[424.] Infámous, having a bad name, ill-famed: a Latinism. The word now implies disgrace or guilt. It is here accented on the penult.
[425.] sacred rays: comp. l. [782].
[426.] bandite or mountaineer. ‘Bandite’ (in Shakespeare bandetto, and now bandit) is borrowed from the Italian bandito, outlawed or banned. ‘Mountaineer,’ here used in a bad sense. In modern English it has reverted to its original sense—a dweller in mountains. The dwellers in mountains are often fierce and readily become freebooters: hence the changes of meaning. See Temp. iii. 3. 44, “Who would believe that there were mountaineers Dew-lapp’d like bulls”; also Cym. iv. 2. 120, “Who called me traitor, mountaineer.”
[428.] very desolation. Very (as an adj.) = true or real and may be traced to Lat. verus = true: comp. l. [646].
[429.] shagged ... shades. ‘Shagged’ is rugged or shaggy, and ‘horrid’ is probably used in the Latin sense of ‘rough’: see [note], l. 38.
[430.] unblenched, undaunted, unflinching. This word, sometimes confounded with ‘unblanched,’ is from blench, a causal of blink.
[431.] Be it not: a conditional clause = on condition that it be not.
[432.] Some say, etc. Compare Hamlet, i. 1. 158:
“Some say that, ever against that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad.”
[433.] In fog or fire, etc. Comp. Il Pens. 93, “those demons that are found In fire, air, flood, or underground”: an allusion to the different orders and powers of demons as accepted in the Middle Ages. Burton, in his Anat. of Mel., quotes from a writer who thus enumerates the kinds of sublunary spirits—“fiery, aerial, terrestrial, watery, and subterranean, besides fairies, satyrs, nymphs, etc.”