P.S.  See those lines in the Athenaeum on Pulci with Hunt’s translation—­all wrong—­’che non si sente,’ being—­’that one does not hear him’ i.e. the ordinarily noisy fellow—­and the rest, male, pessime!  Sic verte, meo periculo, mi ocelle!

Where’s Luigi Pulci, that one don’t the man see? 
He just now yonder in the copse has ‘gone it’ (n’ando)
Because across his mind there came a fancy;
He’ll wish to fancify, perhaps, a sonnet!

Now Ba thinks nothing can be worse than that?  Then read this which I really told Hunt and got his praise for.  Poor dear wonderful persecuted Pietro d’Abano wrote this quatrain on the people’s plaguing him about his mathematical studies and wanting to burn him—­he helped to build Padua Cathedral, wrote a Treatise on Magic still extant, and passes for a conjuror in his country to this day—­when there is a storm the mothers tell the children that he is in the air; his pact with the evil one obliged him to drink no milk; no natural human food!  You know Tieck’s novel about him?  Well, this quatrain is said, I believe truly, to have been discovered in a well near Padua some fifty years ago.

    Studiando le mie cifre, col compasso
    Rilevo, che presto saro sotterra—­
    Perche del mio saper si fa gran chiasso,
    E gl’ignoranti m’hanno mosso guerra.

Affecting, is it not, in its simple, child like plaining?  Now so, if I remember, I turned it—­word for word—­

    Studying my ciphers, with the compass
    I reckon—­who soon shall be below ground,
    Because of my lore they make great ‘rumpus,’
    And against me war makes each dull rogue round.

Say that you forgive me to-morrow!

[The following is in E.B.B.’s handwriting.]

With my compass I take up my ciphers, poor scholar;
Who myself shall be taken down soon under the ground ... 
Since the world at my learning roars out in its choler,
And the blockheads have fought me all round.

E.B.B. to R.B.

Tuesday.
[Post-mark, February 10, 1846.]

Ever dearest, I have been possessed by your ‘Luria’ just as you would have me, and I should like you to understand, not simply how fine a conception the whole work seems to me, so developed, but how it has moved and affected me, without the ordinary means and dialect of pathos, by that calm attitude of moral grandeur which it has—­it is very fine.  For the execution, that too is worthily done—­although I agree with you, that a little quickening and drawing in closer here and there, especially towards the close where there is no time to lose, the reader feels, would make the effect stronger—­but you will look to it yourself—­and such a conception must come in thunder and lightning, as a chief god would—­must make its own way ... and will not let its poet go until he speaks it out