[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 so different from his own, might have stood in admiration before an abode at once so lustrous and so vast.]

[Footnote 7: 

“De’ frutti a lui del Paradiso diero,
Di tal sapor, ch’a suo giudizio, sanza
Scusa non sono i due primi parenti,
Se pur quei fur si poco ubbidienti.”

Canto xxxiv. st. 60.]

[Footnote 8:  Modern astronomers differ very much both with Dante’s and Ariosto’s Moon; nor do the “argent fields” of Milton appear better placed in our mysterious satellite, with its no-atmosphere and no-water, and its tremendous precipices.  It is to be hoped (and believed) that knowledge will be best for us all in the end; for it is not always so by the way.  It displaces beautiful ignorances.]

[Footnote 9:  Very fine and scornful, I think, this.  Mighty monarchies reduced to actual bladders, which, little too as they were, contained big sounds.]