Page:Divine Comedy (Longfellow 1867) v1.djvu/255

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In the Second Circle are found the souls of carnal sinners, whose punishment is

2. The circles grow smaller and smaller as they descend.

4., the king of Crete, so renowned for justice as to be called the Favorite of the Gods, and after death made Supreme Judge in the Infernal Regions. Dante furnishes him with a tail, thus converting him, after the mediæval fashion, into a Christian demon.

21. Thou, too, as well as Charon, to whom Virgil has already made the same reply. Canto VI. 22.

28. In Canto I. 60, the sun is silent; here the light is dumb.

51. Gower, Confessio Amantis, VIII., gives a similar list "of gentil folke that whilom were lovers," seen by him as he lay in a swound and listened to the music

61. Queen.

65., being in love with , a daughter of , went unarmed to the temple of Apollo, where he was put to death by Paris.

Gower, Confessio Amantis, IV., says:—

"I know not how," says Bacon in his Essay on Love, "but martial men are given to love; I think it is but as they are given to wine; for perils commonly ask to be paid in pleasure."

67. of Troy, of whom Spenser says, Faerie Queene. III, ix. 34:—

is the Sir Tristram of the Romances of Chivalry. See his adventures in the Mort d' Arthure. Also Thomas of Ercildoune's Sir Tristram, a Metrical Romance. His amours with Yseult or Ysonde bring him to this circle of the Inferno.

71. Shakespeare, Sonnet CVI.:—

See also the "wives and daughters of chieftains" that appear to Ulysses, in the Odyssey, Book XI.

Also Milton, Paradise Regained, II. 357:—