[200] Fornito, a notable example of what the illustrious Lewis Carroll Dodgson, Waywode of Wonderland, calls a "portmanteau-word," a species that abounds in mediæval Italian, for the confusion of translators.
[201] i.e. getting good pay and allowances (avendo buona provisione).
[202] Guadagnare l'anima, lit. gain the soul (syn. pith, kernel, substance). This passage is ambiguous and should perhaps be rendered "catch the knack or trick" or "acquire the wish."
[203] The translators regret that the disuse into which magic has fallen, makes it impossible to render the technicalities of that mysterious art into tolerable English; they have therefore found it necessary to insert several passages in the original Italian.
[204] i.e. the government (corte).
[205] Lit. that scythes were no less plenty that he had arrows (che falci si trovavano non meno che egli avesse strali), a proverbial expression the exact bearing of which I do not know, but whose evident sense I have rendered in the equivalent English idiom.
[206] Syn. what he said (che si dire). See ante, p. [11], note.
[207] Apparently the well-known fabliau of the Dame de Vergy, upon which Marguerite d'Angoulême founded the seventieth story of the Heptameron.
[208] Lit. made (Di me il feci digno).
[209] i.e. false suspicion (falso pensiero).