----Or vedi la pena molesta Tu che spirando vai veggendo i morti; Vedi s'alcuna è grande come questa. E perchè tu di me novella porti, Sappi ch' i' son Bertram dal Bornio, quelli Che diedi al Re giovane i ma' conforti. I' feci 'l padre e 'l figlio in se ribelli: ....*....*....*....* Perch'io partii così giunte persone, Partito porto il mio cerebro, lasso! Dal suo principio ch 'è 'n questo troncone. Così s'osserva in me lo contrappasso.[13] Now behold This grievous torment, thou, who breathing goest To spy the dead: behold, if any else Be terrible as this,--and that on earth Thou mayst bear tidings of me, know that I Am Bertrand, he of Born, who gave King John The counsel mischievous. Father and son I set at mutual war:---- Spurring them on maliciously to strife. For parting those so closely knit, my brain Parted, alas! I carry from its source That in this trunk inhabits. Thus the law Of retribution fiercely works in me.[14] Pierre Vidal, whose description of love I have quoted before, was one of the most extraordinary characters of his time, a kind of poetical Don Quixotte:--his brain was turned with love, poetry, and vanity: he believed himself the beloved of all the fair, the mirror of knighthood, and the prince of Troubadours. Yet in the midst of all his extravagances, he possessed exquisite skill in his art, and was not surpassed by any of the poets of those days, for the harmony, delicacy, and tenderness of his amatory effusions. He chose for his first love the beautiful wife of the Vicomte de Marseilles: the lady, unlike some of the Princesses of her time, distinguished between the poet and the man, and as he presumed too far on the encouragement bestowed on him in the former capacity, he was banished: he then followed Richard the First to the crusade. The verses he addressed to the lady from the Island of Cyprus are still preserved. The folly of Vidal, or rather the derangement of his imagination, subjected him to some of those mystifications which remind us of Don Quixote and Sancho, in the court of the laughter-loving Duchess. For instance, Richard and his followers amused themselves at Cyprus, by marrying Vidal to a beautiful Greek girl of no immaculate reputation, whom they introduced to him as the niece of the Greek Emperor. Vidal, in right of his wife, immediately took the title of Emperor, assumed the purple, ordered a throne to be carried before him, and played the most fantastic antics of authority. Nor was this the greatest of his extravagances: on his return to Provence, he chose for the second object of his amorous and poetical devotion, a lady whose name happened to be Louve de Penautier: in her honour he assumed the name of _Loup_, and farther to merit the good graces of his "_Dame_," and to do honour to the name he had adopted, he dressed