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1. The subject of the preceding Canto is continued in this.

7. The story of the of Perillus is thus told in the Gesta Romanorum. Tale 48, Swan's Tr.:—

"Dionysius records, that when Perillus desired to become an artificer of Phalaris, a cruel and tyrannical king who depopulated the kingdom, and was guilty of many dreadful excesses, he presented to him, already too well skilled in cruelty, a brazen bull, which he had just constructed. In one of its sides there was a secret door, by which those who were sentenced should enter and be burnt to death. The idea was, that the sounds produced by the agony of the sufferer confined within should resemble the roaring of a bull; and thus, while nothing human struck the ear, the mind should be unimpressed by a feeling of mercy. The king highly applauded the invention, and said, 'Friend, the value of thy industry is yet untried: more cruel even than the people account me, thou thyself shalt be the first victim.

Also in Gower, Confes. Amant., VII.:—

21. Virgil being a Lombard, Dante suggests that, in giving Ulysses and Diomed license to depart, he had used the, saying, "Issa t' en va." See Canto XXIII. Note 7.

28. The inhabitants of the province of, of which is the capital.

29. It is the spirit of that speaks. The city of lies between Urbino and that part of the Apennines in which the Tiber rises. Count Guido was a famous warrior, and one of the great Ghibelline leaders. He tells his own story sufficiently in detail in what follows.

40. Lord Byron, Don Juan, III. 105, gives this description of, with an allusion to Boccaccio's Tale, versified by Dryden under the title of Theodore and Honoria:—