END OF VOLUME I.
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[1]. Pietro Torrigiano’s history has an English interest. He was certainly a “fighting man.” While serving as a volunteer in the army of Pope Alexander VI. he modelled some bronze figures for some Florentine merchants, who invited him to go with them to England. Here he was a favourite with “bluff King Hal,” who employed Torrigiano to execute the tomb of his father, Henry VII. in Westminster Abbey, for which he received the then large sum of £1,000. Employed to execute a sarcophagus for Cardinal Wolsey—the Ipswich butcher’s son—his work (once intended to enclose the coffin of Henry VIII. at Windsor) by the “irony of fate” was destined to enshrine the remains of a greater English hero. Nelson lies beneath the dome of St Paul’s in the sarcophagus sculptured by Torrigiano for Wolsey, his inner coffin being made from a piece of the French flagship L’Orient, blown up at the battle of the Nile. Torrigiano died in Spain in the prisons of the Inquisition, having been condemned as a sacrilegious heretic for demolishing a “statue of the Virgin,” which having been paid inadequately for by a niggardly nobleman, the Duke of Arcoss, he broke in pieces with his mallet. The incensed grandee had him arrested, and Torrigiano, to avoid being roasted at an auto da fé, refused food and so perished, A.D. 1522.
[2]. See Apollon., Argonaut.; Theocritus, Idyll. 22; Apollodorus, b. i., c. 9.
[3]. Statius, Thebais, vi., v. 893; Lucan, Pharsalia, iv., 598; Juvenal, Sat. iii., 88.
[4]. The inquiring reader will find the sex of “the Trojan horse” settled in some humorous scholia to Pope’s “Dunciad,” book i., line 212, quizzically attributed to Richard Bentley, the famous critic, under the alias of Martinus Scriblerus. And at this present time of writing we may note that the axe-wielding ex-premier, the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, in his great speech on introducing the Reform Bill (March 19, 1866), borrowed a metaphor from this ancient fable with eloquent propriety—
“Scandit fatalis machina muros