suffered as did the same saint in the Morgante Maggiore who was weary with the duty of opening the celestial gate for slaughtered Christians:
“Credo che molto quel giorno s’affana:
E converrà ch’egli abbi buono orecchio,
Tanto gridavan quello anime Osanna
Ch’eran portate dagli angeli in cielo;
Sicchè la barba gli sudava e ’l pelo.”[373]
In employing the realistic method in depicting the angels, Byron seems to have caught something of Pulci’s grotesque spirit.
One line of the Vision,
“When this old, blind, mad, helpless, weak, poor worm,”
seems to imitate the opening of Shelley’s powerful Sonnet; England in 1819, already quoted,