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I am quite sorry (after the foregoing love-song, the original of which is not perhaps surpassed by any poem of its class in existence) to endanger the English reader's respect for Fazio by these extracts from the Dittamondo, or “Song of the World,” in which he will find his own country endowed with some astounding properties. However, there are a few fine characteristic sentences, and the rest is no more absurd than other travellers' tales of that day; while the table of our Norman line of kings is not without some historical interest. It must be remembered that the love-song was the work of Fazio's youth, and the Dittamondo that of his old age, when we may suppose his powers to have been no longer at their best. Besides what I have given relating to Great Britain, there is a table of the Saxon dynasty, and some surprising facts about Scotland and Ireland; as well as a curious passage written in French, and purporting to be an account, given by a royal courier, of Edward the Third's invasion of France. I felt half disposed to include these, but was afraid of overloading with such matter a selection made chiefly for the sake of poetic beauty. I should mention that the Dittamondo,like Dante's great poem, is written in terza rima; but as perfect literality was of primary importance in the above extracts, I have departed for once from my rule of fidelity to the original metre.

Mediæval Britons would seem really to have been credited with this slight peculiarity. At the siege of Damietta, Cœur-de-Lion's bastard brother is said to have pointed out the prudence of deferring the assault, and to have received for rejoinder from the French crusaders, “See now these faint-hearted English with the tails!” To which the Englishman replied, “You will need stout hearts to keep near our tails when the assault is made.”

This is the Barnacle-tree, often described in old books of travels and natural history, and which Sir Thomas Browne classes gravely among his “Vulgar Errors.”

What follows relates to the Romances of the Round Table. The only allusion here which I cannot trace to the Mort d'Arthur is one where “Rech” and “Nida” are spoken of: it seems however that, by a perversion hardly too corrupt for Fazio, these might be the Geraint and Enid whose story occurs in the Mabinogion, and has been used by Tennyson in his Idylls of the King. Why Fazio should have “joyed to see” Merlin's stone “for another's love” seems inscrutable; unless indeed the words “per amor altrui” are a mere idiom, and Merlin himself is meant; and even then Merlin, in his compulsory niche under the stone, may hardly have been grateful for such friendly interest.

I should not omit, in this second edition, to acknowledge several obligations, as regards the above extract from the Dittamondo, to the unknown author of an acute and kindly article in the Spectator for January 18th, 1862.