Vitaliano, on my left shall sit.
A Paduan with these Florentines am I.
Ofttimes they thunder in mine ears, exclaiming,
Oh! haste that noble knight, he who the pouch
With the three goats will bring. This said, he writhed
The mouth, and lolled the tongue out, like an ox
That licks his nostrils."

_Canto_ xvii.

This passage of Cary's Dante is not quite so clear as that
translator's work usually is. "One of them all I knew not" is an
awkward periphrasis for "I knew none of them." Dante's indignant
expression of the effect of avarice in withering away distinctions of
character, and the prophecy of Scrovegno, that his neighbor Vitaliano,
then living, should soon be with him, to sit on his left hand, is
rendered a little obscure by the transposition of the word "here."
Cary has also been afraid of the excessive homeliness of Dante's
imagery; "whiter wing than curd" being in the original "whiter than
butter." The attachment of the purse to the neck, as a badge of shame,
in the _Inferno_, is found before Dante's time; as, for instance, in
the windows of Bourges cathedral (see Plate iii. of MM. Martin and
Cahier's beautiful work). And the building of the Arena Chapel by the
son, as a kind of atonement for the avarice of the father, is very
characteristic of the period, in which the use of money for the
building of churches was considered just as meritorious as its unjust
accumulation was criminal. I have seen, in a MS. Church-service of the
thirteenth century, an illumination representing Church-Consecration,
illustrating the words, "Fundata est domus Domini supra verticem
montium," surrounded for the purpose of contrast, by a grotesque,