[194] This critique, from the pen of the venerable and distinguished Editor, William Gifford, Esq., comprehended strictures on “The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy,”—“Tales and Historic Scenes in Verse,”—“Translations from Camoens,” etc.,—“The Sceptic,” and “Stanzas to the Memory of the late King.”
TALES AND HISTORIC SCENES.
SECOND SERIES.
[After the first collection of her Tales and Historic Scenes, it is pretty evident that Mrs Hemans contemplated a second series, although her design was never so extensively carried out as to induce the publication of another volume under the same title. But, as the compositions we refer to all belong to this period of our author’s literary progress, we have ventured not only so to class, but so to christen them, as Malachi Malgrowther would say, “for uniformity’s sake.”
THE MAREMMA.
[“Nello della Pietra had espoused a lady of noble family at Sienna, named Madonna Pia. Her beauty was the admiration of Tuscany, and excited in the heart of her husband a jealousy, which, exasperated by false reports and groundless suspicions, at length drove him to the desperate resolution of Othello. It is difficult to decide whether the lady was quite innocent, but so Dante represents her. Her husband brought her into the Maremma, which, then as now, was a district destructive of health. He never told his unfortunate wife the reason of her banishment to so dangerous a country. He did not deign to utter complaint or accusation. He lived with her alone, in cold silence, without answering her questions, or listening to her remonstrances. He patiently waited till the pestilential air should destroy the health of this young lady. In a few months she died. Some chronicles, indeed, tell us that Nello used the dagger to hasten her death. It is certain that he survived her, plunged in sadness and perpetual silence. Dante had, in this incident, all the materials of an ample and very poetical narrative. But he bestows on it only four verses. He meets in Purgatory three spirits. One was a captain who fell fighting on the same side with him in the battle of Campaldino; the second, a gentleman assassinated by the treachery of the House of Este; the third was a woman unknown to the poet, and who, after the others had spoken, turned towards him with these words:—
Recorditi di me; che son la Pia,
Sienna mi fe, disfecerni Maremma,
Salsi colui che inanellata pria
Disposando m’ avea con la sua gemma.’”