“Let us give her to drink, and let us drink to her!”
And they gave her a full goblet, which she could not help swallowing, and the wine was like fire, the fire of hell itself in all her veins. The men assembled round burst into laughter at seeing her suffering, and one shouted:
“Drink, Princess, drink!
Thou feelest the same fire,
Only in greater measure,
Hotter, wilder and fiercer,
Which thou didst feel before,
When thy blood boiled with passion,
And with love of secret murder;
Then thou didst feel it a little,
Now thou shalt feel it greatly;
Once it ran drop by drop,
Now in full goblets and frequent.”
Then another gave her a glass of wine which she could not help swallowing, and it was cold, and her blood again grew cold as ice, and she shivered in an agony of freezing. And so it went on, everyone giving her first the scalding hot wine and then the cold, while all sang in chorus:
“We give thee again in thy heart
What thou didst give to us:
The heat of love which burned in us,
Burned in us and in thee,
And the cold of desire when satisfied.
Thou hadst no mercy on us:
We have as little for thee.”
The connection of Virgil with the classic Talus, or Iron Man, and so many other ancient legends, as shown in these which I have gathered, renders the more striking the assertion that “after the sixteenth century the Vergilian legends disappear, and become known only to scholars,” as worded by E. F. M. Beneche in his translation of Comparetti’s work. The truth is, that as the age of credulity and mere marvels passed away among the higher classes, the learned ceased to collect or take an interest in heaping up “wonders upon wonders.” But the people went on telling and making tales about Virgil, just as they had always done. And the full proof that there was not a soul who for centuries took the least interest in folklore or popular tradition in Central and Northern Italy is to be found in the fact that, while such material abounds in the English, French, and especially German literature of later ages, there is hardly a trace of it in a single Roman or Tuscan writer till of late years. Even at the present day there is small search or seeking in Northern Italy for the rich treasures of old Roman tradition which still exist among the people.
GIOVANNI DI BOLOGNA AND THE GOD MERCURY.
“Mercurium omnium Deorum antiquorum vigilantissimum ac maxime negotiis implicatum, scribit Hesiodus in Theogonià.”—Natalis Comitis: Mythologia, lib. v., 1616.
In the old times in Florence the Tuscans worshipped the idols of Jupiter, and Bacchus, and Venus, and Mercury in their temples. And sometimes those gods when conjured [155a] came down to earth.
In those times there was in Florence [155b] a sculptor of Bologna named Giovanni, the same who made the Diavolino in the Mercato Vecchio. He was tormented by the desire to make a statue of such beauty that there should not be its like in all the world; and he, moreover, desired that this statue should be as if living, one not stiff and fixed, but one like Mercury, all activity, and he was so full of this thought that he had no rest even by night, for a certain gentleman had said to him: