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This speech occurs in a long poem on Divine Love, half ecstatic, half scholastic, and hardly appreciable now. The passage stands well by itself, and is the only one spoken by our Lord.

Madonna mia.

The lady was probably called Diamante, Margherita, or some similar name. (Note to Flor. Ed. 1816).

See what is said in allusion to his government of Florence by Dante (Parad. C. viii.)

The battle of Monte Catini was fought and won by the Ghibelline leader, Uguccione della Faggiola, against the Florentines, August 29, 1315. This would seem to date Folgore's career further on than the period usually assigned to him (about 1260), and the question arises whether the above sonnet be really his.

This fellowship or club (Brigata), so highly approved and encouraged by our Folgore, is the same to which, and to some of its members by name, scornful allusion is made by Dante (Inferno, C. xxix. l. 130), where he speaks of the hare-brained character of the Sienese. Mr. Cayley, in his valuable notes on Dante, says of it: “A dozen extravagant youths of Siena had put together by equal contributions 216,000 florins to spend in pleasuring; they were reduced in about a twelvemonth to the extremes of poverty. It was their practice to give mutual entertainments twice a-month; at each of which, three tables having been sumptuously covered, they would feast at one, wash their hands on another, and throw the last out of window.”

There exists a second curious series of sonnets for the months, addressed also to this club, by Cene della Chitarra d'Arezzo. Here, however, all sorts of disasters and discomforts, in the same pursuits of which Folgore treats, are imagined for the prodigals; each sonnet, too, being composed with the same terminations in its rhymes as the corresponding one among his. They would seem to have been written after the ruin of the club, as a satirical prophecy of the year to succeed the golden one. But this second series, though sometimes laughable, not having the poetical merit of the first, I have not included it.

That is, according to early Tuscan nomenclature, Carlo, the son of Messer Guerra Cavicciuoli.

Alluding to the Syrian tribe of Assassins, whose chief was the Old Man of the Mountain.

I have not been able to trace the Fazio to whom this sonnet refers.

The character here drawn certainly suggests Count Ugolino de' Gherardeschi, though it would seem that Rustico died nearly twenty years before the tragedy of the Tower of Famine.

Extracted from his long treatise, in unrhymed verse and in prose, “Of the Government and Conduct of Women”; (Del Reggimento e dei Costumi delle Donne).

This and the three following pieces are extracted from his “Documents of Love” (Documenti d'Amore).

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.