trario l'istoria converti:
Che i Greci rotti, e che Troia vittrice,
E che Penelopea fu meretrice.

Da l'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. ]

* * * * *

[Footnote 1: See p. 192.]

[Footnote 2: Ariosto is here imitating Pulci, and bearding Dante. See
vol. i. p. 336.]

[Footnote 3: 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.]

[Footnote 4: 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 AEneas for interfering 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 AEneas," 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.]

[Footnote 5: "Che di soaevita l'alma notriva" is beautiful; 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. 210, &c. Ariosto's Terrestrial Paradise
was at home, among the friends who loved him, and whom he made happy.]

[Footnote 6: 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 vermilion" of a structure so enormous, and
under a sun so pure, presents a gorgeous spectacle to the imagination.
Dante himself, if he could have forgiven the poet his animal spirits
and views of the Moon s