[6] That published by Allen Awnmarsh, 5th ed. 1684, notes Woodhouse; and a copy of the same is noted in the list of Keats’s books.
[7] See article by H. Noble M’Cracken in Philological Journal of the Chicago University, 1908. The romance of Floire and Blancheflor, which Boccaccio in the Filocolo expands with additions and inventions of his own, tells the story of a Moorish prince in Spain and a Christian damsel, brought up together and loving each other as children and thrown apart in maturity by adverse influences and ill fortune. After many chivalric and fantastic adventures both in West and East, of the kind usual in such romances, judicial combats, captures by corsairs, warnings by a magic ring and the like, Floire learns that Blancheflor is immured with other ladies in an impregnable tower by the ‘Admiral of Babylon,’ who desires to marry her. To Babylon Floire follows, cajoles the guardian of the tower and one of her damsels to admit him to her chamber concealed in a basket of roses: whence issuing, he and she are brought to one another’s arms in happiness; various other adventures ensuing before they can be finally free and united. There exists a fragmentary English medieval version of this romance, which might easily have been known to Keats from the abstract and quotations given by George Ellis in his Specimens of Early English Metrical Romance (1806). But unluckily neither this nor, apparently, any version of the original French romance poem contains those incidents recounted in the Filocolo to which Keats’s poem runs most closely parallel. These we must accordingly suppose to be Boccaccio’s own invention and to have been known to Keats, directly or indirectly, from the Filocolo itself.
[8] In both the chapel monuments and the banquet-hall corbels there may be a memory of the following passage from Cary’s Dante (quoted by Mr Buxton Forman and Prof. de Sélincourt):—
| As to support incumbent floor or roof, For corbel is a figure sometimes seen That crumples up its knees into its breast; With the feign’d posture, stirring ruth unfeign’d In the beholder’s fancy; so I saw These fashion’d—. |
[9] It may be noted that in the corresponding scene in the Filocolo a single special colour effect is got by describing the room as lit up by two great pendent self-luminous carbuncles.
[10] Paradise Lost, v. 341-347.
[11] Ed. 1860, pp. 269, 270.
[12] The final couplet of this stanza, as Keats wrote it after several attempts, is weak. Madeline continues,—
| Oh leave me not in this eternal woe, For if thou diest, my love, I know not where to go. |
In the alternative version, intended to leave no doubt of what had happened, which he read to Woodhouse and Woodhouse disapproved, Madeline’s speech breaks off and the poet in his own name adds,—