The common epithets of critical justice fail in such a case as that of this work.  The facts concerning it, as they present themselves one after another, are stronger in their condemnation of it than any words.  It would seem as if nothing further could be added to the disgrace of the translator; but we have still one more charge to prove against him, worse than the incompetence, the ignorance, and the dishonesty of which we have already found him guilty.  In reading the last volume of his work, after our suspicions of its character had been aroused, it seemed to us that we met here and there with sentences which had a familiar tone, which at least resembled sentences we had elsewhere read.  We found, upon examination, that Signor Tamburini, under the pretence of a translation of Benvenuto, had inserted through his pages, with a liberal hand, considerable portions of the well-known notes of Costa, and, more rarely, of the still later Florentine editor, the Abate Bianchi.  It occurred to us as possible that Costa and Bianchi had in these passages themselves translated from Benvenuto, and that Signor Tamburini had simply adopted their versions without acknowledgment, to save himself the trouble of making a new translation.  But we were soon satisfied that his trickery had gone farther than this, and that he had inserted the notes of these editors to fill up his own pages, without the slightest regard to their correspondence with or disagreement from the original text.  It is impossible to discover the motive of this proceeding; for it certainly would seem to be as easy to translate, after the manner in which Signor Tamburini translates, as to copy the words of other authors.  Moreover, his thefts seem quite without rule or order:  he takes one note and leaves the next; he copies a part, and leaves the other part of the same note; he sometimes quotes half a page, sometimes only a line or two in many pages.  Costa’s notes on the 98th and 100th verses of Canto XXI. of the “Paradise” are taken out without the change of a single word, and so also his note on v. 94 of the next Canto.  In this last instance we have the means of knowing what Benvenuto wrote, because, although the passage has not been given by Muratori, it is found in the note by Parenti, in the Florentine edition of the “Divina Commedia” of 1830.  “Vult dicere Benedictus quod miraculosius fuit Jordanem converti retrorsum, et Mare Rubrum aperiri per medium, quam si Deus succurreret et provideret istis malis.  Ratio est quod utrumque praedictorum miraculorum fuit contra naturam; sed punire reos et nocentes naturale est et usitatum, quamvis Deus punierit peccatores AEgyptios per modum inusitatum supernaturaliter Jordanus sic nominatur a duobus fontibus, quorum unus vocatur JOR et alius vocatur DAN:  inde JORDANUS, ut ait Hieronymus, locorum orientalium persedulus indagator. Volto ritrorso; scilicet, versus ortum suum, vel contra:  el mar fugire; idest, et Mare Rubrum fugere hinc inde, quando fecit