with hieroglyphical characters, mixed with some words in the 
 Syrian tongue which he could read ; and these words requested 
 the stranger to spare the fated place, nor trouble the- departed 
 souls who were there shut up in the trees. Meantime the wind 
 was constantly moaning around it ; and in the moaning was a 
 sound of human sighs and tears. 
 
 Tancred's heart, for a moment, was overcome with awe and 
 pity ; but recollecting himself, and resolving to make amends for 
 his credulity, he smote with all his might at the cypress. The 
 blow, wonderful to see, produced an effusion of blood, which dyed 
 the grass about the root. Tancred's hair stood on end. He 
 smote, however, again, with double violence, resolving to see the 
 end of the marvel ; and then he heard a woful voice issuing as 
 from a tomb. 
 
 " Hast thou not hurt me," it said, " Tancred, enough already '? 
 Hast thou slain the human body which I once joyfully inhabited 
 and now must thou cut and rend me, even in this wretched en-
 
 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 497 
 
 closure ? My name was Clorinda. Every tree which thou be- 
 holdest is the habitation of some Christian or Pagan soul ; for all 
 come hither that are slain beneath the walls of the city, compelled 
 by I know not what power, or for what reason. Every bough in 
 the forest is alive ; and when thou cuttest down a tree thou 
 slayest a soul." 
 
 As a sick man in a dream thinks, and yet thinks not, that he 
 sees some dreadful monster, and, notwithstanding his doubt, wishes 
 to fly from the horrible perplexity ; so the trembling lover, though 
 suspecting what he beheld, had so frightful an image before his 
 thoughts of Clorinda weeping and wailing after death, and bleed- 
 ing in her very soul, that he had not the heart to do more, or to 
 remain in the place. He returned in bewildered sorrow to. God- 
 frey, and told him all. " It is not in my power," he said, " to 
 touch another bough of that forest."* 
 
 The astonished leader of the Christians now made up his mind 
 to go himself; and so, with prayer ai^l valour united, bring this 
 appalling adventure to some conclusion. But the hermit Peter 
 dissuaded him. The holy man, in an ecstasy of foreknowledge, 
 beheld the coming of the only champion fated to conclude it ; and 
 Godfrey himself the same night had a vision from heaven, bidding 
 him grant the petition of those who should sue him next day for 
 the recall of Rinaldo from exile Rinaldo, the right hand of the 
 army, as Godfrey was its head. 
 
 The petition was made as soon as daylight appeared : and two 
 knights, Carlo and Ubaldo, were despatched in search of the fated 
 hero. 
 
 * In the original an impetuous gust of wind carries away the sword of Tan- 
 cred; a circumstance which I mention because Collins admired it (see the quota- 
 tion from him in the Preface). I confess I cannot do so. It seems to me quite su- 
 perfluous ; and when the reader finds the sword conveniently lying for the hero 
 outside the wood, as he returns, the effect is childish and pantomimic. If the 
 magician wanted him not to fight any more, why should he give him the sword 
 back 1 And if it was meant as a present to him from Clorinda, what gave her 
 the power to make the present 1 Tasso retained both the particulars in the 
 Gerusalemme Conquistata,
 
 498 RINALDO AND ARMIDA/ 
 
 PART THE FOURTH. 
 
 THE LOVES OF RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 
 
 THE knights, with information procured on the road from a good 
 wizard, struck off for the seacoast, and embarking in a pinnace 
 which miraculously awaited them, sailed along the shores of the 
 Mediterranean for the retreat of Armida. They saw the Egyp- 
 tian army assembled at Gaza, but hoped to return with Rinaldo 
 before it could effect any thing at Jerusalem. They passed the 
 mouths of the Nile, and Alexandria, and Gyrene, and Ptolemais, 
 and the cities of the Moore, and the dangers of the Greater and 
 Lesser Whirlpools, and their pilot shewed them the spot where 
 Carthage stood, Carthage, now a dead city, whose grave is 
 scarcely discernible. For cities die ; kingdoms die ; a little 
 sand and grass covers all that was once lofty in them and glorious. 
 And yet man, fcrsooth, disdains that he is mortal ! Oh, mind of 
 ours, inordinate and proud !* 
 
 * " Giace 1' alta Cartago appena i segni 
 
 De 1' alte sue mine il lido serba. 
 Muoiono le citt i : muoiono i regni : 
 
 Copre i fasti e le pompe arena ed erba : 
 E 1' uom d' esser mortal par che si sdegni. 
 Oh nostra mente cupida e superba !" 
 
 Canto iv. st. 20. 
 
 Great Carthage is laid low. Scarcely can eye 
 Trace where she stood with all her mighty crowd : 
 
 For cities die ; kingdoms and nations die ; 
 A little sand and grass is all their shroud ; 
 
 Yet mortal man disdains mortality ! 
 O mind of ours, inordinate and proud ! 
 
 Very fine is this stanza of Tasso ; and yet, like some of the finest writing of 
 Gray, it is scarcely more than a cento. The commentators call it a " beautiful 
 imitation" of a passage in Sannazzaro, and it is; but the passage in Sannazzaro
 
 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 499 
 
 After looking towards the site of Carthage, they passed Algiers, 
 and Oran, and Tingitana, and beheld the opposite coast of Spain, 
 and then they cleared the narrow sea of Gibraltar, and came out 
 into the immeasurable ocean, leaving all sight of land behind 
 them ; and so speeding ever onward in the billows, they beheld 
 at last a cluster of mountainous and beautiful islands ; the larger 
 ones inhabited by a simple people, the smaller quite wild and 
 desolate. So at least they appeared. But in one of these small- 
 er islands was the mountain, on the top of which, in the indul- 
 gence of every lawless pleasure, lay the champion of the Chris- 
 tian faith. This the pilot shewed to the two knights, and then 
 
 is also beautiful. It contains not only the " Giace Cartago," and the " appena i 
 segni," &c., but the contrast of the pride with the mortality of man, and, above 
 all, the " dying" of the cities, which is the finest thought in the stanza of its 
 imitator. 
 
 " Qua devictse Carthaginis arces 
 Procubuere, jacentque infunsto in littore turres 
 Eversse ; quantam ille metu, quantum Ilia laborum 
 Urbs dedit insultans Latio et Laurentibus arvis ! 
 Nunc passim vix reliquias, vix nomina servans 
 Obruitur propriis non agnoscenda minis. 
 Et querimur genus infelix, humaa labare 
 Membra sevo, cum regna palam moriantur et urbes." 
 
 De Partu Virginia, lib. ii. 
 
 The commentators trace the conclusion of this passage to Dante, where he 
 says that it is no wonder families perish, when cities themselves "have their 
 terminations" (termin hano) ; but though there is a like germ of thought in 
 Dante, the mournful flower of it, the word "death" is not there. It was evi- 
 dently suggested by a passage (also pointed out by the commentators) in the 
 consolatory letter of Salpicius to Cicero, on the death of his daughter Tullia ; 
 " Heu nos homunculi indiatamur, si quis nostrum interiit, aut occisus est, 
 quorum vita brevior esse debet, cum uno loco tot oppidorum cadavera projecta 
 jaceant." (Alas ! we poor human creatures are indignant if any one of us dies 
 or is slain, frail as are the materials of which we are constituted ; and yet we 
 can see, lying together in one place, the dead bodies of I know not how many 
 cities !) The music of Tasso's line was indebted to one in Petrarch's Trionfo 
 del Tempo, v. 112: 
 
 " Passan le signorie, passano i regni ;" 
 
 and the fine concluding verse, "Oh nostra mente," to another, perhaps, in hia 
 Trimtfo delta Dimnitd, v. 61, not without a recollection of Lucretius, lib. ii. v. 14 : 
 
 " O miseras hominum menteis ! o pectora caeca !" 
 PART III. 7
 
 500 R1NALDO AND ARMIDA. 
 
 steered the pinnace into its bay ; and here, after a voyage of 
 four days and nights, it dropped its sails without need of anchor, 
 so mild and sheltered was the port, with natural moles curving 
 towards the entrance, and evergreen woods over head. 
 
 It was evening, with a beautiful sunset. The knights took 
 leave of the pilot, and proceeding instantly on their journey, well 
 furnished with all advices how to proceed, slept that night at the 
 foot of the mountain; for they were not to begin to scale it till 
 sunrise. With the first beams of the sun they arose and as- 
 cended. They had not climbed far, when a serpent rushed out 
 upon the path, entirely stopping it, but fled at the sound of a 
 slender rod, which Ubaldo whisked as he advanced. A lion, for 
 all his cavernous jaws, did the same ; nor was greater resistance 
 made by a whole herd of monsters. They now mounted with 
 great labour the region of ice and snow ; but, at the top of it, 
 emerged from winter-time into summer. The air was full of 
 sweet odours, yet fresh ; they sauntered (for they could not walk 
 fast) over a velvet sward, under trees, by the side of a shady 
 river ; and a bewitching pleasure began to invite their senses. 
 But they knew the river, and bore in mind their duty. It was 
 called the River of Laughter.* A little way on, increasing in 
 beauty as it went, it formed a lucid pool in a dell ; and by the 
 side of this pool was a table spread with every delicacy, and in 
 the midst of it two bathing damsels, talking and laughing. Some- 
 times they sprinkled one another, then dived, then partly came 
 up without shewing their faces, then played a hundred tricks, 
 pretending all the while not to see the travellers. Then they be- 
 came quiet, and sunk gently ; and, as they reappeared, one of 
 them rose half into sight, sweetly as the morning star when it 
 issues from the water dewy and dropping, or as Venus herself 
 arose out of the froth of the sea. Such looked this damsel, and 
 so did the crystal moisture go dropping from her tresses. Then 
 she turned her eyes towards the travellers, and feigning to be- 
 hold them for the first time, shrunk within herself. She has- 
 tened to undo the knot in which her tresses were tied up, and 
 
 * A fountain which caused laughter that killed people is in Pomponius 
 Mela's account of the Fortunate Islands ; and was the origin of that of Boiar- 
 do ; as I ought to have noticed in the place.
 
 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 501 
 
 shook them round about her, and down they fell to the water thick 
 and long, enclosing that beautiful sight ; and yet the enclosure it- 
 self was not less beautiful. So, hid in the pool below, and in her 
 tresses above, she glanced at the knights through her hair, with a 
 blushing gladness. She blushed and she laughed at the same 
 time ; and the blushing was more beautiful for the laughter, and 
 the laughter for the blushing ; and then she said, in a voice which 
 would alone have conquered any other hearers, " You are very 
 happy to be allowed to come to this place. Nothing but delight 
 is here. Our queen must have chosen you from a great number. 
 But be pleased first to rid you of the dust of your journey, and to 
 refresh yourselves at this table." 
 
 So spake the one ; and the other accompanied her speech with 
 accordant looks and gestures, as thft dance accompanies the music. 
 
 Nor was the allurement unfelt. 
 
 But the companions passed on, taking no notice ; and the bathers 
 went sullenly under the water.* 
 
 * All this description of the females bathing is in the highest taste of the 
 voluptuous ; particularly the latter part : 
 
 " Qua! mattutina stella esce de 1' onde 
 
 Rugiadosa e stillante : o come fuore 
 Spunt6 nascendo gia da le feconde 
 
 Spume de 1' ocean la Dea d' Amore : 
 Tale apparve costei : tal le sue bionde 
 
 Chiome stillavan cristallino umore. 
 Poi gir& gli occhi, e pur allor s' infiuse 
 Q.ue' duo vedere, e in se tutta si strinse : 
 
 E '1 crin che 'n cima al capo avea raccolto 
 
 In un sol nodo, immantinente sciolse ; 
 Che lunghissimo in giu cadendo e folto, 
 
 D' un aureo manto i molli avori involse. 
 Oh che vago spettacolo e lor tolto ! 
 
 Ma mon men vago fu chi loro il tolse. 
 Cosl da 1' acque e da capelli ascosa, 
 
 A lor si volse, Beta e vergognosa. 
 
 Rideva insieme, e insieme ella arrossia ; 
 
 Ed era nel rossor pito bello il riso, 
 E nel riso il rossor, che le copria 
 
 Insino al mento il delicate viso." 
 
 Canto xv. st. 60.
 
 502 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 
 
 The knights passed through the gates of the park of Arrnida, 
 and entered a labyrinth made with contrivance the most intricate. 
 Here their path would have been lost, but for a map traced by 
 one who knew the secret. By the help of this they threaded it 
 in safety, and issued upon a garden beautiful beyond conception. 
 Every thing that could be desired in gardens was presented to 
 their eyes in one landscape, and yet without contradiction or con- 
 fusion, flowers, fruits, water, sunny hills, descending woods, re- 
 treats into corners and grottos : and what put the last loveliness 
 upon the scene was, that the art which did all was no where dis- 
 
 Spenser, among the other obligations which it delighted him to owe to this 
 part of Tasso's poem, has translated these last twelve lines : 
 
 " With that the other likewise up arose, 
 And her fair locks, which formerly were bound 
 Up in one knot, she low adown did loose, 
 Which, flowing long and thick, her cloth'd around, 
 And th' ivory in golden mantle gown'd : 
 So that fair spectacle from him was reft ; 
 Yet that which reft it, no less fair was found. 
 So hid in locks and waves from looker's theft, 
 Nought but her lovely face she for his looking left. 
 
 Withal she laughed, and she blush'd withal ; 
 That blushing to her laughter gave more grace, 
 And laughter to her blushing." 
 
 Fairy Queen, book ii. canto 12, st. 67. 
 
 Tasso's translator, Fairfax, worthy both of his original and of Spenser, has 
 had the latter before him in his version of the passage, not without a charming 
 addition of his own at the close of the first stanza : 
 
 " And her fair locks, that in a knot were tied 
 
 High on her crown, she 'gan at large unfold : 
 Which falling long and thick, and spreading wide, 
 
 The ivory soft and white mantled in gold : 
 Thus her fair skin the dame would clothe and hide ; 
 
 And that which hid it, no less fair was hold. 
 Thus clad in waves and locks, her eyes divine 
 From them ashamed would she turn and twine. 
 
 Withal she smiled, and she blush'd withal ; 
 
 Her blush her smiling, smiles her blushing graced."
 
 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 503 
 
 cernible.* You might have supposed (so exquisitely was the 
 wild and the cultivated united) that all had somehow happened, 
 not been contrived. It seemed to be the art of Nature herself; 
 as though, in a fit of playfulness, she had imitated her imitator. 
 But the temperature of the place, if nothing else, was plainly the 
 work of magic, for blossoms and fruit abounded at the same time. 
 The ripe and the budding fig grew on the same bough ; green 
 apples were clustered upon those with red cheeks ; the vines in 
 one place had small leaves and hard little grapes, and in the next 
 they laid forth their richest tapestry in the sun, heavy with 
 bunches full of nectar. At one time you listened to the warbling 
 of birds, and a minute after, as if they had stopped on purpose, 
 nothing was heard but the whispering of winds and the fall of 
 waters. It seemed as if every thing in the place contributed to 
 the harmony and the sweetness. The notes of the turtle-dove 
 were deeper than any where else ; the hard oak, and the chaste 
 laurel, and the whole exuberant family of trees, the earth, the 
 water, every element of creation, seemed to have been compound- 
 ed but for one object, and to breathe forth the fulness of its 
 bliss.f 
 
 " E quel che '1 bello e '1 caro accresce a 1' opre, 
 L' arte, che tutto fa, nulla si scopre. 
 
 Stimi (si misto il culto e col negletto) 
 Sol natural e glii ornament! e i siti. 
 Di natura arte par, che per diletto 
 L' imitatrice sua scherzando imiti." 
 
 The idea of Nature imitating Art, and playfully imitating her, is in Ovid ; but 
 that of a mixture of cultivation and wildness is, as far as I am aware, Tasso's 
 own ; and gives him the honour of having been the first to suggest the pictu- 
 resque principle of modern gardening, as I ought to have remembered, when 
 assigning it to Spenser in a late publication (Imagination and Fancy, p. 109). 
 I should have noticed also, in the same work, the obligations of Spenser to the 
 Italian poet for the passage before quoted about the nymph in the water. 
 
 t " Par che la dura quercia e '1 casto alloro, 
 
 E tutta la frondosa ampia famiglia, 
 
 Par che la terra e 1' acqua e formi e spiri 
 
 Dolcissimi d' amor sensi e sospiri." 
 
 Id. st. 16. 
 
 Fairfax in this passage is very graceful and happy (in the first part of his
 
 504 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 
 
 The two messengers, hardening their souls with all their might 
 against the enchanting impression, moved forward silently among 
 the trees ; till, looking through the branches into a little opening 
 which formed a flower, they saw or did they but think they 
 saw ? 'ho, they saw indeed the hero and his Armida reclining 
 on the grass.* Her dress was careless, her hair loose in the 
 summer-wind. His head lay in her bosom ; a smile trembled on 
 her lips and in her eyes, like a sunbeam in water ; and as she 
 thus looked on him with passionate love, he looked up at her, face 
 to face, and returned it with all his soul. 
 
 Now she kissed his lips, now his eyes ; and then they looked 
 again at one another with their ever hungry looks, and then she 
 kissed him again, and he gave a sigh so deep you would have 
 thought his soul had gone out of him, and passed into hers. The 
 two warriors from their covert gazed on the loving scene. 
 
 At the lover's side there hung a strange accoutrement for a 
 warrior, namely, a crystal mirror. He rose a little on his elbow, 
 and gave it into Armida's hands ; and in two different objects 
 each beheld but one emotion, she hers in the glass, and he his 
 own in her eyes. But he would not suffer her to look long at 
 any thing but himself; and then they spake loving and adoring 
 words ; and after a while Armida bound up her hair, and put 
 some flowers into it, as jewels might be put upon gold, and added 
 a rose or two to the lilies of her bosom, and adjusted her veil. 
 And never did peacock look so proudly beautiful when he dis- 
 plays the pomp of his eyed plumes ; nor was ever the rainbow so 
 
 stanza he is speaking of a bird that sings with a human voice which I have 
 omitted) : 
 
 " She ceased : and as approving all she spoke 
 
 The choir of birds their heavenly tunes renew ; 
 
 The turtles sigh'd, and sighs with kisses broke ; 
 The fowls to shades unseen by pairs withdrew ; 
 
 It seem'd the laurel chaste and stubborn oak, 
 And all the gentle trees on earth that grew, 
 
 It seem'd the land, the sea, and heaven above, 
 
 All breath'd out fancy sweet, and sigh'd out love." 
 
 * " Ecco tra fronde e fronde il guardo avante 
 Penetra, e vede, o pargli di vedere, 
 Vede per certo," &c. Id. st. 17.
 
 RINALDO AND ARM1DA. 505 
 
 sweetly coloured when it curves forth its dewy bosom against the 
 light.* But lovely above all was the effect of a magic girdle 
 which the enchantress had made with her whole art, and which 
 ' she never laid aside day or night. Spirit in it had taken sub- 
 stance ; the subtlest emotions of the soul a shape and palpability. 
 Tender disdains were in it, and repulses that attracted, and levi- 
 ties that endeared, and contentments full of joy, and smiles, and 
 little words, and drops of delicious tears, and short-coming sighs, 
 and soft kisses. All these she had mingled together, and made 
 one delight out of many, and wound it about her heart, and wore 
 it for a charm irresistible. f 
 
 And now she kissed him once more, and begged leave of a 
 little absence (for love is courteous ever), and so went as usual to 
 her books and her magic arts. Rinaldo remained where he was, 
 for he had no power to wish himself out of the sweet spot ; only 
 he would stray a while among the trees, and amuse himself with 
 the birds and squirrels, and so be a loving hermit till she returned. 
 And at night they retired under one roof, still in the midst of the 
 garden. 
 
 But no sooner had Armida gone, than the two warriors issued 
 
 * The line about the peacock, 
 
 " Spiega la pompa de 1' occhiute piume," 
 Opens wide the pomp of his eyed plumes, 
 
 was such a favourite with Tasso that he has repeated it from tke Aminla, and 
 (I think) in some other place, but I cannot call it to mind. 
 
 t " Teneri sdegni, e placide e tranquille 
 Repulse, e can vezzi, e liete paci, 
 Sorrisi, e parolette, e dolci stille 
 Di pianto, e sospir' tronchi, e molli baci." 
 
 St. 25. 
 
 This is the cestus in Homer, which Venus lends to Juno for the purpose of 
 enchanting Jupiter : 
 
 H' Kai awo amOetrijiiv Xti<raro Ktarov t/iai'Ta 
 TlaiKi\ov' tv&a ie o'l 6c\Krripia iravra TCTVKTO. 
 Ev0' ivt jitv 0iAori?f, ev <3' Ificpo;, cv 6' oapiorwf, 
 Ilop^aai?, fi T' c*Xe!// voev TTVKU irep typovcavTuv. 
 
 Iliad, lib. xiv. 214. 
 
 She said ; and from her balmy bosom loosed 
 The girdle that contained all.
 
 506 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 
 
 from their hiding-place, and stood before the lover glittering in 
 their noble arms. 
 
 As a war-horse, that has been taken from the wars, and become 
 the luxurious husband of the stud, wanders among the drove in 
 the meadows in vile enjoyment, should by chance a trumpet be 
 heard in the place, or a dazzling battle-axe become visible, he 
 turns towards it that instant, and neighs, and longs to be in the 
 lists, and vehemently desires the rider on his back who is to dash 
 and be dashed at in the course ; even so turned the young hero 
 when the light of the armour flashed upon him, even so longed 
 for the war, even so shook himself up out of his bed of pleasure, 
 with all his great qualities awaked and eager. 
 
 Ubaldo saw the movement in his heart, and held right in his 
 face the shield of adamant, which had been brought for the pur- 
 pose. It was a mirror that shewed to the eyes of every one who 
 looked into it the very man as he was. 
 
 But when Rinaldo beheld himself indeed, when he read his 
 transformation, not in the flattering glass of the enchantress, but 
 by the light of this true, and simple, and severe reflector, his 
 hair tricked out with flowers and unguents, his soft mantle of ex- 
 quisitest dye, and his very sword rendered undistinguishable for 
 what it was by a garland, shame and remorse fell upon him. 
 He felt indeed like a dreamer come to himself. He looked down. 
 He could not speak. He wished to hide himself in the bottom of 
 the sea. 
 
 Ubaldo raised his voice and spoke. " All Europe and Asia," 
 said he, " are in arms. Whoever desires fame, or is a worship- 
 per of his Saviour, is a fighter in the land of Syria. Thou 
 only, O son of Bertoldo, remainest out of the high way of re- 
 nown in luxury in a little corner ; thou only, unmoved with 
 the movement of the world, the champion of a girl. What 
 dream, what lethargy can have drowned a valour like thine ? 
 What vileness have had attraction for thee ? Up, up, and with 
 us. The camp, the commander himself calls for thee ; fortune 
 and victory await thee. Come, fated warrior, and finish thy 
 work ; and see the false creed which thou hast shaken laid low 
 beneath thy inevitable sword." 
 
 On hearing these words the noble youth remained for a time
 
 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 507 
 
 without speaking, without moving. At length shame gave way 
 to a passionate sense of his duty ; and, with a new fire in his 
 cheeks, he tore away the effeminate ornaments of his servitude, 
 and quitted the spot without a word. In a few moments he had 
 threaded the labyrinth : he was outside the gate. Ere long he 
 was descending the mountain. 
 
 But meantime Armida had received news of the two visitors ; 
 and coming to look for them, and casting her eyes down the steep, 
 she beheld with his face, alas ! turned no longer towards her 
 own the hasty steps of her hero between his companions. She 
 wished to cry aloud, but was unable. She might have, resorted 
 to some of her magic devices, but her heart forbade her. She 
 ran, however for what cared she for dignity ? she ran down 
 the mountain, hoping still by her beauty and her tears to arrest 
 the fugitive ; but his feet were too strong, even for love : she did 
 not reach him till he had arrived on the sea-shore. Where was 
 her pride now ? where the scorn she had exhibited to so many 
 suitors ? where her coquetry and her self-sufficiency her love 
 of being loved, with the power to hate the lover ? The enchan- 
 tress was now taught what the passion was, in all its despair as 
 well as delight. She cried aloud. She cared not for the pres- 
 ence of the messengers. " Oh, go not, Rinaldo," she cried ; 
 " go not, or take me with thee. My heart is torn to pieces. 
 Take me, or turn and kill me. Stop, at least, and be cruel to me 
 here. If thou hast the heart to fly me, it will not be hard to 
 thee to stay and be unkind." 
 
 Even the messengers were moved at this, or seemed to be 
 moved. Ubaldo told the fugitive that it would be heroical in him 
 to wait and hear what the lady had to say, with gentleness and 
 firmness. His conquest over himself would then be complete. 
 
 Rinaldo stopped, and Armida came up breathless and in tears 
 lovelier than ever. She looked earnestly at him at first, with- 
 out a word. He gave her but a glance, and looked aside. 
 
 As a fine singer, before he lets loose his tongue in the lofty ut- 
 terance of his emotion, prepares the minds of his hearers with 
 some sweet prelude, exquisitely mod dating in a lower tone, so 
 the enchantress, whose anguish had not deprived her of all sense 
 of her art, breathed a few sighs to dispose the soul of her idol to 
 
 7*
 
 508 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 
 
 hear her, and then said : " I do not beg thee to hear me as one 
 that loves me. We both loved once ; but that is over. I beg 
 thee to hear, even though as one that loves me not. It will cost 
 thy disdain nothing to grant me that. Perhaps thou hast dis- 
 covered a pleasure in hating me : do so. I come not to deprive 
 thee of it : if it seem just to thee, just let it be. I too once hated. 
 I hated the Christians hated even thee. I thought it right to do 
 so : I was bred up to think it. I pursued thee to do thee mischief; 
 I overtook thee ; I bore thee away ; and worse than all for now, 
 perhaps, thou loathest me for it I loved thee. I loved thee, for 
 the first time that I loved any one ; nay, I made thee love me in 
 turn ; and, alas ! I gave myself into thine arms. It was wrong. 
 I was foolish ; I was wicked. I grant that I have deserved thou 
 shouldst think ill of me, that thou shouldst punish me, and quit 
 me, and hate to have any remembrance of this place which I had 
 filled with delights. Go ; pass over the seas ; make war against 
 my friends and my country ; destroy us all, and the religion we 
 believe in. Alas ! ' we' do I say ? It is mine no longer thou, 
 the cruel idol of my soul. Oh, let me go with thee, if it be but 
 as thy servant, thy slave. Let the conqueror take with him his 
 captive ; let her be mocked ; let her be pointed at ; only let her 
 be with thee. I will cut off these tresses, which no longer please 
 thee : I will clothe myself in other attire, and go with thee into 
 the battle. I have courage and strength enough to bear thy lance, 
 to lead thy spare-horse, and be, above all, thy shield-bearer thy 
 shield. Nothing shall touch thee but through me through this 
 bosom, Rinaldo. Perhaps mischance may spare thee for its sake. 
 Not a word ? not a little word ? Do I dare to boast of what thou 
 hadst once a kind word for, though now thou wilt neither look 
 upon me nor speak to me ?" 
 
 She could say no more : her words were suffocated by a tor- 
 rent of tears. But she sought to take his hand, to arrest him by 
 his mantle in vain. He could scarcely, it is true, restrain his 
 tears : but he did. He looked sorrowful, but composed ; and at 
 length he said : " Armida, would I could do as thou wishest ; but 
 I cannot. I would relieve thee instantly of all this tumult of 
 emotion. No hate is there in him that must quit thee ; no such
 
 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 509 
 
 disdain as thou fanciest ; nothing but the melancholy and impet- 
 uous sense of his duty. Thou hast erred, it is true ^erred both 
 in love and hate ; but have I not erred with thee ? and can I find 
 excuse which is not found for thyself? Dear and honoured ever 
 wilt thou be with Rinaldo, whether in joy or sorrow. Count me, 
 if it please thee, thy champion still, as far as my country and my 
 faith permit ; but here, in this spot, must be buried all else 
 buried, not for my sake only, but for that of thy beauty, thy wor- 
 thiness, thy royal blood. Consent to disparage thyself no longer. 
 Peace be with thee. I go where I have no permission to take 
 thee with me. Be happy, be wise.'"' 
 
 While Rinaldo was speaking in this manner, Armida changed 
 colour ; her bosom heaved ; her eyes took a new kind of fire ; 
 scorn rose upon her lip. When he finished, she looked at him 
 with a bitterness that rejected every word he had said ; and then 
 she exclaimed : " Thou hast no such blood in thine own veins as 
 thou canst fear to degrade. Thy boasted descent is a fiction : 
 base, and brutish, and insensible was thy stock. What being of 
 gentle blood could quit a love like mine without even a tear a 
 sigh ? What but the mockery of a man could call me his, and 
 yet leave me ? vouchsafe me his pardon, as if I had offended him ? 
 excuse my guilt and my tenderness ; he, the sage of virtue, and 
 me, the wretch ! O God ! and these are the men that take upon 
 them to slaughter the innocent, and dictate faiths to the world ! 
 Go, hard heart, with such peace as thou leavest in this bosom. 
 Begone ; take thine injustice from my sight for ever. My spirit 
 will follow thee, not as a help, but a retribution. I shall die first, 
 and thou wilt die speedily : thou wilt perish in the battle. Thou 
 wilt lie expiring among the dead and bleeding, and wilt call on 
 Armida in thy last moments, and I shall hear it yes, I shall 
 hear it ; I shall look for that." 
 
 Down fell Armida on the ground, senseless ; and Rinaldo stood 
 over her, weeping at last. Open thine eyes, poor wretch, and 
 see him. Alas, the heavens deny thee the consolation ! What 
 will he do ? Will he leave thee lying there betwixt dead and 
 alive ? Or will he go pitying thee, but still going ? He goes ; 
 he is gone ; he is in the bark, and the wind is in the sail ; and
 
 510 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 
 
 he looks back ever back ; but still goes : the shore begins to be 
 out of sight. 
 
 Armida woke, and was alone. She raved again, but it was for 
 vengeance. In a few days she was with the Egyptian army, a 
 queen at the head of her vassals, going against the Christians at 
 Jerusalem.
 
 ARNALDO AND ARMIDA. 511 
 
 PART THE FIFTH. 
 
 THE DISENCHANTMENT OF THE FOREST, AND THE 
 TAKING OF JERUSALEM, &c. 
 
 RINALDO arrived without loss of time in the Christian camp 
 before Jerusalem. Every body rejoiced to see the right hand of 
 the army. Godfrey gladly pardoned him; the hermit Peter 
 blessed him ; he himself retired to beg the forgiveness and fa- 
 vour of Heaven ; and then he went straight to the enchanted 
 forest. 
 
 It was a beautiful morning, and the forest, instead of present- 
 ing its usual terrors, appeared to him singularly tranquil and 
 pleasing. On entering it he heard not dreadful thunder-claps, 
 but harmonies made up of all sorts of gentle and lovely sounds 
 brooks, whispering winds, nightingales, organs, harps, and human 
 voices. He went slowly and cautiously, and soon came to a 
 beautiful river which encircled the heart of the wood. A bridge 
 of gold carried him over. He had no sooner crossed it than the 
 river higher up suddenly swelled and rushed like a torrent, 
 sweeping the bridge away. The harmony meanwhile had be- 
 come silent. Admiring, but nothing daunted, the hero went on. 
 
 Every thing as he advanced appeared to start into fresh beauty. 
 His steps produced lilies and roses ; here leaped up a fountain, 
 and there came falling a cascade ; the wood itself seemed to grow 
 young as with sudden spring ; and he again heard the music 
 and the human voices, though he could see no one. 
 
 Passing through the trees, he came into a glade in the heart 
 of the wood, in the centre of which he beheld a myrtle-tree, the 
 largest and most beautiful ever seen : it was taller than a cypress 
 or palm, and seemed the queen of the forest. Looking around 
 him, he observed to his astonishment an oak suddenly cleave it-
 
 512 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 
 
 self open, and out of it there came a nymph. A hundred otfcer 
 trees did the same, giving birth to as many nymphs. They were 
 all habited as we see them in theatres ; only, instead of bows and 
 arrows, each held a lute or guitar. Coming towards the hero 
 with joyful eyes, they formed a circle about him, and danced ; 
 and in their dancing they sang, and bade him welcome to the 
 haunt of their mistress, their loving mistress, of whom he was the 
 only hope and joy. Looking as they spoke towards the myrtle, 
 Rinaldo looked also, and beheld issuing out of it Armida. 
 
 Armida came sweetly towards him, with a countenance at 
 once grieving and rejoicing, but expressing above all infinite 
 affection. " And do I indeed see thee again ?" she said ; " and 
 wilt thou not fly me a second time ? am I visited to be consoled, 
 or to be treated again as an enemy ? is poor Armida so formida- 
 ble, that thou must needs close up thine helmet when thou be- 
 holdest her ? Thou mightest surely have vouchsafed her once 
 more a sight of thine eyes. Let us be friends, at least, if we may 
 be nothing more. Wilt thou not take her hand ?" 
 
 Rinaldo's answer was, to turn away as from a cheat, to look 
 towards the myrtle-tree, to draw his sword, and proceed with 
 manifest intentions of assailing it. She ran before him shrieking, 
 and hugged it round. " Nay, thou wilt not," she said, "thou 
 wilt not hurt my tree not cut and slay what is bound up with 
 the life of Armida ? Thy sword must pass first through her 
 bosom." 
 
 Armida writhed and wailed ; Rinaldo nevertheless raised his 
 sword, and it was coming against the tree, when her shape, like 
 a thing in a dream, was metamorphosed as quick as lightning. It 
 became a giant, a Briareus, wielding a hundred swords, and 
 speaking in a voice of thunder. Every one of the nymphs at 
 the same instant became a Cyclops ; tempest and earthquake en- 
 sued, and the whole air was full of ghastly spectres. 
 
 Rinaldo again raised his arm with a more vehement will ; he 
 struck, and at the same instant every horror disappeared. The 
 sky was cloudless ; the forest was neither terrible nor beautiful, 
 but heavy and sombre as of old a natural gloomy wood, but no 
 prodigy. 
 
 Rinaldo returned to the camp, his aspect that of a conqueror j
 
 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 513 
 
 the silver wings of. his crest, the white eagle, glittering in the 
 sun. The hermit Peter came forward to greet him ; a shout was 
 sent up by the whole camp ; Godfrey gave him high recep- 
 tion ; nobody envied him. Workmen, no longer trembling, were 
 sent to the forest to cut wood for the machines of war ; and the 
 tower was rebuilt, together with battering rams and balistas, and 
 catapults, most of them an addition to what they had before. The 
 tower also was now clothed with bulls-hides, as a security against 
 being set on fire ; and a bridge was added to the tower, from 
 which the besiegers could at once step on the city walls. 
 
 With these long-desired invigorations of his strength, the com- 
 mander of the army lost no time in making a general assault on 
 Jerusalem ; for a dove, supernaturally pursued by a falcon, had 
 brought him letters intended for the besieged, informing them 
 that if they could only hold out four days longer their Egyptian 
 allies would be at hand. The Pagans beheld with dismay the 
 resuscitated tower, and all the new engines coming against them. 
 They fought valiantly ; but Rinaldo and Godfrey prevailed ; 
 the former being the first to scale the walls, the latter to plant his 
 standard from the bridge. The city was entered on all sides, and 
 the enemy diiven, first into Solomon's Temple, and then into the 
 Citadel, or Tower of David. Before the assault, Godfrey had 
 been vouchsafed a sight of armies of angels in the air, accompa- 
 nied by the souls of those who had fallen before Jerusalem ; the 
 latter still fighting, the former rejoicing ; so that there was no 
 longer doubt of triumph ; only it still pleased Heaven that human 
 virtue should be tried. ^ 
 
 And now, after farther exploits on both sides, the last day of 
 the war, and the last hope of the Infidels, arrived at the same 
 time ; for the Egyptian army came up to give battle with the 
 Christians, and to restore Jerusalem, if possible, to its late owners, 
 now cramped up in one corner of it the citadel. The besiegers 
 in their narrow hold raised a shout of joy at the sight ; and God- 
 frey, leaving them to be detained in it by an experienced captain, 
 went forth to meet his new opponents. Crowns of Africa and 
 of Persia were there, and the king of the Indies ; and in the midst 
 of all, in a chariot surrounded by her knights and suitors, was 
 Armida. *
 
 514 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 
 
 The battle joined, and great was the bravery and the slaugh- 
 ter on both sides. It seemed at first all glitter and gaiety its 
 streamers flying, its arms flashing, drums and trumpets rejoicing, 
 and horses rushing with their horsemen as to the tournament. 
 Horror looked beautiful in the spectacle. Out of the midst of the 
 dread itself there issued a delight. But soon it was a bloody, 
 and a turbulent, and a raging, and a groaning thing. Pennons 
 down, horses and men rolling over, foes heaped upon one an- 
 other, bright armour exchanged for blood and dirt, flesh trampled, 
 and spirit fatigued. Brave were the Pagans ; but how could 
 they stand against Heaven ? Godfrey ordered every thing calm- 
 ly like a Divine mind ; Rinaldo swept down the fiercest multi- 
 tudes, like an arm of God. The besieged in the citadel broke 
 forth only to let the conquerors in. Jerusalem was won before 
 the battle was over. King after king fell, and yet the vanquish- 
 ed did not fly. Rinaldo went every where to hasten the rout ; 
 and still had to fight and slay on. Armida beheld him coming 
 where she sat in the midst of her knights ; he saw her, and blush- 
 ed a little ; she turned as cold as ice, then as hot as fire. Her 
 anger was doubled by the slaughter of her friends ; and with her 
 woman's hand she sent an arrow out of her bow, hoping, and yet 
 even then hoping not, to slay or to hurt him. The arrow fell on 
 him like a toy ; and he turned aside, as she thought, in disdain. 
 Yet he disdained not to smite down her champions ; and hope of 
 every kind deserted her. Resolving to die by herself in some 
 lonely spot, she got down from her chariot to horse, and fled out 
 of tl\e field. Rinaldo saw the flight ; and though one of the 
 knights that remained to her struck him such a blow as made 
 him reel in his saddle, he despatched the man with another like a 
 thunderbolt, and then galloped after the fugitive. 
 
 Armida was in the act of putting a shaft to her bosom, in order 
 to die upon it, when her arm was arrested by a mighty grasp ; 
 and turning round, she beheld with a shriek the beloved face of 
 him who had caused the ruin of her and hers. She closed her 
 disdainful eyes and fainted away. Rinaldo supports her ; he 
 loosens her girdle ; he bathes her bosom and her eyelids with his 
 tears. Coming at length to herself, still she would not look at 
 him. She would fain not have been supported by him. She en-
 
 RINALDO AND ARMIDA. 515 
 
 deavoured with her weak fingers to undo the strong ones that 
 clasped her ; she wept bitterly, and at length spoke, but still 
 without meeting his eyes. 
 
 " And may I not," she said, " even die ? must I be followed 
 and tormented even in my last moments ? What mockery of a 
 wish to save me is this ! I will not be watched ; I believe not a 
 syllable of such pity ; and I will not be made a sight of, and a 
 by- word. I ask my life of thee no longer ; I want nothing but 
 death, and death itself I would not receive at such hands ; they 
 would render even that felicity hateful : leave me. I could not 
 be hindered long from putting an end to my miseries, whatever 
 barbarous restraint might be put upon me. There are a thou- 
 sand ways of dying ; and I will be neither hindered, nor deceived, 
 nor flattered oh, never more !" 
 
 Weeping she spoke weeping always, and sobbing, and full of 
 wilful words. But yet she felt all the time the arm that was 
 round her. 
 
 " Armida," said Rinaldo, in a voice full of tenderness, " be 
 calm, and know me for what I am no enemy, no conqueror, 
 nothing that intends thee shame or dishonour ; but thy champion, 
 thy restorer he that will preserve thy kingdom for thee, and seat 
 thee in house and home. Look at me look in these eyes, and 
 see if they speak false. And oh, would to heaven thou would'st 
 be as I am in faith. There isn't a queen in all the East should 
 equal thee in glory." 
 
 His tears fell on her eyelids as he spoke scalding tears ; and 
 she looked at him, and her heart re-opened to its lord, all love and 
 worship ; and Armida said, " Behold thy handmaid ; dispose of 
 her even as thou wilt." 
 
 And that same day Godfrey of Boulogne was lord of Jerusa- 
 lem, and paid his vows on the sepulchre of his Master.
 
 APPENDIX,
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 No. I. 
 
 STOKY OF PAULO AND FRANCESCA. 
 
 POSCIA ch' i' ebbi il mio dottore udito 
 Nomar le donne antiche e i cavalieri, 
 Pieta mi vinse, e fui quasi smarrito. 
 
 F cominciai : Poeta, volentier* 
 Parlerei a que' duo che 'nsieme vanno, 
 E pajon si al vento easel leggier!. 
 
 Ed egli a me : Vedrai, quando saranno 
 Piii presso a noi : e tu allor gli prega, 
 Per quell' amor ch' ei mena ; e quei verranno. 
 
 SI toeto come '1 vento a noi gli piega, 
 Mossi la voce : O anime affannate, 
 Venite a noi parlar, s' altri noi mega. 
 
 Quail colombe dal dlsio chiamate, 
 Con 1' all aperte e ferme, al dolce nido 
 Volan per 1" aer dal voler portate : 
 
 Cotali uscir de la schiera ov' e Dido, 
 A noi venendo per 1' aer maligno, 
 Si forte fu 1' afiettuoso grido. 
 
 O animal grazioso e benigno, 
 Che visitando vai per 1' aer perso 
 Noi che tignemmo il inoiido di sanguigno ; 
 
 Se fosse arnico il Re de 1' Universe, 
 Noi pregheremmo lui per la tua pace, 
 Poich' hai pieta del nostro mal perverso.
 
 520 APPENDIX. 
 
 Di quel ch' udire e che parlar ti place, 
 Noi udiremo, e parleremo a vul, 
 Mentre che '1 vento, come fa, si tace. 
 
 Siede la terra, dove nata fui, 
 Su la marina, dove '1 Po discende, 
 Per aver pace co' seguaci sui. 
 
 Amor ch' al cor gentil ratto s' apprende, 
 Prese costui de la bella persona 
 Che mi fu tolta, e '1 modo ancor m' ofFeude : 
 
 Amor ch' a null' amato amar perdona, 
 Mi prese ael costui piacer si forte, 
 Che come vedi ancor non in' abbandona : 
 
 Amor condusse noi ad una niorte : 
 Caina attende chi 'n vita ci spense. 
 Queste parole da lor ci fur porte. 
 
 DA" ch' io 'ntesi quell' anime offense, 
 Chinai '1 viso, e tanto '1 tenni basso, 
 
 Finche '1 poeta mi disse : Che pense ? 
 
 Quando risposi, cominciai : O lasso, 
 Quanti dolci pensier, quanto disio 
 Mend costoro al doloroso passo ! 
 
 Po' mi rivolsi a loro, e parla' io, 
 E cominciai : Francesca, i tuoi martiri 
 A lagrimar mi fauno tristo e pio. 
 
 Ma dimmi : al tempo de' dolci sospiri, 
 A che, e come concedette amore 
 Che conosceste i dubbiosi desiri ? 
 
 Ed ella a me : Nessun maggior dolore, 
 Che ricordarsi del tempo felice 
 Ne la miseria ; e ci6 sa '1 tuo dottore. 
 
 Ma s' a conoscer la prima radice 
 Del nostro amor tu hai cotanto affetto, 
 Far6 come colui che piange e dice. 
 
 Noi leggiavamo un giorno per diletto 
 Di Lancilotto, come amor Io strinse : 
 Soli eravamo, e senza alcun sospetto. 
 
 Per piu fiate gli occhi ci sospinse 
 Quella lettura, e scolorocci '1 viso : 
 Ma solo un punto fu quel che ci vinse.
 
 APPENDIX. 521 
 
 Quando leggemmo il disiato riao 
 Esser baciato da cotanto amante, 
 Quest! che mai da me non sia diviso, 
 
 La bocca mi bacio tutto tremante : 
 Galeotto fu il libro, e chi lo scrisse : 
 Quel giorno piu non vi leggemmo avante. 
 
 Meutre che 1' uno spirto questo disse, 
 L' altro piangeva si, che di pietade 
 F venni men cosl com' io morisse, 
 
 E caddi come corpo morto cade. 
 
 Translation in the terza rima of the original. 
 
 SCARCE had I learnt the names of all that press 
 Of knights and dames, than I beheld a sight 
 Nigh reft my wits for very tenderness. 
 
 " O guide !" I said, " fain would I, if I might, 
 Have speech with yonder pair, that hand in hand 
 Seem borne before the dreadful wind so light." 
 
 " Wait," said my guide, " until thou seest their band 
 Sweep round. Then beg them, by that love, to stay ; 
 And they will come, and hover where we stand." 
 
 Anon the whirlwind flung them round that way ; 
 And then I cried, " Oh, if I ask nought ill, 
 Poor weary souls, have speech with me, I pray." 
 
 As doves, that leave some bevy circling still, 
 Set firm their open wings, and through the air 
 Sweep homewards, wafted by their pure good-will ; 
 
 So broke from Dido's flock that gentle pair, 
 Cleaving, to where we stood, the air malign ; 
 Such strength to bring them had a loving prayer. 
 
 The female spoke. " O living soul benign !" 
 She said, " thus, in this lost air, visiting 
 Us who with blood stain'd the sweet earth divine ; 
 
 Had we a friend in heaven's eternal King, 
 We would beseech him keep thy conscience clear, 
 Since to our anguish thou dost pity bring.
 
 522 APPENDIX. 
 
 Of what it pleaseth thee to speak and hear, 
 To that we also, till this lull be o'er 
 That falleth now, will speak and will give ear. 
 
 The place where I was born is on the shore, 
 Where Po brings all his rivers to depart 
 In peace, and fuse them with the ocean floor. 
 
 Love, that soon kindleth in a gentle heart, 
 Seized him thou look'st on for the form and face. 
 Whose end still haunts me like a rankling dart. 
 
 Love, which by love will be denied no grace, 
 Gave me a transport in my turn so true, 
 That lo ! 'tis with me, even in this place. 
 
 Love brought us to one grave. The hand that slew 
 Is doom'd to mourn us in the pit of Cain." 
 Such were the words that told me of those two. 
 
 Downcast I stood, looking so full of pain 
 To think how hard and sad a case it was, 
 That my guide ask'd what held me in that vein. 
 
 His voice aroused me ; and I said, " Alas ! 
 All their sweet thoughts then, all the steps that led 
 To love, but brought them to this dolorous pass." 
 
 Then turning my sad eyes to theirs, I said, 
 " Francesca, see these human cheeks are wet 
 Truer and sadder tears were never shed. 
 
 But tell me. At the time when sighs were sweet, 
 What made thee strive no longer ? hurried thee 
 To the last step where bliss and sorrow meet ?" 
 
 " There is no greater sorrow," answered she, 
 " And this thy teacher here knoweth full well, 
 Than calling to mind joy in misery. 
 
 But since thy wish be great to hear us tell 
 How we lost all but love, tell it I will, 
 As well as tears will let me. It befel, 
 
 One day, we read how Lancelot gazed his fill 
 At her he loved, and what his lady said. 
 We were alone, thinking of nothing ill. 
 
 Oft were our eyes suspended as we read, 
 And in our cheeks the colour went and came ; 
 Yet one sole passage struck resistance dead.
 
 APPENDIX. 533 
 
 'Twas where the lover, moth-like in his flame, 
 Drawn by her sweet smile, kiss'd it. O then, he 
 Whose lot and mine are now for aye the same, 
 
 All in a tremble, on the mouth kiss'd me. 
 The book did all. Our hearts within us burn'd 
 Through that alone. That day no more read wo." 
 
 While thus one spoke, the other spirit mourn'd 
 With wail so woful, that at his remorse 
 I felt as though I should have died. I turned 
 
 Stone-stiff; and to the ground fell like a corse. 
 
 No. II. 
 
 ACCOUNTS GIVEN BY DIFFERENT WRITERS OF THE CIRCUMSTANCES 
 RELATING TO PAULO AND FRANCESCA ; CONCLUDING WITH THE 
 ONLY FACTS ASCERTAINED. 
 
 BOCCACCIO'S ACCOUNT: 
 Translated from his Commentary on the Passage. 
 
 " You must know, that this lady, Madonna Francesca, was daughter of 
 Messer Guido the Elder, lord of Ravenna and of Cervia, and that a long and 
 grievous war having been waged between him and the lords Malatesta of Ri- 
 mini, a treaty of peace by certain mediators was at length concluded between 
 them ; the which, to the end that it might be the more firmly established, it 
 pleased both parties to desire to fortify by relationship ; and the matter of this 
 relationship was so discoursed, that the said Messer Guido agreed to give his 
 young and fair daughter in marriage to Gianciotto, the son of Messer Mala- 
 testa. Now, this being made known to certain of the friends of Messer Guido, 
 one of them said to him, ' Take care what you do ; for if you contrive not 
 matters discreetly, such relationship will beget scandal. You know what 
 manner of person your daughter is, and of how lofty a spirit ; and if she see 
 Gianciotto before the bond is tied, neither you nor any one else will have power 
 to persuade her to marry him ; therefore, if it so please you, it seems to me 
 that it would be good to conduct the matter thus : namely, that Gianciotto 
 should not come hither himself to marry her, but that a brother of his should 
 come and espouse her in his name.' 
 
 " Gianciotto was a man of great spirit, and hoped, after his father's death, 
 
 to become lord of Rimini ; in the contemplation of which event, albeit he was 
 
 rude in appearance and a cripple, Messer Guido desired him for a son-in-law 
 
 above any one of his brothers. Discerning, therefore, the reasonableness of 
 
 PART III. 8
 
 534 APPENDIX. 
 
 what his friend counselled, he secretly disposed matters according to his device ; 
 and a day being appointed, Polo, a brother of Gianciotto, came to Ravenna 
 with full authority to espouse Madonna Francesca. Polo was a handsome man, 
 very pleasant, and of a courteous breeding ; and passing with other gentlemen 
 over the court-yard of the palace of Messer Guido, a damsel who knew him 
 pointed him out to Madonna Francesca through an opening in the casement, 
 saying, ' That is he that is to be your husband ;' and so indeed the poor lady 
 believed, and incontinently placed in him hor whole affection ; and the cere- 
 mony of the marriage having been thus brought about, and the lady conveyed 
 to Rimini, she became not aware of the deceit till the morning ensuing the 
 marriage, when she beheld Gianciotto rise from her side ; the which discovery 
 moved her to such disdain, that she became not a whit the less rooted in her 
 love for Polo. Nevertheless, that it grew to be unlawful I never heard, except 
 in what is written by this author (Dante), and possibly it might so have bo- 
 come ; albeit I take what he says to have been an invention framed on the 
 possibility, rather than any thing which he knew of his own knowledge. Bo 
 this as it may, Polo and Madonna Francesca living in the same house, and Gian- 
 ciotto being gone into a certain neighbouring district as governor, they fell into 
 great companionship with one another, suspecting nothing ; but a servant of Gian- 
 ciotto's noting it, went to his master and told him how matters looked ; with 
 the which Gianciotto being fiercely moved, secretly returned to Rimini ; and 
 seeing Polo enter the room of Madonna Francesca the while he himself was 
 arriving, went straight to the door, and finding it locked inside, called to his 
 lady to come out ; for, Madonna Francesca and Polo having descried him, 
 Polo thought to escape suddenly through an opening in the wall, by means 
 of which there was a descent into another room ; and therefore, thinking to 
 conceal his fault either wholly or in part, he threw himself into the opening, 
 telling the lady to go and open the door. But his hope did not turn out as he 
 expected ; for the hem of a mantle which he had on caught upon a nail, and 
 the lady opening the door meantime, in the belief that all would be well by 
 reason of Polo's not being there, Gianciotto caught sight of Polo as he was de- 
 tained by the hem of the mantle, and straightway ran with his dagger in his 
 hand to kill him ; whereupon the lady, to prevent it, ran between them ; but 
 Gianciotto having lifted the dagger, and put the whole force of his arm into the 
 blow, there came to pass what he had not desired namely, that he struck the 
 dagger into the bosom of the lady before it could reach Polo ; by which acci- 
 dent, being as one who had loved the lady better than himself, he withdrew 
 the dagger and again struck at Polo, and slew him ; and so leaving them both 
 dead, he hastily went his way and betook him to his wonted affairs ; and the 
 next morning the two lovers, with many tears, were buried together in the 
 same grave." 
 
 The reader of this account will have observed, that while Dante assumes 
 the guilt of all parties, and puts them into the infernal regions, the good-natu- 
 red Boccaccio is for doubting it, and consequently for sending-them all to heaven.
 
 APPENDIX. 525 
 
 He will ignore as much of the business as a gentleman can ; boldly doubts 
 any guilt in the case ; says nothing of the circumstance of the book ; and af- 
 firms that the husband loved his wife, and was miserable at having slain her. 
 There is, however, one negative point in common between the two narrators ; 
 they both say nothing of certain particulars connected with the date of Fran- 
 cesca's marriage, and not a little qualifying the first romantic look of the story 
 
 Now, it is the absence of these particulars, combined with the tradition of 
 the father's artifice (omitted perhaps by Dante out of personal favour), and 
 with that of the husband's ferocity of character (the belief in which Boccaccio 
 did not succeed in displacing), that has left the prevailing impression on the 
 minds of posterity, which is this : that Francesca was beguiled by her father 
 into the marriage with the deformed and uuamiable Giovanni, and that the 
 unconscious medium of the artifice was the amiable and handsome Paulo ; that 
 one or both of the victims of the artifice fell in love with the other ; that their 
 intercourse, whatever it was, took place not long after the marriage ; and 
 that when Paulo and Francesca were slain in consequence, they were young 
 lovers, with no other ties to the world. 
 
 It is not pleasant in general to dispel the illusions of romance, though Dante's 
 will bear the operation with less hurt to a reader's feelings than most ; and I 
 suspect, that if nine out of ten of all the implied conclusions of other narratives 
 in his poem could be compared with the facts, he would be found to be one of 
 the greatest of romancers in a new and not very desirable sense, however excu- 
 sable he may have been in his party-prejudice. But a romance may be dis- 
 placed, only to substitute perhaps matters of fact more really touching, by rea- 
 son of their greater probability. The following is the whole of what modern 
 inquirers have ascertained respecting Paulo and Francesca. Future enlargers 
 on the story may suppress what they please, as Dante did ; but if any one of 
 them, like the writer of the present remarks, is anxious to speak nothing but 
 the truth, I advise him (especially if he is for troubling himself with making 
 changes in his story) not to think that he has seen all the authorities on the 
 subject, or even remembered all he has seen, until he has searched every cor- 
 ner of his library and his memory. All the poems hitherto written upon this 
 popular subject are indeed only to be regarded as so many probable pieces of 
 fancy, that of Dante himself included. 
 
 THE ONLY PARTICULARS HITHERTO REALLY ASCERTAINED RESPECTING 
 THE HISTORY OF PAULO AND FRANCESCA. 
 
 Francesca was daughter of Guido Novello da Polenta, lord of Ravenna. 
 
 She was married to Giovanni, surnamed the Lame, one of the sons of Ma- 
 latesta da Verrucchio, lord of Rimini. 
 
 Giovanni the Lame had a brother named Paulo the Handsome, who was a 
 widower, and (eft a son.
 
 526 APPENDIX. 
 
 Twelve years after Francesca's marriage, by which time she had become 
 mother of a son who died, and of a daughter who survived her, she and her broth- 
 er-in-law Paulo were slain together by the husband, and buried in one grave. 
 
 Two hundred years afterwards, the grave was opened, and the bodies found 
 lying together in silken garments, the silk itself being entire. 
 
 Now, a far more touching history may have lurked under these facts than 
 in the half-concealed and misleading circumstances of the received story long 
 patience, long duty, struggling conscience, exhausted hope. 
 
 On the other hand, it may have been a mere heartless case of intrigue and 
 folly. 
 
 But tradition is to be allowed its reasonable weight ; and the probability is, 
 that the marriage was an affair of state, the lady unhappy, and the brothers too 
 different from one another. 
 
 The event took place in Dante's twenty-fourth year ; so that he, who looks 
 so much older to our imaginations than his heroine, was younger ; and this ren- 
 ders more than probable what the latest biographers have asserted namely, 
 that the lord of Ravenna, at whose house he finished his days, was not her 
 father, Guido da Polenta, the third of that name, but her nephew, Guido the 
 Fifth. 
 
 No. III. 
 
 STORY OF UGOLINO. 
 
 Noi eravam partiti gia da ello, 
 Ch' i' vidi duo ghiacciati in una buca 
 Si, che Tun capo a 1' altro era capello : 
 
 E come '1 pan per fame si manduca, 
 Cosl '1 sovran li denti a 1' altro pose 
 La 've '1 cervel s' aggiunge con la nuca. 
 
 Non altrimenti Tideo si rose 
 Le tempie a Menalippo per disdegno, 
 Che quei faceva '1 teschio e 1' altre cose. 
 
 O tu che mostri per si bestial segno 
 Odio sovra colui che tu ti mangi 
 Dimmi '1 perche, diss' io, per tal convegno, 
 
 Che se tu a ragion di lui ti piangi, 
 Sappiendo chi voi siete, e la sua pecca, 
 Nel mondo suso ancor io te ne cangi, 
 
 Se quella con cli' i' parlo non si secca.
 
 APPENDIX. 527 
 
 La bocca sollevfc dal fiero pasto 
 Quel peccator, forbeadola a' capelli 
 Del capo cb' egli avea diretro guasto : 
 
 Poi comincio : tu vuoi ch' i' rinnovelli 
 Disperato dolor che '1 cuor mi preme 
 Gia pur pensando, pria ch' i' ne favelli. 
 
 Ma se le mie parole esser den seme, 
 Che frutti iufamia al traditor ch' i' rodo, 
 Parlare e lagrimar vedrai insieme. 
 
 F non so chi tu sei, ne per che modo 
 Venuto se' qua giu : ma Fiorentino 
 Mi sembri veramente, quand' i' t' odo. 
 
 Tu de' saper ch' i' fu '1 Conte Ugolino, 
 E quest! 1' Arciyescovo Ruggieri : 
 Or ti diro perch' i' son tal vicino. 
 
 Che per 1' effetto de' suo' ma' pensieri, 
 Fidandomi di lui, io fossi preso, 
 E poscia morto, dir non e mestieri. 
 
 Pero quel che non puoi avere inteso, 
 Cioe, come la morte mia fu cruda, 
 Udirai e saprai se m ha offeso. 
 
 Breve pertugio dentro da la muda, 
 La qual per me ha '1 titol da la fame, 
 E 'n che conviene ancor ch' altrui si chiuda, 
 
 M' avea mostrato per lo suo forame 
 Piu lune gia, quand' i' feci '1 mal sonno, 
 Che del future mi squarcio "1 velame. 
 
 Questi pareva a me maestro e donno, 
 Cacciando '1 lupo e i lupicini al monte, 
 Perche i Pisan veder Lucca non ponno. 
 
 Con cague magre studiose e conte 
 Gualaudi con Sismondi e con Lanfranchi 
 S' avea messi dinanzi da la fronte. 
 
 In picciol corso mi pareano stanchi 
 Lo padre e i figli, e con 1' agute scane 
 Mi parea lor veder fender li fianchi. 
 
 Quando fui dcsto innanzi la dimane, 
 Pianger senti' fra '1 sonno i miei figliuoli 
 Ch' eran con meco, e dimandar del pane.
 
 528 APPENDIX. 
 
 Ben so' crudel, se tu gift, non ti duoli 
 Pensando ci6 ch' al niio cuor s' annunziava : 
 E se non piangi, di che pianger suoli 7 
 
 Gib. eram desti, e 1' ora s' appressava 
 Che '1 cibo ne soleva essere addotto, 
 E per suo sogno ciascuu dubitava, 
 
 Ed io senti' chiaver 1' uscio di sotto 
 A 1' orribile torre : ond' io guardai 
 Nel viso a miei figliuoi senza far motto : 
 
 I' non piangeva, si dentro impietrai : 
 Piangevan' elli ; ed Anselmuccio mio 
 Disse, Tu guard! si, padre : che hai ? 
 
 Peru non lagrimai ne rispos' io 
 Tutto quel giorno ne la notte appresso, 
 Inlm che 1' altro sol nel mondo uscio. 
 
 Com' un poco di raggio si fu messo 
 Nel doloroso carcere, ed io scorsi 
 Per quattro visi il mio aspetto stesso, 
 
 Ambo le mani per dolor mi morsi : 
 E quei pensando ch' i '1 fessi per voglia 
 Di manicar, di subito levorsi 
 
 E disser : Padre, assai ci sia men doglia, 
 Se tu mangi di noi : tu ne vestisti 
 Queste niisere carni, e tu le spoglia. 
 
 Quetami allor per non fargli piu tristi : 
 Quel di e 1' altro stemmo tutti aiuti : 
 Ahi dura terra, perche non t' apristi ? 
 
 Posciache fummo al quarto di venuti, 
 Gaddo mi si gitto disteso a' piedi, 
 Dicendo : Pardre mio, che non. m' ajuti ? 
 
 Quivi morl : e come tu mi vedi, 
 Vid' io cascar li tre ad uno ad uno 
 Tra'l quinto dl, e '1 sesto : ond' i' mi diedi 
 
 Gia cieco a brancolar sovra ciascuno, 
 E tre di gli chiamai poich' e 'fur morti : 
 Poscia, piu che '1 dolor, pot6 '1 digiuno. 
 
 Quand' ebbo detto ci6, con gli occhj torti 
 Riprese '1 teschio misero co' denti, 
 Che furo a 1' osso come d' un can forti.
 
 APPENDIX. 529 
 
 Ahi Pisa, vituperio de le genti, 
 Del bel paese la dove '1 si suona ; 
 Poiche i vicini a te puuir son lend, 
 
 Muovasi la Capraja e la Gorgona, 
 E faccian siepe ad Arno in su la foce, 
 SI ch' egli annieghi in te ogni persona : 
 
 Che se '1 Conte Ugolino aveva voce 
 D' aver tradita te de le castella, 
 Non dovei tu i figliuoi porre a tal croce, 
 
 Innocenti facea '1 eta novella ; 
 Novella Tebe, Uguccione, e '1 Brigata, 
 E gli altri duo che '1 canto suso appella. 
 
 Translation in the heroic couplet. 
 
 QUITTING the traitor Bocca's barking sonl, 
 We saw two more, so iced up hi one hole, 
 That the one's visage capp'd the other's head : 
 And as a famish'd man devoureth bread, 
 So rent the top one's teeth the skull below 
 'Twixt nape and brain. Tydeus, as stories shew, 
 Thus to the brain of Menalippus ate : 
 " O thou !" I cried, " shewing such bestial hate 
 To him thou tearest, read us whence it rose ; 
 That, if thy cause be juster than thy foe's, 
 The world, when I return, knowing the truth, 
 May of thy story have the greater ruth." 
 
 His mouth he lifted from his dreadful fare, 
 That sinner, wiping it with the grey hair 
 Whose roots he had laid waste ; and thus he said : 
 " A desperate thing thou askest ; what I dread 
 Even to think of. Yet, to sow a seed 
 Of infamy to him on whom I feed, 
 Tell it I will : ay, and thine eyes shall see 
 Mine own weep all the while for misery. 
 Who thou may'st be, I know not ; nor can dream 
 How thou cam'st hither ; but thy tongue doth seem 
 To shew thee, of a surety, Florentine. 
 Know then, that I was once Count Ugoline,
 
 530 APPENDIX. 
 
 And this man was Ruggieri, the archpriest. 
 
 Still thou may'st wonder at my raging feast ; 
 
 For though his snares be known, and how his key 
 
 He turn'd upon my trnst, and murder'd me, 
 
 Yet what the murder was, of what strange sort 
 
 And cruel, few have had the true report. 
 
 Hear then, and judge. In the tower, called since then 
 
 The Tower of Famine, I had lain and seen 
 
 Full many a moon fade through the narrow bars, 
 
 When, in a dream one night, mine evil stars 
 
 Shew'd me the future with its dreadful face. 
 
 Methought this man led a great lordly chase 
 
 Against a wolf and cubs, across the height 
 
 Which barreth Lucca from the Pisan's sight. 
 
 Lean were the hounds, high-bred, and sharp for blood ; 
 
 And foremost in the press Gualandi rode, 
 
 Lanfranchi, and Sismondi. Soon were seen 
 
 The father and his sons, those wolves I mean, 
 
 Limping, and by the hounds all crush'd and torn : 
 
 And as the cry awoke me in the morn, 
 
 I heard my boys, the while they dozed in bed 
 
 (For they were with me), wail, and ask for bread. 
 
 Full cruel, if it move thee not, thou art, 
 
 To think what thoughts then rush'd into my heart. 
 
 What wouldst thou weep at, weeping not at this ? 
 
 All had now waked, and something seemed amiss, 
 
 For 'twas the time they used to bring us bread, 
 
 And from our dreams had grown a horrid dread. 
 
 I listen'd ; and a key, down stairs, I heard 
 
 Lock up the dreadful turret. Not a word 
 
 I spoke, but look'd my children in the face : 
 
 No tear I shed, so firmly did I brace 
 
 My soul ; but they did ; and my Anselm said, 
 
 ' Father, you look so ! Won't they bring us bread ?* 
 
 E'en then I wept not, nor did answer word 
 
 All day, nor the next night. And now was stirr'd, 
 
 Upon the world without, another day ; 
 
 And of its light there came a little ray, 
 
 Which mingled with the gloom of our sad jail ; 
 
 And looking to my children's bed, full pale, 
 
 In four small faces mine own face I saw. 
 
 Oh, then both hands for misery did I gnaw ; 
 
 And they, thinking I did it, being mad 
 
 For food, said, ' Father, we should be less sad 
 
 If you would feed on us. Children, they say, 
 
 Are their own father's flesh. Starve not to-day.'
 
 APPENDIX. 531 
 
 Thenceforth they saw me shake not, hand nor foot. 
 That day, and next, we all continued mute. 
 
 thou hard Earth ! why opened'st thou not ? 
 Next day (it was the fourth in our sad lot) 
 
 My Gaddo stretched him at my feet, and cried, 
 ' Dear father, won't you help me ?' and he died. 
 And surely as thou seest me here undone, 
 
 1 saw my whole three children, one by one, 
 Between the fifth day and the sixth, all die. 
 I became blind ; and in my misery 
 
 Went groping for them, as I knelt and crawl'd 
 About the room ; and for three days I call'd 
 Upon their names, as though they could speak too, 
 Till famine did what grief had fail'd to do." 
 
 Having spoke thus, he seiz'd with fiery eyes 
 That wretch again, his feast and sacrifice, 
 And fasten'd on the skull, over a groan, 
 With teeth as strong as mastiffs on a bone. 
 
 Ah, Pisa ! thou that shame and scandal be 
 To the sweet land that speaks the tongue of Si,* 
 Since Florence spareth thy vile neck the yoke, 
 Would that the very isles would rise, and choke 
 Thy river, and drown every soul within 
 Thy loathsome walls. What if this Ugolin 
 Did play the traitor, and give up (for so 
 The rumour runs) thy castles to the foe, 
 Thou hadst no right to put to rack like this 
 His children. Childhood innocency is. 
 But that same innocence, and that man's name, 
 Have damn'd thee, Pisa, to a Theban fame.t 
 
 REAL STORY OF TJGOLINO, 
 AND CHAUCER'S FEELING RESPECTING THE POEM. 
 
 CHAUCER has told the greater part of this story beautifully in his " Canter- 
 bury Tales ;" but he had not the heart to finish it. He refers for the conclu- 
 
 * Si, the Italian yes. A similar territorial designation is familiar to the reader hi the 
 word "Languedoc," meaning langue d'oc, or tongue of Oe, which was the pronunciation 
 of the out or yes of the French in that quarter. 
 
 t Alluding to the cruel stories in the mythology of Boeotia. 
 8*
 
 532 APPENDIX. 
 
 sion to his original, hight " Dant" the " grete poete of Itaille ;" adding, that 
 Dante will not fail his readers a single word that is to say, not an atom of 
 the cruelty. 
 
 Our great gentle-hearted countryman, who tells Fortune that it was 
 
 " great cruelte 
 Such birdes for to put in such a cage," 
 
 adds a touch of pathos in the behaviour of one of the children, which Dante 
 does not seem to have thought of : 
 
 " There day by day this child began to cry, 
 
 Till in his father's barme (lap) adown he lay ; 
 And said, ' Farewell, father, I muste die,' 
 
 And kias'd his father, and died the same day." 
 
 It will be a relief, perhaps, instead of a disappointment, to the readers of this 
 appalling story, to hear that Dante's particulars of it are as little to be relied on 
 as those of the Paulo and Francesca. The only facts known of Ugolino are, that 
 he was an ambitious traitor, who did actually deliver up the fortified places, as 
 Dante acknowledges ; and that his rivals, infamous as he, or more infamous, pre- 
 vailed against him, and did shut him up and starve him and some of his family. 
 But the " little" children are an invention of the poet's, or probably his belief, 
 when he was a young man, and first heard the story ; for some of Ugolino's fellow- 
 prisoners may have been youths, but others were grown up none so childish 
 as he intimates ; and they were not all his own sons ; some were his nephews. 
 
 And as to Archbishop Ruggieri, there is no proof whatever of his having had 
 any share in the business hardly a ground of suspicion ; so that historians 
 look upon him as an " ill-used gentleman." Dante, in all probability, must 
 have learnt the real circumstances of the case, as he advanced in years ; but 
 if charity is bound to hope that he would have altered the passage accordingly, 
 had he revised his poem, it is forced to admit that he left it unaltered, and that 
 his " will and pleasure" might have found means of reconciling the retention to 
 his conscience. Pride, unfortunately, includes the powor to do things which 
 it pretends to be very foreign to its nature ; and in proportion as detraction is 
 easy to it, retraction becomes insupportable.* 
 
 Rabelais, to shew his contempt for the knights of chivalry, has made them 
 galley-slaves in the next world, their business being to help Charon row his 
 boat over the river Styx, and their payment a piece of mouldy bread and a fil- 
 lip on the nose. Somebody should write a burlesque of the enormities in Dante's 
 poem, and invent some Rabelaesque punishment for a great poet's pride and 
 presumption. What should it be ? 
 
 * The controversial character of Dante's genius, and the discordant estimate formed of 
 it in so many respects by different writers, have already carried the author of this book so 
 far beyond his intended limits, that he is obliged to refer for evidence in the cases of Ugo- 
 lino and Francesca to Baltic, Vita di Dante (Napoli, 1840), p. 33 ; and to Troya, Del Vtltro 
 JlUtforico di Dtmtt (Firenze, 1826), pp. 28, 32, and 176.
 
 APPENDIX. 533 
 
 No. IV. 
 
 PICTTTEE OF FLORENCE IN THE TIME OF DANTE S ANCESTORS. 
 
 FIORENZA dentro da la cerchia antica, 
 Ond' ella toglie ancora e Terza e Nona, 
 Si stava in pace sobria e pudica. 
 
 Non avea catenella, non corona, 
 Non donne contigiate, non cintura 
 Che fosse a veder piu che la persona. 
 
 Non faceva nascendo ancor paura 
 La figlia al padre, che '1 tempo e la dotte 
 Non fuggian quinci e quindi la misura. 
 
 Non avea case di famiglia vote : 
 Non v 5 era giunto ancor Sardanapalo 
 A moetrar ci6 che 'n camera si puote. 
 
 Non era vinto ancora Montemalo 
 Dal vostro Uccellatojo, che com' e vinto 
 Nel montar su, cosl sara nel calo. 
 
 Bellincion Berti vid' io andar cinto 
 Di cuojo e d' osso, e venir da lo specchio 
 La donna sua sanza '1 viso dipinto : 
 
 E vidi quel de' Nerli e quel del Vecchio 
 Esser contenti a la pelle scoverta, 
 E le sue donne al fuso ed al pennecchio. 
 
 O fortunate ! e ciascuna era certa 
 De la sua sepoltura, ed ancor nulla 
 Era per Francia nel letto deserta. 
 
 L' una vegghiava a studio de la culla, 
 E consolando usava 1' idioma 
 Che pria li padri e le madri trastulla. 
 
 
 L' altra traendo a la rocca la chioma 
 Favoleggiava con la sua famiglia 
 Di Trojani e di Fiesole e di Roma. 
 
 Saria tenuta allor tal maraviglia 
 Una Cianghella, un Lapo Salterello, 
 Qual or saria Cincinnato e Comiglia.
 
 534 APPENDIX. 
 
 Translation in blank verse. 
 
 FLORENCE, before she broke the good old bounds, 
 Whence yet are heard the chimes of eve and mom, 
 Abided well, in modesty and peace. 
 No coronets had she no chains of gold 
 No gaudy sandals no rich girdles rare 
 That caught the eye more than the person did. 
 Fathers then feared no daughter's birth for dread 
 Of wantons courting wealth ; nor were their homes 
 Emptied with exile. Chamberers had not shewn 
 What they could dare, to prove their scorn of shame. 
 Your neighbouring uplands then beheld no towers 
 Prouder than Rome's, only to know worse fall. 
 I saw Bellincion Berti walk abroad 
 Girt with a thong of leather ; and his wife 
 Come from the glass without a painted face. 
 Nerlis I saw, and Vecchios, and the like, 
 In doublets without cloaks ; and their good dames 
 Contented while they spun. Blest women those ! 
 They knew the place where they should lie when dead ; 
 Nor were their beds deserted while they liv'd. 
 They nurs'd their babies ; lull'd them with the songs 
 And household words of their own infancy ; 
 And while they drew the distaff's hair away, 
 In the sweet bosoms of their families, 
 Told tales of Troy, and Fiesole, and Rome- 
 It had been then as marvellous to see 
 A man of Lapo Salterello's sort, 
 Or woman like Cianghella, as to find 
 A Cincinnatus or Cornelia now.
 
 APPENDIX. 535 
 
 No. V. 
 
 THE DEATH OP AGRICAN. 
 
 ORLANDO ed Agricane un' altra fiata 
 Ripreso insieme avean crudel battaglia, 
 
 La piu terribil raai non fu mirata, 
 
 L' arme 1' un 1' altro a pezzo a pczzo taglia. 
 
 Vede Agrican sua gente sbarattata, 
 Ne le pu6 dar aiuto, che le vaglia. 
 
 Per6 chc Orlando tanto stretto il tiene, 
 
 Che star con seco a fronte gli conviene. 
 
 Nel suo segreto fe questo pensicro, 
 
 Trar fuor di schiera quel Conte gagliardo ; 
 
 E poi che ucciso 1' abbia in su '1 sentiero, 
 Tornare a la battaglia senza tardo ; 
 
 Per6 che a lui par facile e leggiero 
 Cacciar soletto quel popol codardo ; 
 
 Ch6 tutti insieme, e '1 suo Re Galafrone, 
 
 Non li stimava quanto un vil bottone. 
 
 Con tal proposto si pone a fuggire, 
 Forte correndo sopra la pianura; 
 
 II Conte nulla pensa a quel fallire, 
 Anzi crede che '1 faccia per paura. 
 
 Senz' altro dubbio se '1 pone a seguire, 
 E gia son giunti ad una selva scura : 
 
 Appunto in mezzo a quella selva piana, 
 
 Era un bel prato intorno a una fontana. 
 
 Fermossi ivi Agricane a quella fonte, 
 E smont6 de 1' arcion per riposare, 
 
 Ma non si tolse 1' elmo da la fronte, 
 Ne piastra, o scudo si volse levare ;
 
 536 APPENDIX. 
 
 E poco dimorft, che giunse '1 Conte, 
 E come il vide a la fonte aspettare, 
 Dissegli : Cavalier, tu sei fuggito, 
 E si forte mostravi e tanto ardito ! 
 
 Come tanta vergogna puoi soffrire, 
 A dar le spalle ad un sol cavaliero ! 
 
 Forse credesti la morte fuggire, 
 Or vedi che fallito hai il pensiero ; 
 
 Chi morir pu6 onorato dee morire ; 
 Che spesse volte avviene e di leggiero, 
 
 Che, per durar in questa vita trista, 
 
 Morte e vergogna ad un tratto s' acquista. 
 
 Agrican prima rimonto in arcione, 
 
 Poi con voce soave rispondia : 
 Tu sei per certo il piti franco Barone, 
 
 Ch' io mai trovassi ne la vita mia, 
 E per5 del tuo scampo fia cagione 
 
 La tua prodezza e quella cortesia, 
 Che oggi si grande al campo usato m' hai, 
 Quando soccorso a mia gente donai. 
 
 Pero ti voglio la vita lasciare, 
 
 Ma non tornasti piu per darmi inciampo. 
 Questo la fuga mi fe simulare, 
 
 Ne v' ebbi altro partito a darti scampo. 
 Se pur ti piace meco battagliare, 
 
 Morto ne rimarrai su questo campo ; 
 Ma siami testimonio il cielo e '1 sole, 
 Che darti morte mi dispiace e duole. 
 
 II Conte gli rispose molto umano, 
 Perchfc avea preso gia. di lui pietate ; 
 
 Quanto sei, disse, pifr franco e soprano, 
 Pih di te mi rincresce in veritate, 
 
 Che sarai morto, e non sei Cristiano, 
 Ed anderai tra 1' anime dannate ; 
 
 Ma se vuoi il corpo e 1' anima salvare, 
 
 Piglia battesmo, e lascierotti andare. 
 
 Disse Agricane, e riguardollo in viso : 
 Se tu sei Cristiano, Orlando seL 
 
 Chi mi facesse Re del Paradise, 
 Con tal ventura non la cangierei ; 
 
 Ma sin or ti ricordo e dotti awiso, 
 Che non mi parli de' fatti de' Dei, 
 
 Perche potresti predicar invano ; 
 
 Difenda il suo ciascun co '1 brando in mano.
 
 APPENDIX. 537 
 
 Ne piti parole ; ma trasse Tranchera, 
 E verso Orlando con ardir s' affronta. 
 
 Or si comincia la battaglia fiera, 
 
 Con aspri colpi, di taglio e di ponta; 
 
 Ciascun e di prodezza una lumiera, 
 E sterno insieme, com' il libro conta, 
 
 Da mezzo giorno insino a notte scura, 
 
 Sempre pid franchi a la battaglia dura. 
 
 Ma poi che '1 sol avea passato il monte 
 E cominciossi a far il ciel stellate, 
 
 Prima verso del Re parlava il Conte ; 
 
 Che farem, disse, che '1 giorno n' 6 an Jato 1 
 
 Disse Agricane, con parole pronte : 
 Ambi ci poseremo in questo prate, 
 
 E domattina, come il giorno appare, 
 
 Ritorneremo insieme a battagliare. 
 
 Cosl d' accordo il partite si prese ; 
 
 Lega il destrier ciascun come gli piace, 
 Poi sopra a 1' erba verde si distese : 
 
 Come fosse tra loro antica pace, 
 L' uno a 1' altro vicino era e palese. 
 
 Orlando presso al fonte isteso giace, 
 Ed Agricane al bosco piti vicino 
 Stassi colcato, a 1' ombra d' un gran pino. 
 
 E ragionando insieme tutta via 
 Di cose degne e condecenti a loro, 
 
 Guardava il Conte il ciel, poscia dicia: 
 Questo che ora veggiamo, e un bel lavoro, 
 
 Che fece la divina Monarchia, 
 
 La luna d' argento e le stelle d' oro, 
 
 E la luce del giorno e '1 sol lucente, 
 
 Dio tutto ha fatto per 1' umana gente. 
 
 Disse Agricane : lo comprendo per certo, 
 Che tu vuoi de la fede ragionare ; 
 
 lo di nulla scienza son esperto, 
 
 Nfe mai sendo fanciul, volsi imparare ; 
 
 E ruppi il capo al maestro mio per mcrto ; 
 Poi non si pote un altro ritrovare, 
 
 Che mi mostrasse libro, ne scrittura, 
 
 Tanto ciascun avea di me paura. 
 
 E cosi spesi la mia fanciullezza, 
 
 In caccie, in giochi d' arme e in cavalcare ; 
 Ne mi par che convenga a gentilezza, 
 
 Star tutto il giorno ne' libri a pensare ;
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 Ma la forza del corpo e la destrczza 
 Conviensi al cavaliero esercitare ; 
 Dottrina al prete, ed al dottor sta bene ; 
 lo tanto saccio quanto mi convienc. 
 
 Rispose Orlando : lo tiro teco a un segno, 
 Che 1" armi son del' uomo il primo onore ; 
 
 Ma non gia che '1 saper faccia un men degno, 
 Anzi 1' adorna com' un prato il fiore ; 
 
 Ed e simile a un bove, a un sasso, a un legno, 
 Che non pensa a 1' eterno Creatore ; 
 
 Ne ben si puo pensar, senza dottrina, 
 
 La somma maestade, alta e divina, 
 
 Disse Agricane: Egli e gran scortesia 
 A voler contrastar con awantaggio. 
 
 lo t' ho scoperto la natura mia, 
 
 E te conosco, che sei dotto e saggio; 
 
 Se pill parlassi, io non risponderia; 
 Piacendoti dormir, dormiti ad aggio; 
 
 E se meco parlar hai pur diletto, 
 
 D' arme o d' amor a ragionar t' aspetto. 
 
 Ora ti prego, che a quel ch' io domando 
 Risponda il vero, a fe d' uomo pregiato ; 
 
 Se tu se' veramente quell' Orlando, 
 Che vien tanto nel mondo nominato ; 
 
 E perche qui sei giunto, e come, e quando ; 
 E se mai fosti ancora innamorato ; 
 
 Perche ogni cavalier, ch' fe senza amore, 
 
 Se in vista fe vivo, vivo senza core. 
 
 Rispose il Conte : Q,uell' Orlando sono, 
 Che uccise Almonte e '1 suo fratel Troiano ; 
 
 Amor m' ha posto tutto in abbandono, 
 E venir fammi in questo luogo strano. 
 
 E perchfe teco piti largo ragiono, 
 Voglio che sappi che '1 mio cor fe in mano 
 
 De la figliuola del Re Galafrone, 
 
 Che ad Albracca dimora nel girone. 
 
 Tu fai co '1 padre guerra a gran furore, 
 Par prender suo paese e sua castella ; 
 
 Ed io qua son condotto per amore, 
 E per piacer a quella damisella ; 
 
 Molte fiate son stato per onore 
 E per la fede mia sopra la sella ; 
 
 Or sol per acquistar la bella dama 
 
 Faccio battaglia, e d' altro non ho brama.
 
 APPENDIX. 539 
 
 Quando Agrican ha nel parlare accolto, 
 Che questo e Orlando, ed Angelica amava, 
 
 Fuor di misura si turbo nel volto, 
 Ma per la notte non lo dimostrava ; 
 
 Piangeva sospirando come un stolto, 
 L' anima e 't petto e '1 spirto gli avvampava, 
 
 E tanto gelosia gli batte il core, 
 
 Che non e vivo, e di doglia non more. 
 
 Poi disse a Orlando : Tu debbi pensare, 
 Che come il giorno sara dimostrato, 
 
 Debbiamo insieme la battaglia fare, 
 E 1' uno o 1' altro rimarra su '1 prato. 
 
 Or d' una cosa ti voglio pregare, 
 
 Che, prima che vegnamo e cotal piato, 
 
 Quella donzella, che '1 tuo cor disia, 
 
 Tu 1' abbandoni e lascila per mia. 
 
 10 non potria patire, essendo vivo, 
 
 Che altri con meco amasse il viso adorno: 
 O 1' uno o P altro al tutto sara privo 
 
 Del spirto e de la dama al novo giorno ; 
 Altri mai non sapra, che questo rivo 
 
 E questo bosco, ch' 6 quivi d' intorno, 
 Che 1' abbi rifiutata in cotal loco 
 E in cotal tempo, che sara si poco. 
 
 Diceva Orlando al Re : Le mie promesse 
 Tutte ho servate, quante mai ne fei ; 
 
 Ma se quel che or mi chiedi io promeftesse 
 E s' io il giurassi, io non 1' attenderei j 
 
 Cosl poria spiccar mie membra istesse 
 E levarmi di fronte gli occhi miei, 
 
 E viver senza spirto e senza core, 
 
 Come lasciar d' Angelica 1' amore. 
 
 11 Re Agrican, che ardeva oltre misura, 
 Non puote tal risposta comportare ; 
 
 Benche sia '1 mezzo de la notte scura, 
 Prese Bajardo e su v' ebbe a montare, 
 
 Ed orgoglioso, con vista sicura, 
 Isgrida al Conte, ed ebbel a sfidare, 
 
 Dicendo : Cavalier, la dama gaglia 
 
 Lasciar convienti, o far meco battaglia. 
 
 Era gia il Conte in su 1' arcion salito, 
 Perche, come si mosse il Re possente, 
 
 Temendo dal Pagan esser tradito, 
 Salto sopra '1 destrier subitamente ;
 
 540 APPENDIX. 
 
 Onde rispose con animo ardito : 
 
 Lasciar colei non posso per niente ; 
 E s' io potessi, ancora io non vorria ; 
 Avertela convien per altra via. 
 
 Come in mar la tempesta a gran fortuna, 
 Cominciarno 1' assalto i cavalieri : 
 
 Nel verde prato, per la notte bruna, 
 
 Con sproni urtarno addosso i buon destrieri ; 
 
 E si scorgeano al lume de la luna, 
 Dandosi colpi dispietati e fieri, 
 
 Ch' era ciascun di lor forte ed ardito : 
 
 Ma piu non dico ; il Canto e qui finito. 
 
 Signori e cavalieri innamorati, 
 
 Cortesi damigelle e graziose, 
 Venite qui davanti, ed ascoltati 
 
 L'- alte awenture e le guerre amorose, 
 Che fer gli antiqui cavalier pregiati, 
 
 E furno al mondo degne e gloriose ; 
 Ma sopra tutti Orlando ed Agricane 
 Ferno opre per amor alte e soprane. 
 
 Si come io dissi nel Canto di sopra, 
 Con fier assalto dispietato e duro, 
 
 Per una dama ciaschedun s' adopra ; 
 E ben che sia la notte e '1 ciel oscuro, 
 
 Gia. non vi fa mestier che alcun si scuopra, 
 Ma conviensi guardare e star sicuro, 
 
 E ben difeso di sopra e d' intorno, 
 
 Come il sol fosse in cielo a mezzo giorno. 
 
 Agrican combattea con piu furore, 
 II Conte con piu senno si servava ; 
 
 Gik contrastato avean piu di cinque ore. 
 E 1" alba in Oriente si schiarava, 
 
 Or s' incomincia la zufla maggiore ; 
 II superbo Agrican si disperava, 
 
 Che tanto contra d' esso Orlando dura, 
 
 E mena un colpo fiero oltra misura. 
 
 Giunse a traverse il colpo disperato, 
 
 E '1 scudo com' un latte al mezzo taglia ; 
 
 Piagar non puote Orlando, ch' e affatato, 
 Ma fracassa ad un punto piastra e maglia.
 
 APPENDIX. 541 
 
 Non potea il franco Conte aver il fiato, 
 
 Benchfe Tranchera sua carne non taglia ; 
 Fu con tanta ruina la percossa, 
 Che avea fiaccati i nervi, e peste 1' ossa. 
 
 Ma non fu gia per questo sbigottito, 
 Anzi colpisce con maggior fierezza. 
 
 Giunse nel scudo, e tutto 1' ha partito, 
 Ogni piastra del sbergo e maglia spezza, 
 
 E nel sinistro fianco 1' ha ferito; 
 E fu quel colpo di cotanta asprezza, 
 
 Che '1 scudo mezzo al prato and6 di netto, 
 
 E ben tre coste gli tagli& nel petto. 
 
 Come rugge il Icon per la foresta, 
 Allor che 1' ha ferito il cacciatore, 
 
 Cosi il fier Agrican, con piu tempesta, 
 Rimena un colpo di troppo furorej 
 
 Giunse ne 1' elmo, al mezzo de la testa, 
 Non ebbe il Conte mai botta maggiore, 
 
 E tanto uscito fe ruor di conoscenza, 
 
 Che non sa s' egli ha il capo, o s' egli 6 scnza. 
 
 Non vedea lume per gli occhi niente, 
 E 1' una e 1' altra orecchia tintinnava ; 
 
 Si spaventato e '1 suo destrier corrente, 
 Ch' intorno al prato fuggendo il portava ; 
 
 E sarebbe caduto veramente, 
 Se in quella stordigion punto durava ; 
 
 Ma sendo nel cader, per tal cagione 
 
 Tornogli '1 spirto e tennesi a 1' arcione. 
 
 E venne di se stesso vergognoso, 
 Poi che cotanto si vede avanzato. 
 
 Com' anderai, diceva doloroso, 
 Ad Angelica mai, vituperato 1 
 
 Non ti ricordi quel viso amoroso, 
 
 Che a far questa battaglia t' ha mandato 7 
 
 Ma chi e richiesto e indugia il suo servire, 
 
 Servendo poi, fa il guiderdon perire. 
 
 Presso a dui giorni ho gii fatto dimora, 
 Per il conquisto d' un sol cavaliero, 
 
 E seco a fronte mi ritrovo ancora, 
 Ne li ho vantaggio piu che '1 di primiero. 
 
 Ma, se piu indugio la battaglia un' ora, 
 L' arme abbandono ed entro al monastero, 
 
 Prate mi faccio, e chiamomi dannato, 
 
 Se mai piii brando mi fia visto allato.
 
 542 APPENDIX. 
 
 II fin del suo parlar gift, non e inteso, 
 Che batti i dcnti e le parole incocca ; 
 
 Fuoco rassembra di furore acceso 
 II fiato, ch' esce fuor di naso e bocca. 
 
 Verso Agricane se ne va disteso, 
 
 Con Durindano ad ambe mani il tocca 
 
 Sopra la spalla destra di riverso ; 
 
 Tutta la taglia quel colpo diverse. 
 
 II crudel brando nel petto dichina, 
 
 E rompe il sbergo e taglia il pancirone, 
 
 Benche sia grosso e d' una maglia fina, 
 Tutto lo fende insiii sotto al gallone. 
 
 Non fu veduta mai tanta ruina ; 
 
 Scende la spada e guinse ne 1' arcione ; 
 
 D' osso era questa ed intorno ferrato, 
 
 Ma Durindana lo mando su '1 prato. 
 
 Dal destro lato a 1' anguinaglia stanca 
 Era tagliato il Re cotanto forte ; 
 
 Perse la vista, ed ha la faccia bianca, 
 Come colui ch' e gi&. giunto a la morte ; 
 
 E ben che '1 spirto e '1 anima gli manca, 
 Chiamava Orlando, e con parole scorte 
 
 Sospirando diceva in bassa voce : 
 
 lo credo nel tuo Dio, che mori in croce. 
 
 Battezzarni, Barone, a la fontana, 
 Prima ch' io perda in tutto la favella ; 
 
 E se mia vita e stata iniqua e strana, 
 Non sia la morte alfuen di Dio ribella ; 
 
 Lui, che venne a salvar in gcnte umana, 
 L' anima mia ricoglia tapinella ; 
 
 Ben mi confesso che molto peccai, 
 
 Ma sua misericordia e graude assai. 
 
 Piangea quel Re, che fu cotaato fiero, 
 E tenea il viso al ciel sempre voltato. 
 
 Poi ad Orlando disse: Cavaliero, 
 
 In questo giorno d' oggi hai guadagnato, 
 
 Al mio parere, il piu franco destriero, 
 Che mai fosse nel mondo cavalcato ; 
 
 Questo fu tolto ad un forte Barone, 
 
 Che nel mio campo dimora prigione. 
 
 Io non mi posso ormai pill sostenire ; 
 
 Levami tu d' arcion, Baron accorto. 
 Deh non lasciar quest' anima perire! 
 
 Battezzami oramai, che gifc. son morto !
 
 APPENDIX. 543 
 
 Se tu mi lasci a tal guisa morire, 
 
 Ancor n' arai gran pena e disconforto. 
 Questo diceva e molte altre parole ; 
 Oh quanto al Conte ne rincresce e duole ! 
 
 Egli avea pien di lagrime la faccia, 
 E fu smontato in su la terra piana ; 
 
 Ricolse il Re ferito ne le braccia, 
 
 E sopra '1 marmo il pose a la fontana, 
 
 E di pianger con seco non si saccia, 
 Chiedendogli perdon con voce umana. 
 
 Poi battezzollo a 1' acqua de la fonte, 
 
 Pregando Dio per lui con le man gionte. 
 
 Poco poi stette, che 1' ebbe trovato 
 Freddo nel viso e tutta la persona, 
 
 Onde s' awide ch' egli era passato. 
 
 Sopra al marmor al fonte 1' abbandona, 
 
 Cosi com' era tutto quanto armato, 
 Co '1 brando in mano, e con la sua corona. 
 
 No. VI. 
 
 ANGELICA AND MEDORO. 
 
 SEGUON gli Scotti ove la guida loro 
 Per 1' alta selva alto disdegno mena, 
 
 Poi che lasciato ha 1' uno e 1' altro Moro, 
 L' un morto in tutto, e 1' altro vivo a pena. 
 
 Giacque gran pezzo il giovine Medoro, 
 Spicciando il sangue da si larga vena, 
 
 Che di sua vita al fin saria venuto, 
 
 Se non sopravenia chi gli die aiuto. 
 
 Gli sopravenne a caso una donzella, 
 
 Awolta in pastorale et umil veste, 
 Ma di real presenzia, e in viso bella, 
 
 D' alte maniere e accortamente oneste. 
 Tanto e ch' io non ne dissi piu novella, 
 
 Ch' a pena riconoscer la dovreste; 
 Questa, se non sapete, Angelica era, 
 
 Del gran Can del Catai la figlia altiera.
 
 544 APPENDIX. 
 
 Poi che 'I suo annello Angelica riebbe, 
 Di che Brunei 1' avea tenuta priva, 
 
 In tanto fasto, in tanto orgoglio crebbe, 
 Ch' esser parea di tutto '1 mondo schiva : 
 
 Se ne va sola, e non si degnerebbe 
 Compagno aver qual pifc famoso viva ; 
 
 Si sdegna a rimembrar che gia suo amante 
 
 Abbia Orlando nomato, o Sacripante. 
 
 E, sopra ogn' altro error, via piu pentita 
 Era del ben che gia a Rinaldo volse. 
 
 Troppo parendole essersi avvilita, 
 
 Ch' a riguardar si basso gli occhi volse. 
 
 Tant' arroganzia avendo Amor sentita, 
 Piu lungamente comportar non volse. 
 
 Dove giacea Medor, si pose al varco, 
 
 E 1" aspetto, posto lo strale all' arco. 
 
 Quando Angelica vide il giovinetto 
 Languir ferito, assai vicino a morte, 
 
 Che del suo Re che giacea senza tetto, 
 Piu che del proprio mal, si dolea forte, 
 
 Insolita pietade io mezo al petto 
 Si sent! entrar per disusate porte, 
 
 Che le fe' il duro cor tenero e molle ; 
 
 E piu quando il suo caso egli narrolle. 
 
 E rivocando alia memoria 1' arte 
 Ch' in India impart gia chirurgia, 
 
 (Che par che questo studio in quella parte 
 Nobile e degno e di gran laude sia; 
 
 E, senza molto rivoltar di carte, 
 Che '1 patre a i figli ereditario il dia) 
 
 Si dispose operar con succo d' erbe, 
 
 Ch' a piu matura vita lo riserbe. 
 
 E ricordossi che passando avea 
 Veduta un' erba in una piaggia amcna; 
 
 Fosse dittamo, o fosse panacea, 
 O non so qual di tal effetto piena, 
 
 Che stagna il sangue, a de la piaga rea 
 Leva ogni spasmo e perigliosa pena, 
 
 La trovft non lontana, e, quella c6lta, 
 
 Dove lasciato avea Medor, die volta, 
 
 Nel ritornar s' incontra in un pastore, 
 Ch' a cavallo pel bosco ne veniva 
 
 Cercando una iuvenca, che gli fuore 
 Duo di di mandra e senza guardia giva.
 
 APPENDIX. 545 
 
 Seco lo trasse ove perdea il vigore 
 
 Medor col sangue che del petto usciva ; 
 E gia n' avea di tanto il terren tinto, 
 Ch' era omai presso a rimanere estinto. 
 
 Del palafreno Angelica giu scese, 
 E scendere il pastor seco fece anche. 
 
 Pesto con sassi I' erba, indi la presse, 
 E succo ne cav6 fra le man bianche : 
 
 Ne la piaga n' infuse, e ne distese 
 
 E pel petto e pel ventre e fin a 1' anche ; 
 
 E fu di tal virtu questo liquore, 
 
 Che stagn6 il sangue e gli torno il vigore: 
 
 E gli die forza, che pote salire 
 
 Sopra il cavallo che 1' pastor condusse. 
 Non per6 volse indi Medor partire 
 
 Prima ch' in terra il suo signor non fosse, 
 E Cloridan col Re fe' sepelire ; 
 
 E poi dove a lei piacque si ridusse ; 
 Et ella per pieta ne 1' mail case 
 Del cortese pastor seco rimase. 
 
 Ne, fin che nol tornasse in sanitade, 
 Volea partir : cosi di lui fe' stima: 
 
 Tanto se inteneri de la pietade 
 
 Che n' ebbe, come in terra il vide prima. 
 
 Poi, vistone i costumi e la beltade, 
 Roder si senti il cor d' ascosa Uma; 
 
 Roder si senti il core, e a poco a poco 
 
 Tutto infiammato d' amoroso fuoco. 
 
 Stava il pastore in assai buona e bella 
 Stanza, nel bosco infra duo monti piatta, 
 
 Con la moglie e co i figli ; et avea quella 
 Tutta di nuovo e poco inanzi fatta. 
 
 Quivi a Medoro fu per la donzella 
 La piaga in breve a sanita ritratta ; 
 
 Ma in minor tempo si senti maggiore 
 
 Piaga di questa avere ella nel core. 
 
 Assai piu larga piaga e piu profonda 
 Nel cor senti da non veduto strale, 
 
 Che da' begli occhi e da la testa bionda 
 Di Medoro avvent6 1' arcier c' ha 1' ale. 
 
 Arder si sente, e sempre il fuoco abonda, 
 E piu cura 1' altrui che '1 proprio male. 
 
 Di se non cura ; e non e ad altro inteuta, 
 
 Ch' a risanar chi lei fere e tormenta.
 
 546 APPENDIX. 
 
 La sua piaga piii s' aprc c piii incrudisce, 
 Quanto piu 1' altra si rcstringe c salda. 
 
 II giovine si sana : ella languisce 
 
 Di nuova febbrc, or agghiacciata or calda. 
 
 Di giorno in giorno in lui belta fiorisce : 
 La misera si strugge, come falda 
 
 Strugger di nieve intempestiva suole, 
 
 Ch' in loco aprico abbia scoperta il sole. 
 
 Se di disio non vuol morir, bisogna 
 Che senza indugio ella se stessa aid : 
 
 E ben le par che, di quel ch' essa agogna, 
 Non sia tempo aspettar ch' altri la 'nviti. 
 
 Dunque, rotto ogni freno di vergogna, 
 La lingua ebbe non men che gli occhi arditi ; 
 
 E di quel colpo domando mercede, 
 
 Che, forse non sapendo, esso le diede. 
 
 O Conte Orlando, o Re di Circassia, 
 
 Vestra inclita virtu, dite, che giova7 
 Vostro alto onor, dite, in che prezzo sia 7 
 
 che mercfe vostro servir ritruova 7 
 Mostratemi una sola cortesia, 
 
 Che mai costei v' usasse, o vecchia o nuova, 
 Per ricompensa e guidardone e merto 
 Di quanto avete gia per lei sofferto. 
 
 Oh, se potessi ritornar mai vivo, 
 
 Quanto ti parria duro, o Re Agricane ! 
 
 Che gia, mostr6 costei s\ averti a schivo 
 Con repulse crudeli et inumane. 
 
 O Ferrau, o mille altri ch' io non scrivo, 
 Ch' avete fatto mille pruove vane 
 
 Per questa ingrata, quanto aspro vi fora 
 
 S' a costu' in braccio voi la vedesse ora ! 
 
 Angelica a Medor la prima r&sa 
 
 Coglier lascio, non ancor tocca inante ; 
 
 Ne persona fu mai si avventurosa, 
 
 Ch' in quel giaroin potessc por le piante. 
 
 Per adombrar, per onestar la cosa, 
 Si celebrb con ceremonie sante 
 
 II matrimonio, ch' auspice ebbe Amore, 
 
 E pronuba la moglie del pastore. 
 
 Ffirsi le nozze sotto all' umil tetto 
 
 Le piu solenni che vi potean farsi ; 
 E piu d' un mcse poi stero a diletto 
 
 1 duo tranquilli amanti a ricrearsi.
 
 APPENDIX. 647 
 
 Piu lunge non vedea del giovinetto 
 
 La donna, n6 di lui potea saziarsi : 
 Ne, per mai sempre pendegli dal collo, 
 Ilsuo disir sentia di lui satollo. 
 
 Se stava all' ombra o se del tetto usciva, 
 Avea dl e notte il bel giovine a lato : 
 
 Matino e sera or questa or quella riva 
 Cercando andava, o qualche verde prato : 
 
 Nel mezo giorno un antro li copriva, 
 Forse non men di quel commodo e grato 
 
 Ch' ebber, fuggendo 1' acque, Enea e Dido, 
 
 De' lor secreti testimonio fido. 
 
 Fra piacer tanti, ovunque un arbor dritto 
 Vedesse ombrare o fonte o rivo puro, 
 
 V avea spillo o coltel subito fitto ; 
 Cosl, se v' era alcun sasso men duro. 
 
 Et era fuori in mille luoghi scritto, 
 E cosi in casa in altri tanti il muro, 
 
 Angelica e Medoro, in varii modi 
 
 Legati insieme di diversi nodi. 
 
 Poi che le parve aver fatto soggiomo 
 Q.uivi piu ch' a bastanza, fe' disegno 
 
 Di fare in India del Catai ritorno, 
 E Medor coronar del suo bel regno. 
 
 Portava al braccio un cerchio d' oro, adorno 
 Di ricche gemme, in testimonio e segno 
 
 Del ben che '1 Conte Orlando le volea ; 
 
 E portato gran tempo ve 1' avea. 
 
 duel dono gia Morgana a Ziliante, 
 Nel tempo che nel lago ascoso il tenne ; 
 
 Et esso, poi ch' al padre Monodante 
 Per opra e per virtu d' Orlando venne, 
 
 Lo diede a Orlando : Orlando ch' era amante, 
 Di porsi al braccio il cerchio d' or sostenne, 
 
 Avendo disegnato di donarlo 
 
 Alia Regina sua di ch' io vi parlo. 
 
 Non per amor del Paladino, quanto 
 Perch' era ricco e d' artificio egregio, 
 
 Caro avuto 1' avea la donna tanto 
 Che pid non si pub aver cosa di pregio. 
 
 Se lo serb6 ne 1' Isola del pianto, 
 Non so gia dirvi con che privilegio, 
 
 La dove esposta al marin mostro nuda 
 
 Fu da la gente inospitale e cruda. 
 PART III. 9
 
 548 APPENDIX. 
 
 ftuivi non si trovando altra mercede, 
 Ch' al buon pastore et alia moglie dessi, 
 
 Che serviti gli avea con si gran fede 
 Dal d\ che nel suo albergo si fur messi ; 
 
 Lev6 dal braccio il cerchio, e gli lo diede, 
 E volse per suo amor che lo tenessi ; 
 
 Indi saliron verso la montagna 
 
 Che divide la Prancia da la Spagna. 
 
 Dentro a Valenza o dentro a Barcellona 
 Per qualche giorno avean pensato porsi, 
 
 Fin che accadesse alcuna nave buona, r 
 Che per Levante apparecchiasse a sciorsi. 
 
 Videro il mar scoprir sotto a Girona 
 Ne lo smontar gia de i montani dorsi ; 
 
 E, costeggiando a man sinistra il lito. 
 
 A Barcellona andar pel camin trito. 
 
 Ma non vi giunser prima ch' un uom pazzo 
 Giacer trovaro in su 1' estreme arene, 
 
 Che, come porco, di loto e di guazzo 
 Tutto era brutto, e volto e petto e schene. 
 
 Costui si scaglifc lor, come cagnazzo 
 Ch' aslair forestier subito viene ; 
 
 E die lor noia e fu per far lor scorno. 
 
 The troop then follow'd where their chief had gone, 
 Pursuing his stern chase among the trees, 
 
 And leave the two companions there alone, 
 One surely dead, the other scarcely less. 
 
 Long time Medoro lay without a groan, 
 Losing his blood in such large quantities, 
 
 That life would surely have gone out at last, 
 
 Had not a helping hand been coming past. 
 
 There came, by chance, a damsel passing there, 
 Dress'd like a shepherdess in lowly wise, 
 
 But of a royal presence, and an air 
 
 Noble as handsome, with clear maiden eyes. 
 
 "Tis so long since I told you news of her, 
 Perhaps you know her not in this disguise. 
 
 This, you must know then, was Angelica, 
 
 Proud daughter of the Khan of great Cathay.
 
 APPENDIX. 549 
 
 You know the magic ring and her distress 1 
 Well, when she had recovered this same ring, 
 
 It so increased her pride and haughtiness, 
 She seem'd too high for any living thing. 
 
 She goes alone, desiring nothing less 
 Than a companion, even though a king : 
 
 She even scorns to recollect the flame 
 
 Of one Orlando, or his very name. 
 
 But, above all, she hates to recollect 
 
 That she had taken to Rinaldo so ; 
 She thinks it the last want of self-respect, 
 
 Pure degradation, to have look'd so low. 
 " Such arrogance," said Cupid, " must be check'd." 
 
 The little god betook him with his bow 
 To where Medoro lay ; and, standing by, 
 Held the shaft ready with a lurking eye. 
 
 Now when the princess saw the youth all pale, 
 And found him grieving with his bitter wound, 
 
 Not for what one so young might well bewail, 
 But that his king should not be laid in ground, 
 
 She felt a something strange and gentle steal 
 Into her heart by some new way it found, 
 
 Which touch'd its hardness, and turn'd all to grace; 
 
 And more so, when he told her all his case. 
 
 And calling to her mind the little arts 
 Of healing, which she learnt in India, 
 
 (For 'twas a study valued in those parts 
 Even by those who were in sovereign sway, 
 
 And yet so easy too, that, like the heart's, 
 'Twas more inherited than learnt, they say), 
 
 She cast about, with herbs and balmy juices, 
 
 To save so fair a life for all its uses. 
 
 And thinking of an herb that caught her eye 
 As she was coming, in a pleasant plain 
 
 (Whether 'twas panacea, dittany, 
 
 Or some such herb accounted sovereign 
 
 For stanching blood quickly and tenderly, 
 And winning out all spasm and bad pain), 
 
 She found it not far off, and gathering some, 
 
 Returned with it to save Medoro's bloom. 
 
 In coming back she met upon the way 
 
 A shepherd, who was riding through the wood 
 
 To find a heifer that had gone astray, 
 And been two days about the solitude.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 She took him with her where Medoro lay, 
 
 Still feebler than he was, with loss of blood ; 
 So much he lost, and drew so hard a breath, 
 That he was now fast fading to his death. 
 
 Angelica got off her horse in haste, 
 And made the shepherd get as fast from his ;, 
 
 She ground the herbs with stones, and then express'd 
 With her white hands the balmy milkiness ; 
 
 Then dropp'd it in the wound, and bath'd his breast, 
 His stomach, feet, and all that was amiss : 
 
 And of such virtue was it, that at length 
 
 The blood was stopp'd, and he look'd round with strength. 
 
 At last he got upon the shepherd's horse, 
 But would not quit the place till he had seen 
 
 Laid in the ground his lord and master's corse ; 
 And Cloridan lay with it, who had been 
 
 Smitten so fatally with sweet remorse. 
 He then obey'd the will of the fair queen ; 
 
 And she, for very pity of his lot, 
 
 Went and stay'd with him at the shepherd's cot. 
 
 Nor would she leave him, she esteem'd him so, 
 Till she had seen him well with her own eye; 
 
 So full of pity did her bosom grow, 
 
 Since first she saw him faint and like to die. 
 
 Seeing his manners now, and beauty too, 
 She felt her heart yearn somehow inwardly ; 
 
 She felt her heart yearn somehow, till at last 
 
 'Twas all on fire, and burning warm and fast. 
 
 The shepherd's home was good enough and neat, 
 
 A little shady cottage in a dell : 
 The man had just rebuilt it all complete, 
 
 With room to spare, in case more births befell. 
 There with such knowledge did the lady treat 
 
 Her handsome patient, that he soon grew well ; 
 But not before she had, on her own part, 
 A secret wound much greater in her heart. 
 
 Much greater was the wound, and deeper far, 
 
 Which the sweet arrow made in her heart's strings ; 
 
 'Twa? from Medoro's lovely eyes and hair ; 
 Twas from the naked archer with the wings. 
 
 She feels it now ; she feels, and yet can bear 
 Another's less than her own sufferings. 
 
 She thinks not of herself: she thinks alone 
 
 How to cure him by whom she is undone.
 
 APPENDIX. 551 
 
 The more his wound recovers and gets ease, 
 Her own grows worse, and widens day by day. 
 
 The youth gets well ; the lady languishes, 
 Now warm, now cold, as fitful fevers play. 
 
 His beauty heightens, like the flowering trees ; 
 She, miserable creature, melts away 
 
 Like the weak snow, which some warm sun has found 
 
 Fall'n, out of season, on a rising ground. 
 
 And must she speak at last, rather than die 7 
 And must she plead, without another's aid 1 
 
 She must, she must : the vital moments fly : 
 She lives she dies, a passion-wasted maid. 
 
 At length she bursts all ties of modesty : 
 
 Her tongue explains her eyes ; the words are said ; 
 
 And she asks pity, underneath that blow 
 
 Which he, perhaps, that gave it did not know. 
 
 O County Orlando ! King Sacripant ! 
 
 That fame of yours, say, what avails it yel 
 That lofty honour, those great deeds ye vaunt, 
 
 Say, what's their value with the lovely she 7 
 Shew me recall to memory (for I can't) 
 
 Shew me, I beg, one single courtesy 
 That ever she vouchsafed ye, far or near, 
 For all you've done and have endured for her. 
 
 And you, if you could come to life again, 
 O Agrican, how hard 'twould seem to you, 
 
 Whose love was met by nothing but disdain, 
 And vile repulses, shocking to go through ! 
 
 O Ferragus ! O thousands, who, in vain, 
 Did all that loving and great hearts could do, 
 
 How would ye feel, to see, with all her charms, 
 
 This thankless creature in a stripling's arms 1 
 
 The young Medoro had the gathering 
 
 Of the world's rose, the rose untouch'd before ; 
 
 For never, since that garden blush'd with spring, 
 Had human being dared to touch the door. 
 
 To sanction it to consecrate the thing, 
 The priest was called to read the service o'er, 
 
 (For without marriage what can come but strife'?) 
 
 And the bride-mother was the shepherd's wife. 
 
 All was perform'd, in short, that could be so 
 In such a place, to make the nuptials good ; 
 
 Nor did the happy pair think fit to go, 
 
 But spent the month and more within the wood.
 
 552 APPENDIX. 
 
 The lady to the stripling seemed to grow. 
 
 His step her step, his eyes her eyes pursued ; 
 Nor did her love lose any of its zest, 
 Though she was always hanging on his breast. 
 
 In doors and out of doors, by night, by day, 
 She had the charmer by her side for ever ; 
 
 Morning and evening they would stroll away, 
 Now by some field or little tufted river ; 
 
 They chose a cave in middle of the day, 
 Perhaps not less agreeable or clever 
 
 Than Dido and ^Gneas found to screen them, 
 
 When they had secrets to discuss between them. 
 
 And all this while there was not a smooth tree, 
 That stood by stream or fountain with glad breath, 
 
 Nor stone less hard than stones are apt to be, 
 But they would find a knife to carve it with ; 
 
 And in a thousand places you might see, 
 And on the walls about you and beneath, 
 
 ANGELICA AND MEDORO, tied in one, 
 
 As many ways as lovers' knots can run. 
 
 And when they thought they had outspent their time, 
 
 Angelica the royal took her way, 
 She and Medoro, to the Indian clime, 
 
 To crown him king of her great realm, Cathay.* 
 
 No. VII. 
 THE JEALOUSY OF ORLANDO. 
 
 FERON camin diverso i cavallieri, 
 
 Di qua Zerbino, e di la il Conte Orlando. 
 Prima che pigli il Conte altri sentieri, 
 
 All' arbor tolse, e a se ripose il brando ; 
 E, dove meglio col Pagan pensosse 
 Di potersi incontrare, il destrier mosse. 
 
 Lo strano corso che tenne il cavallo 
 Del Saracin pel bosco senza via, 
 
 * This version of the present episode has appeared in print before. So has a portion 
 of the Monks and the Giants.
 
 APPENDIX. 553 
 
 Fece ch' Orlando and6 duo giorni in fallo, 
 N6 lo trovo, ne pote averne spia. 
 
 Giunse ad un rivo, che parea cristallo, 
 Ne le cui sponde un bel pratel fioria, 
 
 Di native color vago e dipinto, 
 
 E di molti e belli arbori distinto. 
 
 II merigge facea grato 1' orezo 
 
 Al duro armento et al pastore ignudo ; 
 
 Si che ne Orlando sentia alcun ribrezo, 
 Che la corazza avea, 1' ehno e lo scudo. 
 
 Quivi egli entro, per riposarsi, in mezo; 
 E v' ebbe travaglioso albergo e crudo, 
 
 E, piu che dir si possa, empio soggiorno, 
 
 Quell' infelice e sfortunato giorno. 
 
 Volgendosi ivi intorno, vidi scritti 
 Molti arbuscelli in su 1' oinbrosa riva. 
 
 Tosto che fermi v' ebbe gli occhi e fitti, 
 Fu certo esser di man de la sua Diva. 
 
 Questo era un di quei lochi gia descritti, 
 Ove sovente con Medor veniva 
 
 Da casa del pastore indi vicina 
 
 La bella donna del Catai Regina. 
 
 Angelica e Medor con cento nodi 
 Legati insieme, e in cento lochi vede. 
 
 Quante lettere son, tanti son chiodi 
 
 Co i quali Amore il cor gli punge e fiede. 
 
 Va col pensier cercando in mille modi 
 Non creder quel ch' al suo dispetto crede : 
 
 Ch' altra Angelica sia, creder si sforza, 
 
 Ch' abbia scritto il suo nome in quella scorza. 
 
 Poi dice : Conosco io pur queste note ; 
 
 Di tal io n' ho tante e vedute e lette. 
 Finger questo Medoro ella si puote ; 
 
 Forse ch' a me questo cognome mette. 
 Con tali opinion dal ver remote 
 
 Usando fraude a se medesmo, stette 
 Ne la speranza il mal contento Orlando, 
 Che si seppe a se stesso ir procacciando. 
 
 Ma sempre piu raccende e piu rinuova, 
 Q,uanto spenger piu cerca, il rio sospetto; 
 
 Come 1' incauto augel che si ritrova 
 In ragna o in visco aver dato di petto, 
 
 Quanto piu batte 1' ale e piu si prova 
 Di disbrigar, piu vi si lega stretto.
 
 654 APPENDIX. 
 
 Orlando vicne ove s' incurva il monte 
 A guisa d' arco in su la chiara fonte. 
 
 Aveano in su 1' entrata il luogo adorno 
 
 Coi piedi storti cdere e viti erranti. 
 Quivi soleano al piu cocente giorno 
 
 Stare abbracciati i duo felici amanti. 
 V aveano i nomi lor dentro e d' intorno 
 
 Piu che in altro de i luoghi circonstanti, 
 Scritti, qnal con carbone e qual con gesso, 
 E qual con punte di coltelli impresso. 
 
 II mesto Conte a pie quivi discese ; 
 
 E vide in su 1' entrata de la grotta 
 Parole assai, che di sua man distese 
 
 Medoro avea, che parean scritte allotta. 
 Del gran piacer che ne Ja grotta prese, 
 
 Q,uesta sentenzia in versi avea ridotta : 
 Che fosse culta in suo linguaggio io penso ; 
 Et era ne la nostra tale in senso : 
 
 Liete piante, verdi erbe, limpide acque, 
 Spelunca opaca e di fredde ombre grata, 
 
 Dove la bella Angelica, che nacque 
 Di Galafron, da molti in vano amata, 
 
 Spesso ne le mie braccia nuda giacque ; 
 De la commodita che qui m' e data, 
 
 Io povero Medor ricompensarvi 
 
 D' altro non posso, che d' ognior lodarvi : 
 
 E di pregare ogni signore arnante 
 
 E cavalh'eri e damigelle, e ognuna 
 Persona o paesana o viandante, 
 
 Che qui sua volonta meni o Fortuna, 
 Ch' all' erbe, all' ombra, all' antro, al rio, alle piante 
 
 Dica : Benigno abbiate e sole e luna, 
 E de le nimfe il coro che proweggia, 
 Che non conduca a voi pastor mai greggia. 
 
 Era scritta in Arabico, che '1 Conte 
 
 Intendea cosi ben, come Latino. 
 Fra molte lingue e molte ch' avea pronte 
 
 Prontissima avea quella il Paladino 
 E gli schivb piu volte e danni et onte, 
 
 Che si trovb tra il popul Saracino. 
 Ma non si vanti, se gia n' ebbe frutto ; 
 Ch' un danno or n' ha, che pu6 scontargli il tutto. 
 
 Tre volte, e quattro, e sei, lesse Io scritto 
 Quello infelice, e pur cercando in vano
 
 ?PENDIX. 555 
 
 Che non vi fosse quel che v' era scritto ; 
 
 E sempre lo vedea piu chiaro e piano ; 
 Et ogni volta in mezo il petto afflitto 
 
 Stringers! il cor sentia con fredda mano. 
 Rimase il fin con gli occhi e con la mente 
 Pissi nel sasso, al sasso indifferente. 
 
 Fu allora per uscir del sentimento ; 
 
 81 tutto in preda del dolor si lassa. 
 Credete a chi n" ha fatto esperimento, 
 
 Che questo e '1 duol che tutti gli altri passa. 
 Caduto gli era sopra il petto il mento, 
 
 La fronte priva di baldanza, e bassa ; 
 Ne pote aver (che '1 duol 1' occupo tanto) 
 Alle querele voce, o umore al pianto. 
 
 L' impetuosa doglia entro rimase, 
 
 Che volea tutta uscir con troppa fretta. 
 
 Cosi veggian restar 1' acqua nel vase, 
 Che largo il ventre e la bocca abbia stretta ; 
 
 Che, nel voltar che si fa in su la base, 
 L' umor, che vorria uscir, tanto s' affretta, 
 
 E ne 1' angusta via tanto s' intrica, 
 
 Ch' a goccia a goccia fuore esce a fatica. 
 
 Poi ritorna in sc alquanto, e pensa come 
 Possa esser che non sia la cosa vera : 
 
 Che voglia alcun cosi infamare il nome 
 De la sua donna e crede e brama e spera, 
 
 O gravar lui d' insopportabil some 
 Tanto di gelosia, che s& ne pera; 
 
 Et abbia quel, sia chi si voglia stato, 
 
 Molto la man di lei bene imitate. 
 
 In cosi poca, in cosi debol speme 
 Sveglia gli spirti, e gli rifranca un poco ; 
 
 Indi al suo Brigliadoro il dosso preme, 
 Dando gia il sole alia sorella loco. 
 
 Non molto va, che da le vie supreme 
 De i tetti uscir vede il vapor del fuoco, 
 
 Sente cani abbaiar, muggiare armento ; 
 
 Viene alia villa, e piglia alloggiamento. 
 
 Languido smonta, e lascia Brigliadoro 
 A un discrete garzon che n' abbia. cura. 
 
 Altri il disarma, altri gli sproni d' oro 
 Gli leva, altri a forbir va 1' armatura. 
 
 Era questa la casa ove Medoro 
 Giacque ferito, e v' ebbe alta awentura.
 
 556 APPENDIX. 
 
 Corcarsi Orlando e non cenar domanda, 
 Di dolor sazio e non d' altra vivanda. 
 
 Quanto piu cerca ritrovar quiete, 
 Tanto ritrova piu travaglio e pene ; 
 
 Che de '1 odiato scritto ogni parete, 
 Ogni uscio, ogni finestra vede plena. 
 
 Chieder ne vuol : poi tien le labra chete ; 
 Che teme non si far troppo serena, 
 
 Troppo chiara la cosa, che di nebbia 
 
 Cerca offuscar, perche men nuocer debbia. 
 
 Poco gli giova usar fraude a se stesso ; 
 
 Che senza domandarne e chi ne parla. 
 II pastor, che lo vede cosi oppresso 
 
 Da sua tristrizia, e che vorria levarla, 
 L' istoria nota a se che dicea spesso 
 
 Di quei duo amanti a chi volea ascoltarla, 
 Ch' a molti dilettevole fu a udire, 
 Gl' incomincib senza rispetto a dire: 
 
 Come esso a prieghi d' Angelica bella, 
 Portato avea Medoro alia sua villa ; 
 
 Ch' era ferito gravemente, e ch' ella 
 Curo la piaga, e in pochi di guarilla : 
 
 Ma che nel cor d' una maggior di quella 
 Lei feri amor : e di poca scintilla 
 
 L' accesse tanto e si cocente fuoco, 
 
 Che n' ardea tutta, e non trovava loco. 
 
 E, sanza aver rispetto ch' ella fosse 
 
 Figlia del maggior Re ch' abbia il Levante, 
 Da troppo amor constretta si condusse 
 . A farsi moglie d' un povero fante. 
 All ultimo 1' istoria si ridusse, 
 
 Che '1 pastor fe' portar la gemma inante, 
 Ch' alia sua dipartenza, per mercede 
 Del buono albergo, Angelica gli diede. 
 
 Q,uesta conclusion fu la secure 
 Che '1 capo a un colpo gli Iev6 dal collo, 
 
 Poi che d' innumerabil battiture 
 Si vide il manigoldo Amor satollo. 
 
 Celar si studia Orlando il duolo ; e pure 
 Quel gli fa forza, e male asconder puollo ; 
 
 Per lacrime e suspir da bocca e d' occhi 
 
 Convien, voglia o non voglia, al fin che scocchL 
 
 Poi ch' allagare il freno al dolor puote 
 (Che resta solo, e senza altrui rispetto),
 
 APPENDIX. 557 
 
 Gib da gli occhi rigando per le gote 
 Sparge un fiume di lacrime su '1 petto : 
 
 Sospira e geme, e va con spesse ruote 
 Di qua di la tutto cercando il letto ; 
 
 E piu duro ch' un sasso, e piti pungente 
 
 Che se fosse d' urtica, se lo sente. 
 
 In tanto aspro travaglio gli soccorre, 
 Che nel medesmo letto in che giaceva 
 
 L' ingrata donna venutasi a poire 
 Col suo drudo piu volte esser doveva. 
 
 Non altrimenti or quella piuma abborre 
 Ne con minor prestezza se ne leva, 
 
 Che de 1' erba il villan, che s' era messo 
 
 Per chiuder gli occhi, e vegga il serpe appresso. 
 
 Q.uel letto, quella casa, quel pastore 
 Immantinente in tant' odio gli casca, 
 
 Che senza aspettar luna, o che 1" albore 
 Che va dinanzi al nuovo giorno, nasca, 
 
 Piglia 1" arme e il destriero, et esce fuore 
 Per mezo il bosco alia piu oscura frasca ; 
 
 E quando poi gli e avviso d' esser solo, 
 
 Con gridi et urli apre le porte al duolo. 
 
 Di pianger mai, mai di gridar non resta ; 
 
 Ne la notte ne '1 di si da mai pace ; 
 Fugge cittadi e borghi, e alia foresta 
 
 Su '1 terren duro al discoperto giace, 
 Di se si maraviglia ch' abhia in testa 
 
 Una fontana d' acqua si vivace, 
 E come sospirar possa mai tan to; 
 E spesso dice a se cosi nel pianto : 
 
 Queste non son pita lacrime, che fuore 
 Stillo da gli occhi con si larga vena. 
 
 Non suppliron le lacrime al dolore ; 
 Finlr, ch' a mezo era il dolore a pena. 
 
 Dal fuoco spinto ora il vitale umore 
 
 Fugge per quella via ch' a gli occhi mem : 
 
 Et e quel che si versa, e trarra insieme 
 
 E '1 dolore e la vita all' ore estreme. 
 
 Questi, ch' indizio fan del mio tonnento, 
 Sospir non sono; ne i sospir son tali. 
 
 Quelli han triegua talora; io mai non sen to 
 Che '1 petto mio men la sua pena esali. 
 
 Amor, che m' arde il cor, fa questo vento, 
 Mentre dibatte intorno al fuoco 1' all.
 
 558 APPENDIX. 
 
 Amor, con che miracolo lo fai, 
 
 Che 'n fuoco il tenghi, e nol consumi mai 7 
 
 Non son, non sono io quel che paio in viso ; 
 
 Q,uel, ch' era Orlando, e morto, et e sotterra; 
 La sua donna ingratissima 1' ha ucciso ; 
 
 Si, mancando di fe, gli ha fatto guerra. 
 
 10 son lo spirito suo da lui diviso, 
 
 Ch' in questo inferno tormentandosi erra, 
 Accio con 1' ombra sia, che sola avanza, 
 Escmpio a chi in amor pone speranza. 
 
 Pel bosco erro tutta la notte il Conte ; 
 
 E allo spuntar delta diurna fiamina 
 Lo torno il suo destin sopra la fonte, 
 
 Dove Medoro insculse 1' epigrainma. 
 Veder 1' ingiuria sua scritta nel monte 
 
 L' accese si, ch' in lui non resto dramina 
 Che non fosse odio, rabbia, ira e furore ; 
 Ne piu indugio, che trasse il brando fuore. 
 
 Taglio lo scritto e '1 sasso, e sin al cielo 
 A volo alzar fe' le minute schegge. 
 
 Infelice quell' antro, et ogni stelo 
 In cui Medoro e Angelica si legge ! 
 
 Cosi restar quel di, ch' ombra ne gielo 
 A pastor mai non daran piu, ne a gregge: 
 
 E quella fonte gia si chiara e pura, 
 
 Da cotanta ira fu poco sicura : 
 
 Che rami, e ceppi, e tronchi, e sassi, e zolle 
 Non cesso di gittar ne le bell' onde, 
 
 Fin che da sommo ad imo si turbolle 
 Che non furo mai piu chiare ne monde ; 
 
 E stance al fin, e, al fin di sudor molle, 
 Poi che la lena vinta non risponde 
 
 Allo sdegno, al grave odio, all' ardente ira, 
 
 Cade sul prato, e verso il ciel sospira. 
 
 Afflitto e stance al fin cade ne 1' erba, 
 E ficca gli occhi al cielo, e non fa motto ; 
 
 Senza cibo e dormir cosi si serba, 
 Che '1 sole esce tre volte, e torna sotto. 
 
 Di crescer non cesso la pena acerba, 
 
 Che fuor del senno al fin 1' ebbe condotto. 
 
 11 quarto di, da gran furor commosso, 
 E maglie e piastre si stracci6 di dosso. 
 
 Q,ui riman 1' elmo. e la riman lo scudo ; 
 Lontan gli arnesi, e piu lontan 1' usbergo :
 
 APPENDIX. 559 
 
 L' arme sue tutte, in somma vi conclude, 
 
 Avean pel bosco differente albergo. 
 E poi si squarcib i panni, e mostro ignudo 
 
 L' ispido ventre, e tutto '1 petto e '1 tergo ; 
 E cominci6 la gran follia, si orrenda, 
 Che de la piu non sara mai ch' intenda. 
 
 In tanta rabbia, in tanto furor venne, 
 
 Che rimase offuscato in ogni senso. 
 Di tor la spada in man non gli sovvenne, 
 
 Che fatte avria mirabil cose, penso. 
 Ma ne quella ne scure ne bipenne 
 
 Era bisogno al suo vigore immense. 
 Q,uivi fe' ben de le sue prove eccelse ; 
 Ch' un alto pino al primo crollo svelse ; 
 
 E svelse dopo il primo altri parecchi, 
 
 Come fosser finocchi, ebuli o aneti ; 
 E fe' il simil di querce e d' olmi vecchi, 
 
 Di faggi e d' orni e d' illici a d' abeti ; 
 duel ch' un uccellator, che s' apparecchi 
 
 II campo mondo, fa, per por le reti, 
 De i giunchi e de le stoppie e de 1' urtiche, 
 Facchi de cerri e d' altre piante antiche. 
 
 I pastor, che sentito hanno il fracasso, 
 
 Lasciando il gregge sparso alia foresta, 
 Chi di qua, chi di la, tutti a gran passo 
 Vi vengono a veder che cosa e questa. 
 
 The poet breaks off here, and enters afterwards at large into the consequences 
 of the madness of Orlando ; omitted in this work, for the reasons mentioned at 
 page 366. 
 
 No. VIII. 
 THE DEATH OF CLORINDA. 
 
 MA, ecco omai 1' ora fatale e giunta 
 Che '1 viver di Clorinda al suo fin deve. 
 
 Spinge egli il ferro nel bel sen di punta, 
 Che vi s' immerge, e '1 sangue avido beve ;
 
 560 APPENDIX. 
 
 E la veste che d' or vago trapunta 
 
 Le mammelle stringea tenera e leve 
 L' empie d' un caldo fiume. Ella gia sente 
 Morirsi, e '1 pie le manca egro e languente. 
 
 Quel segue la vittoria, e la trafitta 
 
 Vergine minacciando incalza e prctne : 
 
 Ella, mentre cadea, la voce afflitta 
 Movendo, disse le parole estreme : 
 
 Parole ch' a lei novo un spirto ditta, 
 Spirto di fe, di carita., di speme: 
 
 Virtu ch' or Dio le infonde ; e se rubella 
 
 In vita fu, la vuole in morte ancella : 
 
 Amico, hai vinto ; io ti perdon : perdona 
 Tu ancora, al corpo no, che nulla pave, 
 
 All' alma si : deh ! per lei prega: e dona 
 Battesmo a me ch' ogni mia colpe lave. 
 
 In queste voci languide risuona 
 Un non so che di flebile e soave, 
 
 Che al cor gli serpe, ed ogni sdegno ammorza, 
 
 E gli occhi a lagrimar gl" invoglia e sforza. 
 
 Poco quindi Ionian nel sen del monte 
 Scaturia mormorando un picciol rio : 
 
 Egli v' accorse, e 1' elmo empie nel fonte, 
 E tornb mesto al grande ufficio e pio. 
 
 Tremar senti la man, mentre la fronte, 
 Non conosciuta ancor, sciolse e scoprio. 
 
 La vide, e la conobbe ; e rest6 Penza, 
 
 E voce, e moto. Ahi vista ! ahi cognoscenza ! 
 
 Non mori gia ; che sue virtuti accolse 
 Tutte in quel punto, e in guardia al cor le mise; 
 
 E, premendo il suo affanno, a dar si volse 
 Vita, coll' acqua a chi col ferro uccise. 
 
 Mentre egli il suon de' sacri detti sciolse, 
 Colei di gioia trasmutossi, e rise : 
 
 E in atto di morir lieto e vivace, 
 
 Dir parea ; S'apre il cielo ; io vado in pace. 
 
 D' un bel pallore ha il bianco volto asperso, 
 
 Come a gigli sarian miste viole ; 
 E gli occhi al cielo affisa, e in lei converso 
 
 Sembra per la pietate il cielo e '1 sole ; 
 E la man nuda e fredda alzando verso 
 
 II cavaliero, in vece di parole, 
 Gli da pegno di pace. In questa forma 
 Passa la bella donna, e par che dorma.
 
 APPENDIX. 561 
 
 Come 1' alma gentile uscita ei vede, 
 Rallenta quel vigor ch' avea raccolto, 
 
 E 1" imperio di se libero cede 
 Al duol gia fatto impetuoso e stolto, 
 
 Ch' al cor si stringe, e chiusa in breve sede 
 La vita, empie di morte i sensi e '1 volto. 
 
 Gia simile all' estinto il vivo langue 
 
 Al colore, al silenzio, agli atti, al sangue. 
 
 E ben la vita sua sdegnosa e scbiva, 
 Spezzando a sforza il suo ritegno frale, 
 
 La bell' anima sciolta alfin seguiva, 
 Che poco innanzi a lei spiegava 1' ale ; 
 
 Ma quivi stuol d' Franchi a caso arriva, 
 Cvu trae bisogno d' acqua, o d' altro tale ; 
 
 E con la donna il cavalier ne porta, 
 
 In se mal vivo, e morto in lei ch 1 e morta. 
 
 No. IX. 
 TANCRED IN THE ENCHANTED FOREST. 
 
 ERA in prence Tancredi intanto sorto 
 
 A seppellir la sua diletta arnica ; 
 E, benche in volto sia languido e smorto, 
 
 E mal atto a portar elmo e lorica, 
 Nulladimen, poi che '1 bisogno ha scorto, 
 
 Ei non ricusa il rischio o la fatica ; 
 Che "1 cor vivace il suo vigor trasfonde 
 Al corpo si, che par ch' esso n' abbonde. 
 
 Vassene il valoroso in se ristretto, 
 E tacito e guardingo al rischio ignoto : 
 
 E sostien della selva il fero aspetto, 
 
 E '1 gran romor del tuono e del tremoto ; 
 
 E nulla sbigottisce ; e sol nel petto 
 
 Sente, ma tosto il seda, un picciol moto. 
 
 Trapassa ; ed ecco in quel silvestre loco 
 
 Sorge improvvisa la citti del foco. 
 
 Allor s' arretra, e dubbio alquanto resta, 
 
 Fra se dicendo : Or qui che vaglion 1' armi 7 
 
 Nelle fauci de' inostri, e 'n gola a questa 
 Divoratrice fiamrua andrb a gettarmil
 
 562 APPENDIX. 
 
 Non mai la vita, ove cagione onesta 
 
 Del comun pro la chieda, altri risparmi ; 
 Ma ne prodigo sia d' anima grande 
 Uom degno ; e tale e ben chi qui la spande. 
 
 Pur 1' oste che dira, s' indarno io riedo 1 
 Qual altra selva ha di troncar speranza 1 
 
 Ne intentato lasciar vorra Goffredo 
 Mai questo varco. Or, s' oltre alcun s' avanza, 
 
 Forse 1' incendio, che qui sorto i' vedo, 
 Fia d' effetto minor che sembianza; 
 
 Ma seguane che puote. E in questo dire 
 
 Dentro saltowi : oh memorando ardire ! 
 
 Ne sotto 1' arme gia sentir gli parve 
 Caldo o fervor come di fbco intense ; 
 
 Ma pur, se fosser vere fiamme o larve, 
 Mai pote giudicar si tosto il senso : 
 
 Perche repente, appena tocco, sparve 
 
 Quel simulacro, e giunse un nuvol denso, 
 
 Che portb notte e verno ; e '1 verno ancora, 
 
 E 1' ombra dileguossi in picciol' ora. 
 
 Stupido si, ma intrepido rimanc 
 
 Tancredi ; e poiche vede il tutto cheto, 
 
 Mette secure il pie nelle profane 
 
 Soglie, e spia della selva ogni secreto. 
 
 Ne piu apparenze inusitate e strane, 
 Ne trova alcun per via scontro o divieto, 
 
 Se non quanto per se ritarda il bosco 
 
 La vista e i passi, inviluppato e fosco. 
 
 Alfine un largo spazio in forma scorge 
 D' anfiteatro, e non e pianta in esso, 
 
 Salvo che nel suo mezzo altero sorge, 
 Quasi eccelsa piramide, un cipresso. 
 
 Cola si drizza, e nel mirar s' accorge 
 Ch' era di varj segni il tronco impresso, 
 
 Simil a quei, che in vece uso di scritto 
 
 L' antico gia misterioso Egitto. 
 
 Fra i segni ignoti alcune note ha scorte 
 Del sermon di Soria, ch' ei ben possiede: 
 
 O tu, che dentro ai chiostri della morte 
 Osasti por, guerriero audace, il piede, 
 
 Deh ! se non sei crudel, quanto sei forte, 
 Deh ! non turbar questa secreta sede. 
 
 Perdona all' ahne omai di luce prive : 
 
 V.on dee guerra co' morti aver chi vive.
 
 APPENDIX. 563 
 
 Cosl dicea quel motto. Egli era intento 
 Delle brevi parole ai sensi occulti. 
 
 Premere intanto udia continuo il vento 
 Tra le frondi del bosco e tra i virgulti ; 
 
 E trarne un suon che flebile concento 
 Par d' umani sospiri e di singulti; 
 
 E un non so che confuso instilla al core 
 
 Di pieta, di spavento-e di dolore. 
 
 Pur tragge alfin la spada, e con gran forza 
 Percote 1' alta pianta. Ob. maraviglia ! 
 
 Manda fuor sangue la recisa scorza, 
 E fa la terra intorno a se vermiglia. 
 
 Tutto si raccapriccia ; e pur rinforza 
 II colpo, e '1 fin vederne ei si consiglia. 
 
 Allor, quasi di tomba, uscir ne sente 
 
 Un indistinto gemito dolente ; 
 
 Che poi distinto in voci : Ahi troppo, disse, 
 M' hai tu, Tancredi, offcsso : or tanto basti : 
 
 Tu dal corpo, che meco e per me visse, 
 Felice albergo gia, mi discacciasti. 
 
 Perche il misero tronco, a cui m' affisse 
 II mio duro destino, ancor mi guastil 
 
 Dopo la morte gli avversarj tuoi, 
 
 Crudel, ne' lor sepolcri offender vuoil 
 
 Clorinda fui : ne sol qui spirto umano 
 Albergo in questa pianta rozza e dura; 
 
 Ma ciascun altro ancor, Franco o Pagano, 
 Che lassi i membri, a pie dell' alte nmra, 
 
 Astretto e qui da novo incanto e strano, 
 Non so s' io dica in corpo o in sepoltu 
 
 Son di sensi animati i rami e i tronchi ; 
 
 E micidial sei tu, se legno tronchi. 
 
 Qual infermo talor, ch' in sogno scorge 
 Drago, o cinta di fiamme alta Chimera, 
 
 Sebben sospetta, o in parte anco s' accorge 
 Che simulacro sia non forma vera, 
 
 Pur desia di fuggir, tanto gli porge 
 Spavento la sembianza orrida e fera : 
 
 Tale il timido amante appien non crede 
 
 Ai falsi inganni : e pur ne teme, e cede : 
 
 E dentro il cor gli 6" in modo tal conquiso 
 Da varj affetti, che s' agghiaccia e trema ; 
 
 E nel moto potente ed improvviso 
 Gli cade il ferro : e '1 manco e in lui la tema. 
 
 tura.
 
 564 APPENDIX. 
 
 Va fuor di se. Presente aver gli e awiso 
 
 L" offesa donna sua, che plori e gema : 
 Ne pud soffrir di rimirar quel sangue, 
 Ne quei gemiti udir d' egro che langue. 
 
 Cosi quel contra morte audace core 
 Nulla forma turbo d' alto spavento ; 
 
 Ma lui, che solo e fievole in amore, 
 Falsa imago deluse e van lamento. 
 
 II suo caduto ferro instanto fuore 
 Porto del bosco impetuoso vento, 
 
 Sicche vinto partissi ; e in sulla strada 
 
 Ritrovft poscia, e ripiglio la spada. 
 
 Pur non torno, ne ritentando ardio 
 
 Spiar di novo le cagioni ascose ; 
 E poi che, giunto al sommo Duce, unio 
 
 Gli spirti alquanto, e 1' animo compose, 
 Incomincio : Signor, nunzio son io 
 
 Di non credute e noh credibil cose. 
 Ci6 che dicean dello spettacol fero, 
 E del suon paventoso, e tutto vero. 
 
 Maraviglioso foco indi m' apparse, 
 Senza materia in un istante appreso ; 
 
 Che sorse, e, dilatando un muro farse 
 Parve, e d' armati mostri esser difeso. 
 
 Pur vi passai ; chfe ne 1' incendio m' arse, 
 Ne dal ferro mi fu 1' andar conteso : 
 
 Verno in quel punto, ed annottfc : fe' il giorno 
 
 E la serenitA poscia ritorno. 
 
 Di piu diro; ch' agli alberi da vita 
 Spirito uman, che sente e che ragiona. 
 
 Per prova sollo : io n' ho la voce udita, 
 Che nel cor flebilmente anco mi suona. 
 
 Stilla sangue de' tronchi ogni ferita, 
 Quasi di molle carne abbian persona. 
 
 No, no, piu non potrei (vinto mi chiamo) 
 
 Ne corteccia scorzar, ne sveller ramo.
 
 161 Broadway, January, 1846. 
 
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