The allied Spanish and papal army, if victorious, would probably have turned their arms against the dukedom of Ferrara. ↩
Brescia was sacked a short time before Ravenna. The fate of this last city terrified Faenza and Rimini into a surrender. Trivulzio may have been well fitted to restrain the excesses of others, but was not himself free from a similar reproach. He was a native of Milan, and banished from thence for his adherence to the Guelph, party. He entered the service of France, and obtained great distinction in the wars of Charles VIII, Louis XII, and Francis I. He was made governor of Milan in 1500, and of Genoa in 1504. But he is accused of a rapacious administration of power, and of a haughty, ungovernable temper, and on this account forfeited the favour of Francis; which is said to have occasioned his death in 1518. His epitaph speaks his character. ↩
Ariosto is not more successful than Homer in this catalogue, and the same observation may be made on the review of Tasso, which is only animated by his apostrophe to the Greeks. ↩
It is hardly necessary to observe that Sagittarius is the sign into which Chiron is said to have becn translated, and is, therefore, always represented by a Centaur. ↩
The account of the conquest of the arms of Hector in the Syrian fairy’s castle is to be found in the Innamorato, where Mandricardo takes the oath specified in the text. ↩
Ariosto would appear to have sometimes inserted anecdotes of his age in the Furioso; but these are usually so altered that they are scarcely to be recognised. This is not the case with the present story, the rape of Doralice; in which the poet appears to have figured a similar atrocity and of recent occurrence, perpetrated by Caesar Borgia, near Cesenna, on the shore of the Adriatic, upon an illustrious lady espoused to a Venetian captain, to whom she was journeying, under the escort of a train of nobles and ladies, who were attacked with the same violence that is described in the text. ↩
Dante says of this angel, whose figure is represented as sculptured in purgatory,
“Giurato si saria ch’ ei dicesse Ave.”
Probably as saluting the Virgin, a favourite subject with the Italian masters. ↩
Vertot describes the Maltese as casting hoops charged with wildfire among the Turks at the famous siege: it is said, without any authority for the fact, for which he was perhaps indebted to Ariosto. ↩
A marshy place in the Ferrarese. ↩
A wooden and movable bartizan, a kind of a stage, moving upon hinges, within the wall of a fortification, which being raised to a horizontal position, served as a means of communication between the towers, and made the bridge spoken of by Ariosto. ↩
I have translated the account of this storm very literally; and it is curious, as probably exhibiting the modes of attack and defence practised in the time of Ariosto. It appears, to sum his story in a few words, that the wall on the side where the Moors attacked was surrounded by a wet ditch, through which Rodomont plunged at the head of the storming party, scaled the wall, and carried the bertesca, or wooden platform, placed within it and near its summit. Beyond this work, it seems, was a second wall, or dyke, divided from the first by a dry ditch, into which Rodomont drives his party of assailants, urging them to the assault of the interior wall, and he himself leaping the ditch, and, like Alexander at the siege of Oxydracae, mounting the last defence, and springing from it into the city. His followers, in the meantime, while planting their ladders against the interior wall in this second moat, are consumed by combustibles, with which it had been previously filled by the Parisians. Rodomont, it is to be recollected, had escaped the effects of the explosion by his desperate leap, and is left enclosed in the middle of the city. ↩
Rodomont. ↩
He alludes to the victory obtained at Francolino, about forty miles above the mouth of the Po; to which he had before referred. ↩
Namus. ↩
The geography is here woefully confused; and Astolpho cannot be followed even on the map: for east and west are confounded in this course. But reasoning from some of Ariosto’s descriptions, it would seem that he had attempted to graft the discoveries of Marco Polo upon the map of Ptolemy. It is scarcely necessary to observe that the land of Thomas is the Malabar Coast, where St. Thomas, the companion of our Saviour, was supposed to have preached the Gospel, and where Vasco de Gama found a species of Christianity established. ↩
The golden Chersonese of Ptolemy has been conjectured to be the kingdom of Sumatra: I think, with reason, nor does the fact of its being an island necessarily militate against such a supposition; for the neck of land, which connects it with terra firma, is very narrow; and navigators have in all ages mistaken peninsulas for islands, and islands for peninsulas. Thus, Van Diemen’s Land was supposed to be a part of the continent of New Holland, till the (comparatively speaking) late penetration of Bass’s Straits. Taprobana is the island of Ceylon, and Cori is, I suppose, Cape Comorin. The sea, which
“frets between two shores,”
must be the strait between. Cochin China is here placed at the western instead of the eastern extremity of India; for it must be recollected that Astolpho was directing his flight westward. ↩
This is, I suppose, the Ram, in which the sun
