This story of Olindro and Drusilla is taken from Plutarch, from whom Castiglione has translated it in his Cortigiano. It is likewise told with many circumstances by Apuleius in his Golden Ass: but Ariosto has altered and improved the story. ↩
Rove is to shoot with roving arrows, or arrows shot out of the horizontal, in the language of archery; but in that of poetry, it often means simply to shoot with shafts. ↩
In the city of the Amazons. ↩
The moon. He has in another place termed her the lowest of the planets. ↩
Rodomont. ↩
Bactros—now Dahesh—a river on the borders of Asiatic Scythia, from which Bactriana derives its name. ↩
As the person challenged; but it seems, from another passage, that the selection of the weapons chosen lay afterwards with the challenger. ↩
The part of the scythe which corresponds with the reverse of the axe is termed the heel. ↩
On the melting of the snow. ↩
This was his second invasion of France. The first is commemorated in the Innamorato. ↩
Astolpho and Dudon. ↩
Astolpho. ↩
Aldabella was the sister of Oliviero, and the wife of Orlando, whom the authors of the Innamorato and the Furioso, for obvious reasons, seldom mention as a husband. ↩
Oliviero and Brandimart. ↩
Solvite me! (the exclamation of Silenus, Virg. Ec. VI l. 24).—This insulated piece of Latin seems very oddly introduced; but, in the learned age of Ariosto, it may have been more familiar to his readers, and had very likely acquired currency in conversation, as certain phrases, derived from the breviary, have at present. Such as: “Annuncio vobis gaudium magnum,” which I have heard, even from a woman, as a proclamation to her guests of the servant’s having told her that dinner was on the table. ↩
The Venetian lion. ↩
Coperti da testuggini e gatti.
Machines under cover of which the assailants advanced to a storm, known by the name of the cat and the tortoise in Italian, are called the boar and the sow in the relations of our middle-age warfare. ↩
Astolpho. ↩
Astolpho. ↩
Lewis Sforza (il Moro) and Lewis XII of France. ↩
Aetna, as the most prominent part of Sicily. ↩
Rogero had vowed to Bradamant, that he would, on the first reasonable pretence, leave Agramant and his evil sect, to serve the God and the king of his fathers. This occasion is afforded him by the perjury of Agramant, whose service he had sworn to renounce, if he should, contrary to his oath, interrupt the duel between himself and Rinaldo. Yet, in spite of all this, we find him sacrificing faith and love to loyalty, and perjuring himself in favour of a perjured king. The thing is worthy of remark, because Rogero is evidently the hero of the poem; and, from the qualities with which Ariosto has generally invested him, we may suppose was intended as his pattern of a preux chevalier. In ascribing to him, therefore, the sentiments and conduct which he exhibits in the text, Ariosto has probably ascribed to him the quality that was most popular in his time, and has thus unwittingly pronounced the most damning satire on the morals of his age. For allegiance to person or party, exclusive of principle, is surely the most vulgar, as well as the most exceptionable, of all generous propensities, and Rogero might probably be outdone in his equivocal generosity by many of the tenants of every gaol in Christendom. ↩
Dudon finished his career as a hermit, a very common practice with the supposed knights errant, and, like all the usages of romance, paralleled by many instances in real life during the middle ages. Ariosto’s own age, indeed, furnished the most notable example in the self-seclusion of Charles the Fifth. ↩
The thrust was more dangerous than the cut, even in the days of armour, whether directed against mail or plate, because the sword might easily thread the links of the one, and might even pass between the interstices of the other, but to cut through either, and most through plate, was a more difficult operation. ↩
Equivi a strano giuoco di sonaglio.
The Crusca dictionary explains giuoco di sonaglio to be the same thing as gatta cieca, which is our blindman’s buff; and, as striking a helpless person forms a part of this game, the definition assorts very well with the passage before us; but the word sonaglio may lead to the suspicion that the game in question was not the gatta cieca, but the gatto e sorcio of the modern Lombards, which, however, is but a variety of blindman’s buff, and which is played at in this manner:—A person who is blinded, and who is armed with a knotted handkerchief, is fastened to a cord attached to a pivot. Another, who is also blinded, and who is also fastened to the pivot by another cord, has a small bell in his hand, which he occasionally rings, and which serves as a guide to
