[Footnote 5: "Che di soävità l'alma notriva" is beautiful; but the passage, as a whole, is not well imitated from the Terrestrial Paradise of Dante. It is not bad in itself, but it is very inferior to the one that suggested it. See vol. i. p. 210, &c. Ariosto's Terrestrial Paradise was at home, among the friends who loved him, and whom he made happy.]
[Footnote 6: This is better; and the house made of one jewel thirty miles in circuit is an extravagance that becomes reasonable on reflection, affording a just idea of what might be looked for among the endless planetary wonders of Nature, which confound all our relative ideas of size and splendour. The "lucid vermilion" of a structure so enormous, and under a sun so pure, presents a gorgeous spectacle to the imagination. Dante himself, if he could have forgiven the poet his animal spirits and views of the Moon so different from his own, might have stood in admiration before an abode at once so lustrous and so vast.]
"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."
[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 già buon odore, or putia forte. Questo era il dono (se però dir lece) Che Constantino al buon Silvestro fece."
The lines were not so bold in the first edition. They stood thus
"Ad un monte di rose e gigli passa, Ch'ebbe già buon odore, or putia forte, Ch'era corrotto; e da Giovanni intese, Che fu un gran don ch'un gran signor mal spese."