The branches too alike commotion found, And shook th' industrious creatures on the ground, Who by degrees (what's scarce to be believed) 88. Latian, or Italian; any one of the Latin race. 109. The speaker is a certain Griffolino, an alchemist of Arezzo, who practised upon the credulity of Albert, a natural son of the Bishop of Siena. For this he was burned; but was condemned to the last Bolgia of the ten for alchemy." 66 116. The inventor of the Cretan labyrinth. Ovid, Metamorph. VIII. :— "Great Dædalus of Athens was the man tlemen, who took it into their heads to do things that would make a great part of the world wonder." Accordingly each contributed eighteen thou sand golden florins to a common fund, amounting in all to two hundred and sixteen thousand florins. They built a palace, in which each member had a splendid chamber, and they gave sumptuous dinners and suppers; ending their banquets sometimes by throwing all the dishes, table-ornaments, and knives of gold and silver out of the window This silly institution," continues Benvenuto, "lasted only ten months, the treasury being exhausted, and the wretched members became the fable and laughing-stock of all the world." In honour of this club, Folgore da San Geminiano, a clever poet of the Who made the draught, and formed the wonday (1260), wrote a series of twelve drous plan.' Not being able to find his way out of the labyrinth, he made wings for himself and his son Icarus, and escaped by flight. 122. Speaking of the people of Siena, Forsyth, Italy, 532, says: "Vain, flighty, fanciful, they want the judgment and penetration of their Florentine neighbours; who, nationally severe, call a nail without a head chiodo Sanese. The accomplished Signora Rinieri told me, that her father, while Governor of Siena, was once stopped in his carriage by a crowd at Florence, where the mob, recognizing him, called out: Lasciate passare il Governatore de' matti. A native of Siena is presently known at Florence; for his very walk, being formed to a hilly town, detects him on the plain." convivial sonnets, one for each month of the year, with Dedication and Conclusion. A translation of these sonnets may be found in D. G. Rossetti's Early Italian Poets. The Dedication runs as follows: "Unto the blithe and lordly Fellowship, Hart-hounds, hare-hounds, and blood-hounds even so; And o'er that realm, a crown for Niccolò. Who well might pass for children of King Courteous and valiant more than Lancelot,- man To hold high tournament in Camelot." 136. "This Capocchio," says the Ottimo, "was a very subtle alchemist; and because he was burned for practising alchemy in Siena, he exhibits his hatred to the Sienese, and gives us to understand that the author knew him." 125. The persons here mentioned gain a kind of immortality from Dante's verse. The Stricca, or Baldastricca, was a lawyer of Siena; and Niccolò dei Salimbeni, or Bonsignori, introduced the fashion of stuffing pheasants with cloves, or, as Benvenuto says, of roasting them at a fire of cloves. Though Dante mentions them apart, they seem, like the two others named afterwards, to have been members of the Brigata I. In this Canto the same Bolgia Spendereccia, or Prodigal Club, of Siena, continued, with different kinds of Falsiwhose extravagances are recorded by fiers. CANTO XXX. Benvenuto da Imola. This club con- 4. Athamas, king of Thebes and nisted of "twelve very rich young gen-husband of Ino, daughter of Cadmus His madness is thus described by Ovid, 'Now Athamas cries out, his reason fled, Here, fellow-hunters, let the toils be spread. With her two young, run roaring in this wood.' A father now no more--who now begun waves Had long consumed, and hollowed into caves. lent: Thence with her guiltless boy, who vain, Extends her jaws, as she her voice would rais 31. Griffolino d'Arezzo, mentione { in Canto XXIX. 109. 42. The same "mad sprite," Gianni Schicchi, mentioned in line 32. "Buoso Donati of Florence," says Benvenuto, "although a nobleman and of an illus trious house, was nevertheless like other noblemen of his time, and by means of thefts had greatly increased his patrimony. When the hour of death drew near the sting of conscience caused him to make a will in which he gave fat legacies to many people; whereupon his son Simon, (the Ottimo says his nephew,) thinking himself enormously aggrieved, suborned Vanni Schicchi dei Cavalcanti, who got into Buoso's bed, and made a will in opposition to the other. Gianni much resembled Buoso." In this will Gianni Schicchi did not forget himself while making Simon heir; At one bold spring she plunged into the for, according to the Ottimo, he put main. "When on the banks her son in ghastly hue Transfixed with Thracian arrows strikes her view, The matrons' shrieked; her big swoln grief The power of utterance; she stood aghast; Now she contemplates o'er with sad delight turns. T with collected rage at length she burns, Swift flies the ravisher; she marks his trace, Fastens her forky fingers in his eyes; scene, With darts and stones assail the frantic queen. this clause into it: "To Gianni Schicthe "lady of the herd," and Benvenuto chi I bequeath my mare." This was adds, none more beautiful was to be found in Tuscany; and it was valued at a thousand florins.' 61. Messer Adamo, a false-coiner of Brescia, who at the instigation of the Counts Guido, Alessandro, and Aghinolfo of Romena, counterfeited the golden florin of Florence, which bore on one side a lily, and on the other the figure of John the Baptist. 64. Tasso, Gerusalemme, XIII. 6c Fairfax's Tr. :— "He that the gliding rivers erst had seen 65. The upper valley of the Arno is in the province of Cassentino. Quoting these three lines, Ampère, Voyage Dan tesque, 246, says: "In these untrans freshness, which almost makes one shud latable verses, there is a feeling of humid der. I owe it to truth to say, that the Cassentine was a great deal less fresh and less verdant in reality than in the poetry of Dante, and that in the midst of the aridity which surrounded me, this poetry, by its very perfection, made one feel something of the punishment of Master Adam.' 73. Forsyth, Italy, 116, says: "The castle of Romena, mentioned in these verses, now stands in ruins on a precipice about a mile from our inn, and not far off is a spring which the peasants call Fonte Branda. Might I presume to differ from his commentators, Dante, in my opinion, does not mean the great fountain of Siena, but rather this obscure spring; which, though less known to the world, was an object more familiar to the poet himself, who took refuge here from proscription, and an image more natural to the coiner who was burnt on the spot." Ampère is of the same opinion, Voyage Dantesque, 246: "The Fonte Branda, mentioned by Master Adam, is assuredly the fountain thus named, which still flows not far from the tower of Romena, between the place of the crime and that of its punish ment. On the other hand, Mr. Barlow, Contributions, remarks: "This little fount was known only to so few, that Dante, who wrote for the Italian people generally, can scarcely be thought to have meant this, when the famous Fonte Branda at Siena was, at least by name, familiar to them all, and formed an image more in character with the insatiable thirst of Master Adam." Poetically the question is of slight importance; for, as Fluellen says, There is a river in Macedon, and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth, and there is salmons in both.' 86. This line and line 11 of Canto XXIX. are cited by Gabrielle Rossetti in confirmation of his theory of the "Principal Allegory of the Inferno,' that the city of Dis is Rome. He says, Spirito Antipapale, I. 62, Miss Ward's Tr.: "This well is surrounded by a high wall, and the wall by a vast trench; the circuit of the trench is twenty-two miles, and that of the wall eleven miles. Now the outward trench of the walls of Rome (whether real or imaginary we say not) was reckoned by Dante's contemporaries to be exactly twenty-two miles; and the walls of the city were then, and still are, eleven miles round. Hence it is clear, that the wicked time which looks into Rome, as into a mirror, sees there the corrupt place which is the final goal to its waters or people, that is, the figurative Rome, 'dread seat of Dis.'" The trench here spoken of is the last trench of Malebolge. Dante mentions no wall about the well; only giants standing round it like towers. 97. Potiphar's wife. 98. Virgil's "perjured Sinon," the Greek who persuaded the Trojans to accept the wooden horse, telling them it was meant to protect the city, in lieu of the statue of Pallas, stolen by Diomed and Ulysses. Chaucer, Nonnes Preestes Tale:"O false dissimilour, O Greek Sinon, That broughtest Troye at utterly to sorwe." called "because the abdomen is dis103. The disease of tympanites is so tended with wind, and sounds like a drum when struck." 128. Ovid, Metamorph. III. :— A fountain in a darksome wood, Nor stained with falling leaves nor rising mud." I. CANTO XXXI. This Canto describes the Plain of the Giants, between Malebolge and the mouth of the Infernal Pit. 4. Iliad, XVI. : "A Felion ash, which Chiron gave to his (Achilles') father, cut from the top of Moun: Pelion, to be the death of heroes." Chaucer, Squieres Tale:"And of Achilles for his queinte spere, For he coude with it bothe hele and drere." And Shakspeare, in King Henry the Sixth, V. i. — "Whose smile and frown, like to Achilles' spear Is able with the change to kill and cure." 16. The battle of Roncesvalles, "When Charlemain with all his peerage fell By Fontarabia." 18. Archbishop Turpin, Chronicle XXIII., Rodd's Tr., thus describes the blowing of Orlando's horn : "He now blew a loud blast with his hom, to summon any Christian concealed in the adjacent woods to his assistance, or to recall his friends beyond the pass. This horn was endued with such power, that all other horns were split by its sound; and it is said that Orlando at that time blew it with such vehemence, that he burst the veins and nerves of his neck. The sound reached the king's ears, who lay encamped. in the valley still called by his name, about eight miles from Ronceval, to>wards Gascony, being carried so far by supernatural power. Charles would have flown to his succour, but was prevented by Ganalon, who, conscious of Orlando's sufferings, insinuated it was usual with him to sound his horn on light occasions. He is, perhaps,' said he, pursuing some wild beast, and the sound echoes through the woods; it will be fruitless, therefore, to seek him.' O wicked traitor, deceitful as Judas! What dost thou merit?" Walter Scott in Marmion, VI. 33, makes allusion to Orlando's horn : O for a blast of that dread horn, That to King Charles did come, On Roncesvalles died!" Orlando's horn is one of the favourite fictions of old romance, and surpassed in power only by that of Alexander, which took sixty men to blow it and could be heard at a distance of sixty miles! 41. Montereggione is a picturesque old castle on an eminence near Siena. Ampère, Voyage Dantesque, 251, remarks: "This fortress, as the commentators say, was furnished with towers all round about, and had none in the centre. In its present state it is still very faithfully described by the verse, 'Montereggion di torri si corona.'" 59. This pine-cone of bronze, which is now in the gardens of the Vatican, vas found in the mausoleum of Hadrian, nd is supposed to have crowned its summit. "I have looked daily," says Mrs. Kemble, Year of Consolation, 152, "over the lonely, sunny gardens, open like the palace halls to me, where the wide-sweeping orange-walks end in some distant view of the sad and noble Campagna, where silver fountains call to each other through the silent, overarching cloisters of dark and fragrant green, and where the huge bronze pine, by which Dante measured his great giant, yet stands in the midst of graceful vases and bas-reliefs wrought in former ages, and the more graceful blossoms blown within the very hour." And Ampère, Voyage Dantesque, 277, remarks: "Here Dante takes as a point of comparison an object of determinate size; the pigna is eleven feet high, the giant then must be seventy; it performs, in the description, the office of those figures which are placed near monuments to render it easier for the eye to measure their height." Mr. Norton, Travel and Study in Italy, 253, thus speaks of the same object : "This pine-cone, of bronze, was set originally upon the summit of the Mausoleum of Hadrian. After this imperial sepulchre had undergone many evil fates, and as its ornaments were stripped one by one from it, the cone was in the sixth century taken down, and carried off to adorn a fountain, which had been constructed for the use of dusty and thirsty pilgrims, in a pillared enclosure, called the Paradiso, in front of the old basilica of St. Peter. Here it remained for centuries; and when the old church gave way to the new, it was put where it now stands, useless and out of place, in the trim and formal gardens of the Papal palace." And adds in a note : "At the present day it serves the bronze-workers of Rome as a model for an inkstand, such as is seen in th shop-windows every winter, and is sola to travellers, few of whom know the history and the poetry belonging to its original." 67. "The gaping monotony of this jargon," says Leigh Hunt, "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." 77. Nimrod, the "mighty hunter before the Lord," who built the tower of Babel, which, according to the Italian popular tradition, was so high that whoever mounted to the top of it could hear the angels sing. Cory, Ancient Fragments, 51, gives this extract from the Sibylline Oracles: "But when the judgments of the Almighty God crew Named from the event. Then severed far away They sped uncertain into realms unknown; Thus kingdoms rose, and the glad world was filled." 94. Odyssey, XI., Buckley's Tr.: "God-like Otus and far-famed Ephialtes; whom the faithful earth nourished, the tallest and far the most beautiful, at least after illustrious Orion. For at nine years old they were also nine cubits in width, and in height they were nine fathoms. Who even threatened the immortals that they would set up a strife of impetuous war in Olympus. They attempted to place Ossa upon Olympus, and upon Ossa leafy Pelion, that heaven might be accessible. And they would have accomplished it, if they had reached the measure of youth; but the son of Jove, whom fair-haired Latona bore, destroyed them both, before the down flowered under their temples and thickened upon their cheeks with a flowering beard. 98. The giant with a hundred hands. Aineid, X.:"Agaon, who, they say, had a hundred arms and a hundred hands, and flashed fire from fifty mouths and breasts; when against the thunderbolts of Jove he on so many equal bucklers clashed; unsheathed SO many swords." He is supposed to have been a famous pirate, and the fable of the hundred hands arose from the hundred sailors that manned his ship. 100. The giant Antæus is here unbound, because he had not been at "the mighty war" against the gods. 115. The valley of the Bagrada, one of whose branches flows by Zama, the scene of Scipio's great victory over Hannibal, by which he gained his greatest renown and his title of Africanus. Among the neighbouring hills, according to Lucan, Pharsalia, IV., the giant Antæus had his cave. Speaking of Curio's voyage, he says:— "To Afric's coast he cuts the foamy way, Where low the once victorious Carthage y There, landing, to the well-known camp he hies, Where from afar the distant seas he spies: Where Bagrada's dull waves the sands divide, And slowly downward roll their sluggish tide. From thence he seeks the heights renowned by fame, And hallowed by the great Cornelian name: But 124. Eneid, VI.: "Here too you might have seen Tityus, the foster-child of all-bearing earth, whose body is extended over nine whole acres; and a huge vulture, with her hooked beak, pecking at his immortal liver." Also, Odyssey, XI., in similar words. Typhoeus was a giant with a hundred heads, like a dragon's, who made war upon the gods as soon as he was born. He was the father of Geryon and Cer berus. |