What a landscape! and what a charm beyond painting he has put into it with his nightingales! and then what figures besides!  A knight on a winged steed descending with a naked beauty into a meadow in the thick of woods, with “here and there a solitary mountain.”  The mountains make no formal circle; they keep their separate distances, with their various intervals of light and shade.  And what a heart of solitude is given to the meadow by the loneliness of these its waiters aloof!]

[Footnote 11:  Nothing can be more perfectly wrought up than this sudden change of circumstances.]

[Footnote 12:  To feel the complete force of this picture, a reader should have been in the South, and beheld the like sudden apparitions, at open windows, of ladies looking forth in dresses of beautiful colours, and with faces the most interesting.  I remember a vision of this sort at Carrara, on a bright but not too hot day (I fancied that the marble mountains there cooled it).  It resembled one of Titian’s women, with its broad shoulders, and boddice and sleeves differently coloured from the petticoat; and seemed literally framed in the unsashed window.  But I am digressing.]

[Footnote 13:  Ariosto elsewhere represents him as the handsomest man in the world; saying of him, in a line that has become famous,

“Natura il fece, e poi roppe la stampa.”

Canto x. st. 84.

—­Nature made him, and then broke the mould.

(The word is generally printed ruppe; but I use the primitive text of Mr. Pannizi’s edition.) Boiardo’s handsomest man, Astolfo, was an Englishman; Ariosto’s is a Scotchman.  See, in the present volume, the
  note on the character of Astolfo, p. 41.]

[Footnote 14: 

  “Come orsa, che l’alpestre cacciatore
    Ne la pietrosa tana assalita abbia,
  Sta sopra i figli con incerto core,
    E freme in suono di pieta e di rabbia: 
  Ira la ’nvita e natural furore
    A spiegar l’ugne, e a insanguinar le labbia;
  Amor la ’ntenerisce, e la ritira
  A riguardare a i figli in mezo l’ira.”

  Like as a bear, whom men in mountains start
    In her old stony den, and dare, and goad,
  Stands o’er her children with uncertain heart,
    And roars for rage and sorrow in one mood;
  Anger impels her, and her natural part,
    To use her nails, and bathe her lips in blood;
  Love melts her, and, for all her angry roar,
  Holds back her eyes to look on those she bore.

This stanza in Ariosto has become famous as a beautiful transcript of a beautiful passage in Statius, which, indeed, it surpasses in style, but not in feeling, especially when we consider with whom the comparison originates: 

  “Ut lea, quam saevo foetam pressere cubili
    Venantes Numidae, natos erecta superstat
  Mente sub incerta, torvum ac miserabile frendens
    Illa quidem turbare globes, et frangere morsu
  Tela queat; sed prolis amor crudelia vincit
    Pectora, et in media catulos circumspicit ira.”