[42] Comatas was a goatherd who devoutly served the Muses, and sacrificed to them his masters goats. His master therefore shut him up in a cedar chest, opening which at the year’s end he found Comatas alive, by miracle, the bees having fed him with honey. Thus, in a mediaeval legend, the Blessed Virgin took the place, for a year, of the frail nun who had devoutly served her.
[43] Sneezing in Sicily, as in most countries, was a happy omen.
[50] A superfluous and apocryphal line is here omitted.
[53] An allusion to the common superstition (cf. Idyl xii. 24) that perjurers and liars were punished by pimples and blotches. The old Irish held that blotches showed themselves on the faces of Brehons who gave unjust judgments.
[54] Spring in the south, like Night in the tropics, comes ‘at one stride’; but Wordsworth finds the rendering distasteful ‘neque sic redditum valde placet.’
[57] ‘Quant à ta manière, je ne puis la rendre.’—Sainte-Beuve.
[61] Reading μηνοφόρως.
[70] Cf. Wordsworth’s proposed conjecture—
μετάρσι’, έτων παρεόντων.
Meineke observes ‘tota haec carminis pars luxata et foedissime depravata est’. There seems to be a rude early pun in lines 73, 74.