I could not make him Dædalus,[752] so then His second father sent me to the fire. But to the deepest Bolgia of the ten, For alchemy which in the world I wrought, The unerring Minos doomed me.' 'Now were men E'er found,' I of the Poet asked, 'so fraught 121 With vanity as are the Sienese?[753] French vanity to theirs is surely nought.' The other leper hearing me, to these My words: 'Omit the Stricca,'[754] swift did shout, 'Who knew his tastes with temperance to please; And Nicholas,[755] who earliest found out The lavish custom of the clove-stuffed roast Within the garden where such seed doth sprout. Nor count the club[756] where Caccia d' Ascian lost 130 Vineyards and woods; 'mid whom away did throw His wit the Abbagliato.[757] But whose ghost It is, that thou mayst weet, that backs thee so Against the Sienese, make sharp thine eyes That thou my countenance mayst surely know. In me Capocchio's[758] shade thou'lt recognise, Who forged false coin by means of alchemy: Thou must remember, if I well surmise, How I of nature very ape could be.' FOOTNOTES: [735] _Thou didst not, etc._: It is a noteworthy feature in the conduct of the Poem that when Dante has once gained sufficient knowledge of any group in the Inferno he at once detaches his mind from it, and, carrying on as little arrear of pity as he can, gives his thoughts to further progress on the journey. The departure here made from his usual behaviour is presently accounted for. Virgil knows why he lingers, but will not seem to approve of the cause. [736] _Twenty miles and two_: The Ninth Bolgia has a circumference of twenty-two miles, and as the procession of the shades is slow it would indeed involve a protracted halt to wait till all had passed beneath the bridge. Virgil asks ironically if he wishes to count them all. This precise detail, taken along with one of the same kind in the following Canto (line 86), has suggested the attempt to construct the Inferno to a scale. Dante wisely suffers us to forget, if we will, that--taking the diameter of the earth at 6500 miles, as given by him in the _Convito_--he travels from the surface of the globe to the centre at the rate of more than two miles a minute, counting downward motion alone. It is only when he has come to the lowest rings that he allows himself to give details of size; and probably the mention of the extent of the Ninth Bolgia, which comes on the reader as a surprise, is thrown out in order to impress on the imagination some sense of the enormous extent of the regions through which the pilgrim has already passed. Henceforth he deals in exact measurement. [737] _The moon_: It is now some time after noon on the Saturday. The last indication of time was at Canto xxi. 112. [738] _The time, etc._: Before nightfall they are to complete their exploration of the Inferno, and they will have spent twenty-four hours in it.