"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 AEneid. It serves,
too, in a very particular manner to introduce Medoro worthily to the
affection of 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.]

[Footnote 16: 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 pleasure 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.]

[Footnote 17:

"Scritti, qual 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.

* * * * *

ASTOLFO'S JOURNEY TO THE MOON.

Argument.

The Paladin Astolfo ascends on the hippogriff to the top of one of the
mountains at the source of the Nile, called the Mountains of the