“In heavenly spirits could such perversion dwell?”
—Par. Lost, vi.
[17] Dante in his Inferno punishes Sinon with an eternal sweating-sickness: a singular penalty, which is shared only by Potiphar’s wife.—Inf. xxx.
[18] Nay, the “crests” spoken of seem to have been (as reported of the modern sea-serpent) of actual hair; since Pindar, as Conington has noted, calls them “manes.”
[19] The French word “feu,” used of a person deceased, is probably from this Latin use of “fui.”
[20] For this reason, says Macrobius, the real name of Rome and of its guardian deity was always kept a secret.
[21] Horrible as the legend is, Spenser thought it worth adopting. The Red-Cross Knight, to make a garland for Fidessa, tears branches from the tree that had once been Fradubio.—’Faery Queen,’ I. ii. 30.
[22] The story of Idomeneus, according to the old annotators upon Virgil, has a curious similarity to that of Jephthah. He had vowed that if he escaped from a storm at sea, he would offer in sacrifice the first thing that met him on landing. It was his son. A plague followed, and his subjects expelled him.
[23] There is a fine description of these hags in Morris’s ‘Jason,’ where the voyagers
“Beheld the daughters of the Earth and Sea,
The dreadful Snatchers, who like women were
Down to the breast, with scanty close black hair
About their heads, and dim eyes ringed with red,
And bestial mouths set round with lips of lead.
But from their gnarled necks there ’gan to spring
Half hair, half feathers, and a sweeping wing
Grew out instead of arm on either side,
And thick plumes underneath the breast did hide
The place where joined the fearful natures twain.
[24] See Homer’s Odyssey, p. 69.