Alle robuste membra avean già messe”—
Fairfax renders—
“They started up, and every tender limb
In sturdy steel and stubborn plate they dight.”
The tender limbs of two hardened old soldiers is surely weak.
At the end of the next stanza, we have in the Italian—
“E in poppa quella
Che guidar gli dovea, fatal donzella.”
The word “fatal,” an appropriate epithet for Fortune, who sits in the stern to steer the boat, disappears in Fairfax, and we get the colourless line—
“Wherein a damsel sate the stern to guide.”