[549] Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616), the author of Don Quixote de la Mancha, was captured on returning to Spain, four years after the Battle of Lepanto, in 1575, and passed five years in captivity in Algiers. He was ransomed by his family and religious charity in 1580.—T.
[550] Lucrezia Buti sat to Filippo Lippi for the Madonna at Prato, where he was painting an altar-piece for the nuns of Santa Margherita. He became enamoured of her, and finally ran off with her.—T.
[551] Jan Count Potoçki (1761-1815), the Polish traveller, archæologist and historian. He committed suicide on the 2nd of December 1815.—T.
[552] St. Jerome (circa 331-420), a father of the Church, honoured on the 30th of September, the anniversary of his death.—T.
[553] The bridge of Spoleto is the highest in Europe.—T.
[554] Gray, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, 51-54.—T.
[555] "Man's misery leads him back to God."—T.
[556] Tommaso Cardinal Bernetti (1779-1852), created a cardinal in 1727, and Secretary of State from 1828 to 1836.—T.
[557] Pierre Narcisse Baron Guérin (1774-1833), a French historical painter and pupil of Regnault. He gained the Prix de Rome in 1797, became an academician in 1815 and, in 1816, returned to Rome as director of the French Academy in that city.—T.
[558] Chateaubriand here gives only the commencement of his letter of 11th October. The other letters to Madame Récamier contained in the present book have all been more or less modified by the author, who sometimes curtails and sometimes adds to the original text. Madame Lenormant, in the second volume of her Souvenir de Madame Récamier, has reprinted the great writer's letters in their entirety, after the originals in her possession.—B.