The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri (13 inch ebook reader .txt) 📕

spoken of is the last trench of Malebolge. Dante mentions no wall about the well; only giants standing round it like towers. ↩

Potiphar’s wife. ↩

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.”

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The disease of tympanites is so called “because the abdomen is distended with wind, and sounds like a drum when struck.” ↩

Ovid, Metamorphoses III:⁠—

“A fountain in a darksome wood,
Nor stained with falling leaves nor rising mud.”

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This Canto describes the Plain of the Giants, between Malebolge and the mouth of the Infernal Pit. ↩

Iliad, XVI:⁠—

“A Pelion ash, which Chiron gave to his (Achilles’) father, cut from the top of Mount 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 Shakespeare, in King Henry the Sixth, V i:⁠—

“Whose smile and frown, like to Achilles’ spear,
Is able with the change to kill and cure.”

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The battle of Roncesvalles,

“When Charlemain with all his peerage fell
By Fontarabia.”

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Archbishop Turpin, Chronicle, XXIII, Rodd’s Tr., thus describes the blowing of Orlando’s horn:⁠—

“He now blew a loud blast with his horn, 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, towards Gascony, being carried so far by supernatural power. Charles would have flown to his succor, 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,
On Fontarabian echoes borne,
That to King Charles did come,
When Rowland brave, and Olivier,
And every paladin and peer,
On Roncesvalles died!”

Orlando’s horn is one of the favorite fictions of old romance, and is 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! ↩

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.’ ”

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This pine-cone of bronze, which is now in the gardens of the Vatican, was found in the mausoleum of Hadrian, and 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 bass-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 the shopwindows every winter, and is sold to travellers, few of whom know the history and the poetry belonging to its original.”

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“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.” ↩

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,