Chapter 137

v. 1. The Heathen.] Psalm lxxix. 1.

v. 36. Hope not to scare God’s vengeance with a sop.] “Let not him who hath occasioned the destruction of the church, that vessel which the serpent brake, hope to appease the anger of the Deity by any outward acts of religious, or rather superstitious, ceremony, such as was that, in our poet’s time, performed by a murderer at Florence, who imagined himself secure from vengeance, if he ate a sop of bread in wine, upon the grave of the person murdered, within the space of nine days.”

v. 38. That eagle.] He prognosticates that the Emperor of Germany will not always continue to submit to the usurpations of the Pope, and foretells the coming of Henry VII Duke of Luxembourg signified by the numerical figures DVX; or, as Lombardi supposes, of Can Grande della Scala, appointed the leader of the Ghibelline forces. It is unnecessary to point out the imitation of the Apocalypse in the manner of this prophecy.

v. 50. The Naiads.] Dante, it is observed, has been led into a mistake by a corruption in the text of Ovid’s Metam. I. vii. 75, where he found- Carmina Naiades non intellecta priorum;

instead of Carmina Laiades, &c. as it has been since corrected. Lombardi refers to Pansanias, where “the Nymphs” are spoken of as expounders of oracles for a vindication of the poet’s accuracy. Should the reader blame me for not departing from the error of the original (if error it be), he may substitute

Events shall be the Oedipus will solve, &c.

v. 67. Elsa’s numbing waters.] The Elsa, a little stream, which flows into the Arno about twenty miles below Florence, is said to possess a petrifying quality.

v. 78. That one brings home his staff inwreath’d with palm.] “For the same cause that the pilgrim, returning from Palestine, brings home his staff, or bourdon, bound with palm,” that is, to show where he has been.

Che si reca ’I bordon di palma cinto.

“In regard to the word bourdon, why it has been applied to a pilgrim’s staff, it is not easy to guess. I believe, however that this name has been given to such sort of staves, because pilgrims usually travel and perform their pilgrimages on foot, their staves serving them instead of horses or mules, then called bourdons and burdones, by writers in the middle ages.” Mr. Johnes’s Translation of Joinville’s Memoirs. Dissertation xv, by M. du Cange p. 152. 4to. edit. The word is thrice used by Chaucer in the Romaunt of the Rose.

PARADISE