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NOTES TO CANTO V.
sufficiently obvious and common; but I do not recollect any other author who has alluded to the last circumstance in this description—that bitter, poisonous taste, which is sometimes created in the mouth by any painful and unexpected impression.
What in the ensuing canto will appear,
If you are Jain the history to hear.
Stanza xcii. lines 7 and 8.
Ariosto, like Boiardo, usually finishes the canto, and often suspends the narrative, at the most interesting part of a story. This artifice is always practised by the itinerant eastern tale-tellers, with the view of whetting the curiosity of their hearers; and hence the divisions in The Arabian Nights.
