anchoring from the stern in the situation he described. A few days afterwards the ship arrived at the very island which is the supposed scene of the catastrophe, and moored in the port of La Valletta, in which lay some Greek vessels, whose high sterns might have preserved them from the danger incidental to anchoring from such a part. Many of the sailors were observing these, whose construction was new to them, and one was heard to say to a comrade: “You see, Jemmy, the saint was no such lubber as we took him for.”
Among those damned souls, whom Charon keeps,
With their companions, plunged in boiling deeps.
Stanza xxxvi. lines 7 and 8.
In the original,
Tra quelli spirti che con suoi compagni
Fà star Caron dentro a i bollenti stagni.
I have preserved the most popular reading ; but it seems (if we are to believe Fornari) that the old editions read Chiron instead of Charon: and it must be observed, that the old Italians would have preserved the h in both these words. And, though Ariosto would seem to have been a man to have addressed what he wrote rather to the mob of readers than to the learned, we must recollect that the reading public of Ariosto’s age was very different from that of our own, and that some learning at least was its characteristic. With this before our eyes, we may suspect Chiron to have been intended by the poet: for it was not the business of Charon, the ferryman of hell, to keep damned souls in the boiling deeps, but to transport such across them; whereas this is the office assigned by Dante to Chiron, with the centaurs, his companions, who in the seventh circle of hell watch over lakes of boiling blood, in which are immersed sinners of the description of him in the text. See Dante‘s Inferno, canto xii.
Now Dante was probably as familiar to Ariosto’s readers in his century as Shakespeare is to us.
I would not however disturb the more general reading of the text, upon the strength of a plausible conjecture, though it is supported by the assertion of Fornari.
