HKB
Come tu di che in ciel servar si suole: Morti co' morti; or pensiam di godere: Io vo' tagliar le mani a tutti quanti, E porterolle a que' monaci santi."
This doctrine, which is horrible blasphemy in the eyes of natural feeling, is good reasoning in Catholic and Calvinistic theology. They first make the Deity's actions a necessity from some barbarous assumption, then square them according to a dictum of the Councils, then compliment him by laying all that he has made good and kindly within us mangled and mad at his feet. Meantime they think themselves qualified to denounce Moloch and Jugghanaut!]
[Footnote 3:
"E furno al here infermi, al mangiar sani."
I am not sure that I am right in my construction of this passage. Perhaps Pulci means to say, that they had the appetites of men in health, and the thirst of a fever.]
[Footnote 5: Cagnazzo, Farfarello. Libicocco, and Malacoda; names of devils in Dante.]
[Footnote 6: "Il maestro di color che sanno." A jocose application of Dante's praise of Aristotle.]
[Footnote 7: "O vita nostra, debole e fallace!"]
THE
BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES.
Notice.
This is the
"sad and fearful story Of the Roncesvalles fight;"
an event which national and religious exaggeration impressed deeply on the popular mind of Europe. Hence Italian romances and Spanish ballads: hence the famous passage in Milton,
"When Charlemain with all his peerage fell By Fontarabbia:"
hence Dante's record of the dolorosa rotta (dolorous rout) in the Inferno, where he compares the voice of Nimrod with the horn sounded by the dying Orlando: hence the peasant in Cervantes, who is met by Don Quixote singing the battle as he comes along the road in the morning: and hence the song of Roland actually thundered forth by the army of William the Conqueror as they advanced against the English.
But Charlemagne did not "fall," as Milton has stated. Nor does Pulci make him do so. In this respect, if in little else, the Italian poet adhered to the fact. The whole story is a remarkable instance of what can be done by poetry and popularity towards misrepresenting and aggrandising a petty though striking adventure. The simple fact was the cutting off the rear of Charlemagne's army by the revolted Gascons, as he returned from a successful expedition into Spain. Two or three only of his nobles perished, among whom was his nephew Roland, the obscure warden of his marches of Brittany. But Charlemagne was the temporal head of Christendom; the poets constituted his nephew its champion; and hence all the glories and superhuman exploits of the Orlando of Pulci and Ariosto. The whole assumption of the wickedness of the Saracens, particularly of the then Saracen king of Spain, whom Pulci's authority, the pseudo-Archbishop Turpin, strangely called Marsilius, was nothing but a pious fraud; the pretended Marsilius having been no less a person than the great and good Abdoùlrahmaùn the First, who wrested the dominion of that country out of the hands of the usurpers of his family-rights. Yet so potent and long-lived are the most extravagant fictions, when genius has put its heart into them, that to this day we read of the devoted Orlando and his friends not only with gravity, but with the liveliest emotion.
THE
BATTLE OF RONCESVALLES