of subsequent events have taken place
necessary to the greatest interests of the story. All the previous
passages in romance about Amazons are nothing compared with this flash of
a thunderbolt.]

[Footnote 6: From _bayard_, old French; _bay-colour._]

Footnote 7: His famous sword, vide p. 48.]

[Footnote 8: To richness and rarity, how much is added by remoteness! It
adds distance to the other difficulties of procuring it.]

[Footnote 9:

"Ecco apparir lo smisurato mostro
Mezo ascoso ne l'onda, e mezo sorto.
Come sospinto suol da Borca o d'Ostro
Venir lungo navilio a pigliar porto,"
Canto x. st. 100.

Improved from Ovid, _Metamorph_. lib. iv. 706

"Ecce velut navis praefixo concita rostro
Sulcat aquas, juvenum sudantibus acta lacertis;
Sic fera," &c.

As when a galley with sharp beak comes fierce,
Ploughing the waves with many a sweating oar.

Ovid is brisker and more obviously to the purpose; but Ariosto gives the
ponderousness and dreary triumph of the monster. The comparison of the
fly and the mastiff is in the same higher and more epic taste. The
classical reader need not be told that the whole ensuing passage, as far
as the combat is concerned, is imitated from Ovid's story of Perseus and
Andromeda.]

[Footnote 10:

"Sul lito un bosco era di querce ombrose,
Dove ogn' or par che Filomena piagna;
Ch'in mezo avea un pratel con una fonte,

E quinci e quindi un solitario monte.
Quivi il bramoso cavalier ritenne
L'audace corso, e nel pratel discese."
St. 113.

What a landscape! and what a charm beyond painting he has put into it
with his nightingales! and then what figures besides! A knight on a
winged steed descending with a naked beauty into a meadow in the thick of
woods, with "here and there a solitary mountain." The mountains make no
formal circle; they keep their separate distances, with their various
intervals of light and shade. And what a heart of solitude is given to
the meadow by the loneliness of these its waiters aloof!]

[Footnote 11: Nothing can be more perfectly wrought up than this sudden
change of circumstances.]

[Footnote 12: To feel the complete force of this picture, a reader should
have been in the South, and beheld the like sudden apparitions, at open
windows, of ladies looking forth in dresses of beautiful colours, and
with faces the most int