How shall I speak of it? exclaims the poet.  How think of the horrible slaughter about to fall on the Christians and their greatest men, so that not a dry eye shall be left in France?  How express my disgust at the traitor Gan, whose heart a thousand pardons from his sovereign, and the most undeserved rescues of him by the warrior he betrayed, could not shame or soften?  How mourn the weakness of Charles, always deceived by him, and always trusting?  How dare to present to my mind the good, the great, the ever-generous Orlando, brought by the traitor into the doleful pass of Roncesvalles and the hands of myriads of his enemies, so that even his superhuman strength availed not to deliver him out of the slaughterhouse, and he blew the blast with his dying breath, which was the mightiest, the farthest heard, and the most melancholy sound that ever came to the ears of the undeceived?

Gan was known well to every body but his confiding sovereign.  The Paladins knew him well; and in their moments of indignant disgust often told him so, though they spared him the consequences of his misdeeds, and even incurred the most frightful perils to deliver him out of the hands of his enemies.  But he was brave; he was in favour with the sovereign, who was also their kinsman; and they were loyal and loving men, and knew that the wretch envied them for the greatness of their achievements, and might do the state a mischief; so they allowed themselves to take a kind of scornful pleasure in putting up with him.  Their cousin Malagigi, the enchanter, had himself assisted Gan, though he knew him best of all, and had prophesied that the innumerable endeavours of his envy to destroy his king and country would bring some terrible evil at last to all Chistendom.  The evil, alas! is at hand.  The doleful time has come.  It will be followed, it is true, by a worse fate of the wretch himself; but not till the valleys of the Pyrenees have run rivers of blood, and all France is in mourning.

[Footnote 1:  A common pleasantry in the old romances—­“Galaor went in, and then the halberders attacked him on one side, and the knight on the other.  He snatched an axe from one, and turned to the knight and smote him, so that he had no need of a surgeon.”—­Southey’s Amadis of Gaul, vol. i. p. 146.]

[Footnote 2: 

  “Sonsi i nostri dottori accordati,
  Pigliando tutti una conclusione,
  Che que’ che son nel ciel glorificati,
  S’ avessin nel pensier compassione
  De’ miseri parenti che dannati
  Son ne lo inferno in gran confusione,
  La lor felicita nulla sarebbe
  E vedi the qui ingiusto Iddio parebbe.

  Ma egli anno posto in Gesu ferma spene;
  E tanto pare a lor, quanto a lui pare: 
  Afferman cio ch’ e’ fu, che facci bene,
  E che non possi in nessun modo errare: 
  Se padre o madre e ne l’eterne pene,
  Di questo non si posson conturbare: 
  Che quel che piace a Dio, sol piace a loro
  Questo s’osserva ne l’eterno core.