[347] {308}[Byron could not make up his mind with regard to the translation of the Italian _sbergo_, which he had, correctly, rendered "cuirass." He was under the impression that the word "meant _helmet_ also" (see his letters to Murray, March 1, 5, 1820, _Letters_, 1900, iv. 413-417). _Sbergo_ or _usbergo_, as Moore points out (_Life_, p. 438, note 2), "is obviously the same as hauberk, habergeon, etc., all from the German _halsberg_, or covering for the neck." An old dictionary which Byron might have consulted, _Vocabolario Italiano-Latino_, Venice, 1794, gives _thorax_, _lorica_, as the Latin equivalent of "Usbergo = armadura del busto, corazza." (See, too, for an authority quoted in the _Dizzionario Universale_ (1797-1805) of Alberti di Villanuova, _Letters_, 1900, iv. 417, note 2.)] FRANCESCA OF RIMINI. INTRODUCTION TO _FRANCESCA OF RIMINI_. The MS. of "a _literal_ translation, word for word (versed like the original), of the episode of Francesca of Rimini" (Letter March 23, 1820, _Letters_, 1900, iv. 421), was sent to Murray from Ravenna, March 20, 1820 (_ibid_., p. 419), a week after Byron had forwarded the MS. of the _Prophecy of Dante_. Presumably the translation had been made in the interval by way of illustrating and justifying the unfamiliar metre of the "Dante Imitation." In the letter which accompanied the translation he writes, "Enclosed you will find, _line for line_, in _third rhyme_ (_terza rima_,) of which your British Blackguard reader as yet understands nothing, Fanny of Rimini. You know that she was born here, and married, and slain, from Cary, Boyd, and such people already. I have done it into _cramp_ English, line for line, and rhyme for rhyme, to try the possibility. You had best append it to the poems already sent by last three posts." In the matter of the "British Blackguard," that is, the general reader, Byron spoke by the card. Hayley's excellent translation of the three first cantos of the _Inferno_ (_vide ante_, "Introduction to the _Prophecy of Dante_," p. 237), which must have been known to a previous generation, was forgotten, and with earlier experiments in _terza rima_, by Chaucer and the sixteenth and seventeenth century poets, neither Byron nor the British public had any familiar or definite acquaintance. But of late some interest had been awakened or revived in Dante and the _Divina Commedia_.