64. The Scrovigni of Padua.
68. Vitaliano del Dente of Padua.
73. Giovanni Bujamonte, who seems to have had the ill-repute of being the greatest usurer of his day, called here in irony the "sovereign cavalier."
74. As the ass-driver did in the streets of Florence, when Dante beat him for singing his verses amiss. See Sacchetti, Nov. CXV.
78. Dante makes as short work with these usurers, as if he had been a curious traveller walking through the Ghetto of Rome, or the Judengasse of Frankfort.
107. Ovid, Metamorph. II., Addison's Tr.:—
"Half dead with sudden fear he dropt the reins;
The horses felt 'em loose upon their manes,
And, flying out through all the plains above,
Ran uncontrolled where'er their fury drove;
Rushed on the stars, and through a pathless way
Of unknown regions hurried on-the day.
And now above, and now below they flew,
And near the earth the burning chariot drew.
·····
At once from life and from the chariot driv'n,
Th' ambitious boy fell thunder-struck from heav'n.
The horses started with a sudden bound,
And flung the reins and chariot to the ground:
The studded harness from their necks they broke,
Here fell a wheel, and here a silver spoke,
Here were the beam and axle torn away;
And, scatter'd o'er the earth, the shining fragments lay.
The breathless Phaeton, with flaming hair,
Shot from the chariot, like a falling star,
That in a summer's ev'ning from the top
Of heav'n drops down, or seems at least to drop;
Till on the Po his blasted corpse was hurled,
Far from his country, in the Western World."
108. The Milky Way. In Spanish El camino de Santiago; in the Northern Mythology the pathway of the ghosts going to Valhalla.
109. Ovid, Metamorph. VIII., Croxall's Tr.:—
"The soft'ning wax, that felt a nearer sun,
Dissolv'd apace, and soon began to run.
The youth in vain his melting pinions shakes,
His feathers gone, no longer air he takes.
O father, father, as he strove to cry,
Down to the sea he tumbled from on high,
And found his fate; yet still subsists by fame,
Among those waters that retain his name.
The father, now no more a father, cries,
Ho, Icarus! where are you? as he flies:
Where shall I seek my boy? he cries again,
And saw his feathers scattered on the main."
136. Lucan, Pharsal. I.:—
"To him the Balearic sling is slow,
And the shaft loiters from the Parthian bow."
CANTO XVIII.
1. Here begins the third division of the Inferno, embracing the Eighth and Ninth Circles, in which the Fraudulent are punished.
