Orlando muttered with his lips closed and his teeth ground together; and you might have thought that fire instead of breath came out of his nose and mouth.  He raised his sword Durindana with both his hands, and sent it down so tremendously on Agrican’s left shoulder, that it cut through breast-plate and belly-piece down to the very haunch; nay, crushed the saddle-bow, though it was made of bone and iron, and felled man and horse to the earth.  From shoulder to hip was Agrican cut through his weary soul, and he turned as white as ashes, and felt death upon him.  He called Orlando to come close to him with a gentle voice, and said, as well as he could, “I believe in Him who died on the Cross.  Baptise me, I pray thee, with the fountain, before my senses are gone.  I have lived an evil life, but need not be rebellious to God in death also.  May He who came to save all the rest of the world, save me!  He is a God of great mercy.”

And he shed tears, did that king, though he had been so lofty and fierce.

Orlando dismounted quickly, with his own face in tears.  He gathered the king tenderly in his arms, and took and laid him by the fountain, on a marble cirque which it had; and then he wept in concert with him heartily, and asked his pardon, and so baptised him in the water of the fountain, and knelt and prayed to God for him with joined hands.

He then paused and looked at him; and when he perceived his countenance changed, and that his whole person was cold, he left him there on the marble cirque by the fountain, all armed as he was, with the sword by his side, and the crown upon his head.

* * * * *

I think I may anticipate the warm admiration of the reader for the whole of this beautiful episode, particularly its close.  “I think,” says Panizzi, “that Tasso had this passage particularly in view when he wrote the duel of Clorinda and Tancredi, and her conversion and baptism before dying.  The whole passage, from stanza xii. (where Agrican receives his mortal blow) to this, is beautiful; and the delicate proceeding of Orlando in leaving Agrican’s body armed, even with the sword in his hand, is in the noblest spirit of chivalry.”—­Edition of Boiardo and Ariosto, vol. iii. page 357.

The reader will find the original in the Appendix No.  I.

In the course of the poem (canto xix. stanza xxvi.) a knight, with the same noble delicacy, who is in distress for a set of arms, borrows those belonging to the dead body, with many excuses, and a kiss on its face.

[Footnote 1: 

  “Che tutti insieme, e ’l suo Re Galafrone,
  Non li stimava quanto un vil bottone.”]

[Footnote 2:  Berni has here introduced the touching words, “Would I were not so!” (Cosi non foss’io!)]

[Footnote 3:  This proposal is in the highest ingenuous spirit of the absurd wilfulness of passion, thinking that every thing is to give way before it, not excepting the same identical wishes in other people.]