Sardinian poet Araolla, a dialogue between himself and Gavino Sambigucci, written in the soft dialect of Logodoro, a mixture of Italian, Spanish, and Latin, and beginning:—
"Dulche, amara memoria de giornadas
Fuggitivas cun doppia pena mia,
Qui quanto pìus l' istringo sunt passadas."
See Valery, Voyages en Corse et en Sardaigne, II. 410.
CANTO XXIII.
1. In this Sixth Bolgia the Hypocrites are punished.
"A painted people there below we found,
Who went about with footsteps very slow,
Weeping and in their looks subdued and weary."
Chaucer, Knightes Tale, 2780:—
"In his colde grave
Alone, withouten any compagnie."
And Gower, Conf. Amant.:—
"To muse in his philosophie
Sole withouten compaignie."
4. The Fables of Æsop, by Sir Roger L'Estrange, IV.: "There fell out a bloody quarrel once betwixt the Frogs and the Mice, about the sovereignty of the Fenns; and whilst two of their champions were disputing it at swords point, down comes a kite powdering upon them in the interim, and gobbles up both together, to part the fray."
7. Both words signifying "now"; mo, from the Latin modo; and issa, from the Latin ipsa; meaning ipsa hora. "The Tuscans say mo," remarks Benvenuto, "the Lombards issa."
37. "When he is in a fright and hurry, and has a very steep place to go down, Virgil has to carry him altogether," says Mr. Ruskin. See Canto XII., Note 2.
63. Benvenuto speaks of the cloaks of the German monks as "ill-fitting and shapeless."
66. The leaden cloaks which Frederick put upon malefactors were straw in comparison. The Emperor Frederick II. is said to have punished traitors by wrapping them in lead, and throwing them into a heated caldron. I can find no historic authority for this. It rests only on tradition; and on the same authority the same punishment is said to have been inflicted in Scotland, and is thus described in the ballad of "Lord Soulis," Scott's Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, IV. 256:—
"On a circle of stones they placed the pot,
On a circle of stones but barely nine;
They heated it red and fiery hot,
Till the burnished brass did glimmer and shine.
"They roll'd him up in a sheet of lead,
A sheet of lead for a funeral pall,
And plunged him into the caldron red,
And melted him,—lead, and bones, and all."
We get also a glimpse of this punishment in Ducange, Glos. Capa Plumbea, where he cites the case in which one man tells another: "If our Holy Father the Pope knew the life you are
