It was famous for the most luxurious worship of antiquity.  Vide Gibbon, vol. iii. p. 198.]

[Footnote 4:  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.]

[Footnote 5:  In the original, an impetuous gust of wind carries away the sword of Tancred; a circumstance which I mention because Collins admired it (see his Ode on the Superstitions of the Highlands).  I confess I cannot do so.  It seems to me quite superfluous; 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 wished him not to fight any more, why should he give him the sword back?  And if it was meant as a present to him from Clorinda, what gave her the power to make the present?  Tasso retained both the particulars in the Gerusalemme Conquistata.]

[Footnote 6: 

  “Giace l’alta Cartago:  appena i segni
     De l’alte sue ruine il lido serba.

  Muoiono le citta:  muoiono i regni: 
    Copre i fasti e le pompe arena ed erba: 
  E l’uom d’esser mortal par che si sdegni. 
    Oh nostra mente cupida e superba!”

Canto xv. 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 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 thing in the stanza of its imitator.

                     “Qua devictae Carthaginis arces
  Procubuere, jacentque infausto in littore turres
  Eversae; quantum ille metus, quantum illa laborum
  Urbs dedit insultans Latio et Laurentibus arvis! 
  Nunc passim vix reliquias, vix nomina servans,
  Obruitur propriis non agnoscenda ruinis. 
  Et querimur genus infelix, humana labare
  Membra aevo, cum regna palam moriantur et urbes.”

De Partu Virginis, 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 hanuo):  but though there is a like germ of thought in Dante, the mournful flower of it, the word “death,” is not there.  It was evidently suggested by a passage (also pointed out by the commentators) in the consolatory letter of