v. 127.  Bede.] Bede, whose virtues obtained him the appellation of the Venerable, was born in 672 at Wearmouth and Jarrow, in the bishopric of Durham, and died in 735.  Invited to Rome by Pope Sergius I., he preferred passing almost the whole of his life in the seclusion of a monastery.  A catalogue of his numerous writings may be seen in Kippis’s Biographia Britannica, v. ii.

v. 127.  Richard.] Richard of St. Victor, a native either of Scotland or Ireland, was canon and prior of the monastery of that name at Paris and died in 1173.  “He was at the head of the Mystics in this century and his treatise, entitled the Mystical Ark, which contains as it were the marrow of this kind of theology, was received with the greatest avidity.”  Maclaine’s Mosheim, v. iii. cent. xii. p. 2. c. 2. 23.

v. 132.  Sigebert.] “A monk of the abbey of Gemblours who was in high repute at the end of the eleventh, and beginning of the twelfth century.”  Dict. de Moreri.

v. 131.  The straw-litter’d street.] The name of a street in Paris:  the “Rue du Fouarre.”

v. 136.  The spouse of God.] The church.

CANTO XI

v. 1.  O fond anxiety of mortal men.] Lucretius, 1. ii. 14

O miseras hominum mentes !  O pectora caeca Qualibus in tenebris vitae quantisque periclis Degitur hoc aevi quodcunque est!

v. 4.  Aphorisms,] The study of medicine.

v. 17.  ’The lustre.] The spirit of Thomas Aquinas

v. 29.  She.] The church.

v. 34.  One.] Saint Francis.

v. 36.  The other.] Saint Dominic.

v. 40.  Tupino.] A rivulet near Assisi, or Ascesi where Francis was born in 1182.

v. 40.  The wave.] Chiascio, a stream that rises in a mountain near Agobbio, chosen by St. Ubaldo for the place of his retirement.

v. 42.  Heat and cold.] Cold from the snow, and heat from the reflection of the sun.

v. 45.  Yoke.] Vellutello understands this of the vicinity of the mountain to Nocera and Gualdo; and Venturi (as I have taken it) of the heavy impositions laid on those places by the Perugians.  For GIOGO, like the Latin jugum, will admit of either sense.

v. 50.  The east.]

This is the east, and Juliet is the sun. 
Shakespeare.

v. 55.  Gainst his father’s will.] In opposition to the wishes of his natural father

v. 58.  In his father’s sight.] The spiritual father, or bishop, in whose presence he made a profession of poverty.

v. 60.  Her first husband.] Christ.

v. 63.  Amyclas.] Lucan makes Caesar exclaim, on witnessing the secure poverty of the fisherman Amyclas: 

—­O vite tuta facultas
Pauperis, angustique lares!  O munera nondum
Intellecta deum! quibus hoc contingere templis,
Aut potuit muris, nullo trepidare tumultu,
Caesarea pulsante manu? 
Lucan Phars. 1. v. 531.