TRANSLATION.

In the time of Guido in Brettinoro even the nobles ploughed the land; but discords arose among them, and innocence of life disappeared, and with it liberality.  The people of Brettinoro determined to erect in the pub lic square a column with as many iron rings upon it as there were noble families in that stronghold, and he who should arrive and tie his horse to one of those rings was to be the guest of the family pointed out by the ring to which the horse was attached.

Surely, Signor Tamburini has fixed the dunce’s cap on his own head so that it can never he taken off.  The commonest Latin phrases, which the dullest schoolboy could not mistranslate, he misunderstands, turning the pleasant sense of the worthy commentator into the most self-contradictory nonsense.

“Ad confirmandum propositum,” says Benvenuto, “oceurrit mihi res jocosa,"[A]—­“In confirmation of this statement, a laughable matter occurs to me”; and he goes on to relate a story about the famous astrologer Pietro di Abano.  But our translator is not content without making him stultify himself, and renders the words we have quoted, “A maggiore conferma referiro un fatto a me accaduto”; that is, he makes Benvenuto say, “I will report an incident that happened to me,” and then go on to tell the story of Pietro di Abano, which had no more to do with him than with Signor Tamburini himself.

[Footnote A:  Comment on Purg. xvi. 80.]

We might fill page after page with examples such as these of the distortions and corruptions of Benvenuto’s meaning which we have noted on the margin of this so-called translation.  But we have given more than enough to prove the charge of incompetence against the President of the “Academy of the Industrious,” and we pass on to exhibit him now no longer as simply an ignoramus, but as a mean and treacherous rogue.

Among the excellent qualities of Benvenuto there are few more marked than his freedom in speaking his opinion of rulers and ecclesiastics, and in holding up their vices to reproach, while at the same time he shows a due spirit of respect for proper civil and ecclesiastical authority.  In this he imitates the temper of the poet upon whose work he comments,—­and in so doing he has left many most valuable records of the character and manners especially of the clergy of those days—­He loved a good story, and he did not hesitate to tell it even when it went hard against the priests.  He knew and he would not hide the corruptions of the Church, and he was not the man to spare the vices which were sapping the foundations not so much of the Church as of religion itself.  But his translator is of a different order of men, one of the devout votaries of falsehood and concealment; and he has done his best to remove some of the most characteristic touches of Benvenuto’s work, regarding them as unfavorable to the Church, which even now in the nineteenth century cannot well bear to have exposed the sins committed by its rulers