St. xxviii. and xxx. The star Lucifer or Phosporos, to whom 'the droves of stars that guild the morn, in charge were given,' can never climb the North or reach the zenith, being conquered by the effulgence of the sun of day. When did the fable of the angel Lucifer, founded on an astronomical appearance, mingle itself as it has done here, and grandly in Milton, and in the popular mind generally, with the biblical history of Satan?
St. xxxvi. line 2. Turnbull perpetuates the misprint of 'whose' for 'my' from 1670.
St. li. line 3, 'linage' = 'lineage.' For once 1670 is correct in reading 'linage' for the misprint 'image' of 1646 and 1648. The original is literally as follows:
'Herod the liege of Augustus, a man now agèd,
Then ruled over the royal courts of David:
Not of the royal line ...'
St. lix. line 3, 'a special worm:' so Shakespeare (Ant. and Cleopatra, v. 2), 'the pretty worm' and 'the worm.'
St. lx. Every one will be reminded of the tent-scene in Richard III.
At end of this translation Peregrine Phillips adds 'cetera desunt—heu! heu!'
Marino and Crashaw have left proper names in the poem unannotated. They are mostly trite; but these may be noticed: st. xlii. l. 4, Erisichton (see Ovid, Met. viii. 814 &c.); he offended Ceres, and was by her punished with continual hunger, so that he devoured his own limbs: line 5, Tantalus the fabled son of Zeus and Pluto, whose doom in the 'lower world,' has been celebrated from Homer (Od. xi. 582) onward: ib. Atreus, grandson of Tantalus, immortalised in infamy with his brother Thyestes: ib. Progne = Procne, wife of Tereus, who was metamorphosed into a swallow (Apollod. iii. 14, 8): l. 6, Lycaon, like Tantalus, with his sons changed by Zeus into wolves (Ovid; Paus. viii. 3, § 1): st. xliii. line 2, Medea, most famous of the mythical sorcerers: ib. Jezebel, 2 Kings ix. 10, 36: line 3, Circe, another mythical sorceress: Scylla, daughter of Typho and rival of Circe, who transformed her (Ovid, Met. xiv. 1-74); cf. Paradise Lost: line 4, the Paræ = the Fates, ever spinning: st. xliv. lines 7-8, all classic monsters: st. xlv. line 1, 'Diomed's horses' = the fabled 'mares' fed on human flesh (Apollod. ii. 5, § 8): 'Phereus' dogs,' or Fereus of mythical celebrity: line 2, Therodamas or Theromedon, king of Scythia, who fed lions with human blood (Ovid, Ibis 385, Pont. i. 2, 121): line 3, Busiris, associated with Osiris of Egypt; but Herodotus denies that the Egyptians ever offered human sacrifices: line 4, Sylla = Sulla: line 5, Lestrigonians, ancient inhabitants of Sicily who fed on human flesh (Ovid, Met. xiv. 233, &c.): line 6, Procrustes, i.e. the Stretcher, being a surname of the famous robber Damastes (Ovid, Met. vii. 438): line 7, Scyron, or Sciron (Ovid, Met. vii. 444-447), who threw his captives from the rocks: line 8, Schinis, more accurately Sinis or Sinnis, a celebrated robber, his name being connected with [Greek: σίνομαι], expressing the manner in which he tore his victims to pieces by tying them to branches of two trees, which he bent together and then let go (Ovid, Met. vii. 440); according to some he was surnamed Procrustes, but Marino and Crashaw distinguish the two: st. xlvi. line 2, Mezentius, a mythical king of the Etruscans (Virgil, Æneid, viii. 480, &c.); he put men to death by tying them to a corpse: ib. Geryon, a fabulous king of Hesperia (Apollod. ii. 5, § 10); under this name the very reverend Dr. J.H. Newman has composed one of his most remarkable poems: line 3, Phalaris, the tyrant of Sicily, whose 'brazen bull' of torture gave point to Cicero's words concerning him, as 'crudelissimus omnium tyrannorum' (in Verr. iv. 33): ib. Ochus = Artaxerxes III. a merciless king of Persia: ib. Ezelinus or Ezzelinus, another wicked tyrant.
