Deep, deep as hell, the dismal dungeon lay,
Dark and impervious to the beams of day.
With copious slaughter smoked the purple floor,
Pale heads hung horrid on the lofty door,
Dreadful to view! and dropped with crimson gore."
28. Dante makes a Centaur of Cacus, and separates him from the others because he was fraudulent as well as violent. Virgil calls him only a monster, a half-man, Semihominis Caci facies.
35. Agnello Brunelleschi, Buoso degli Abati, and Puccio Sciancato.
38. The story of Cacus, which Virgil was telling.
43. Cianfa Donati, a Florentine nobleman. He appears immediately, as a serpent with six feet, and fastens upon Agnello Brunelleschi.
65. Some commentators contend that in this line papiro does not mean paper, but a lamp-wick made of papyrus. This destroys the beauty and aptness of the image, and rather degrades
"The leaf of the reed,
Which has grown through the clefts in the ruins of ages."
73. These four lists, or hands, are the fore feet of the serpent and the arms of Agnello.
76. Shakespeare, in the "Additional Poems to Chester's Love's Martyrs," Knight's Shakespeare, VII. 193, speaks of "Two distincts, division none"; and continues:—
"Property was thus appalled
That the self was not the same,
Single nature's double name
Neither two nor one was called.
"Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together;
To themselves yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded."
83. This black serpent is Guercio Cavalcanti, who changes form with Buoso degli Abati.
95. Lucan, Phars., IX., Rowe's Tr.:—
"But soon a fate more sad with new surprise
From the first object turns their wondering eyes.
Wretched Sabellus by a Seps was stung:
Fixed on his leg with deadly teeth it hung.
Sudden the soldier shook it from the wound,
Transfixed and nailed it to the barren ground.
Of all the dire, destructive serpent race,
None have so much of death, though none are less.
For straight around the part the skin withdrew,
The flesh and shrinking sinews backward flew,
And left the naked bones exposed to view.
The spreading poisons all the parts confound,
And the whole body sinks within the wound.
·····
Small relics of the mouldering mass were left,
At once of substance as of form bereft;
Dissolved, the whole in liquid poison ran,
And to a nauseous puddle shrunk the man.
·····
So snows dissolved by southern breezes run,
So melts the wax before the noonday sun.
Nor ends the wonder here; though flames are known
To waste the flesh, yet still they spare the bone:
Here none were left, no least remains were seen,
No marks to show that once the man had been.
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