Chapter 9

Improved from Ovid, _Metamorph_. lib. iv. 706

"Ecce velut navis præfixo 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 interesting. I remember a vision of this sort at Carrara, on a bright but not too hot day (I fancied that the marble mountains there cooled it). It resembled one of Titian's women, with its broad shoulders, and boddice and sleeves differently coloured from the petticoat; and seemed literally framed in the unsashed window. But I am digressing.]

[Footnote 13: Ariosto elsewhere represents him as the handsomest man in the world; saying of him, in a line that has become famous,

"Natura il fece, e poi roppe la stampa."