o different from his own, might have stood in
admiration before an abode at once so lustrous and so vast.]

[Footnote 7:

"De' frutti a lui del Paradiso diero,
Di tal sapor, ch'a suo giudizio, sanza
Scusa non sono i due primi parenti,
Se pur quei fur si poco ubbidienti."

Canto xxxiv. st. 60.]

[Footnote 8: Modern astronomers differ very much both with Dante's and
Ariosto's Moon; nor do the "argent fields" of Milton appear better placed
in our mysterious satellite, with its no-atmosphere and no-water, and its
tremendous precipices. It is to be hoped (and believed) that knowledge
will be best for us all in the end; for it is not always so by the way.
It displaces beautiful ignorances.]

[Footnote 9: Very fine and scornful, I think, this. Mighty monarchies
reduced to actual bladders, which, little too as they were, contained big
sounds.]

[Footnote 10: Such, I suppose, as was given at convent-gates.]

[Footnote 11: The pretended gift of the palace of St. John Lateran, the
foundation of the pope's temporal sovereignty. This famous passage was
quoted and translated by Milton.

"Di varii fiori ad on gran monte passa
Ch'ebbe gia buon odore, or putia forte.
Questo era il dono (se pero dir lece)
Che Constantino al buon Silvestro fece."

Canto xxxiv. st. 80.

The lines were not so bold in the first edition. They stood thus

"Ad un monte di rose e gigli passa,
Ch'ebbe gia buon odore, or putia forte,
Ch'era corrotto; e da Giovanni intese,
Che fu un gran don ch'un gran signor mal spese."

"He came to a mount of lilies and roses, that once had a sweet smell,
but now stank with corruption; and be understood from John that it was a
great gift which a great lord ill expended."

The change of these lines to the stronger ones in the third edition, as
they now stand, served to occasion a charge against Ariosto of having got
his privilege of publication from the court of Rome for passages which
never existed, and which he afterwards basely introduced; but, as Panizzi
observes, the third edition had a privilege also; so that the papacy
put its hand, as it were, to these very lines. This is remarkable; and
doubtless it would not have occurred in some other ages. The Spanish
Inquisition, for instance, erased it, though the holy brotherhood found
no fault with the story of Giocondo.]

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