[487]. Crepantes.
[488]. Here does Sidonius (though all unknowing, in the one case certainly, in the other all but certainly) repeat Longinus and anticipate Dante—a cry of the child in the night.
[489]. Sollicitus, perhaps “actively harassing” his enemy.
[490]. This is a word so delightful in itself that I have no heart to attempt translation. “Carolling,” I suppose, would come nearest.
[491]. The passage contains many curious details about this not wholly Admirable Crichton, who was at last strangled by his slaves. The description of the dead body and its silent testimony to the crime—protinus argumento fuere livida cutis, oculi protuberantes, et in obruto vultu non minora iræ vestigia quam doloris—is vivid, and does not compare too badly even with the great picture of Glouceester’s corpse in Henry VI.
[493]. Indeed, such a passage as the elaborate criticism of the literary work of Lampridius, however exaggerated and out of focus, is of quite priceless value to us. It is the kind of thing of which we have only too little from classical antiquity, and if it were not for the Halicarnassian and Longinus, should have quite wofully little. It is the kind of thing of which we have as nearly as possible nothing from the Middle Ages, and hardly anything, of equal directness to the individual, from the Renaissance; while, though it has been plentiful enough for the last two hundred and fifty years, and especially for the last hundred, the very abundance of it diminishes the individual significance of the expressions.
[494]. I use the agreeable Variorum edition, Leyden, 1671. No apology, I think, is needed in this instance for not making my own translations, but partly conveying Chaucer’s.
[495]. V. supra, p. [384], and [note].
[496]. As in the well-known cases, somewhat later, of St Faron and of Mummolenus.