108
NOTES TO CANTO III.
have attempted to illustrate in these notes. Not to follow his guide then, in this place, when he had followed him every where else, would have been little short of an insult to his patron; the more so, as the honest old Lord of Scandiano had no apparent motive for ministering to the vanity of the house of Este.
Though Ariosto is usually happy in his copies of the ancient poets, he seems here to have been oppressed by his subject, and the vision of the brother’s, suggested by that of Marcellus, with the
“luctum ne quære tuorum,”
imitated in the LXII stanza, seem the only circumstances, in his original, which he has turned to account.
