nication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication. So he carried me away in the Spirit into the wilderness: and I saw a woman sit upon a scarlet-colored beast, full of names of blasphemy, having seven heads and ten horns."
The seven heads are interpreted to mean the Seven Virtues, and the ten horns the Ten Commandments.
110. Revelation xvii. 12, 13:—
"And the ten horns which thou sawest are ten kings, . . . . . and shall give their power and strength unto the beast."
117. Gower, Confes. Amant., Prologus:—
"The patrimonie and the richesse
Which to Silvester in pure almesse
The firste Constantinus lefte."
Upon this supposed donation of immense domains by Constantine to the Pope, called the "Patrimony of St. Peter," Milman, Lat. Christ., Book I. ch. 2, remarks:—
"Silvester has become a kind of hero of religious fable. But it was not so much the genuine mythical spirit which unconsciously transmutes history into legend; it was rather deliberate invention, with a specific aim and design, which, in direct defiance of history, accelerated the baptism of Constantine, and sanctified a porphyry vessel as appropriated to, or connected with, that holy use: and at a later period produced the monstrous fable of the Donation.
"But that with which Constantine actually did invest the Church, the right of holding landed property, and receiving it by bequest, was far more valuable to the Christian hierarchy, and not least to the Bishop of Rome, than a premature and prodigal endowment."
CANTO XX.
1. In the Fourth Bolgia are punished the Soothsayers:—
"Because they wished to see too far before them,
Backward they look, and backward make their way."
9. Processions chanting prayers and supplications.
13. Ignaro in Spenser's Faerie Queene, I. viii. 31:—
"But very uncouth sight was to behold
How he did fashion his untoward pace;
For as he forward moved his footing old,
So backward still was turned his wrinkled face."
34. Amphiaraus was one of the seven kings against Thebes. Foreseeing his own fate, he concealed himself, to avoid going to the war; but his wife Eriphyle, bribed by a diamond necklace (as famous in ancient story as the Cardinal de Rohan's in modern), revealed his hiding-place, and he went to his doom with the others.
