Spenser’s picture is more subtly wrought and imaginative than Ariosto’s; but it removes the man farther from ourselves, except under very special circumstances.  Indeed, it might be taken rather for a picture of hypochondria than jealousy, and under that aspect is very appalling.  But nothing, under more obvious circumstances, comes so dreadfully home to us as Ariosto’s poor wretch feeling himself “the less safe the more he puts on,” and calling out dismally from his tower, a thousand feet high, to the watchers and warders below to see that all is secure.

[Footnote 1:  This daring and grand apologue is not in the Furioso, but in a poem which Ariosto left unfinished, and which goes under the name of the Five Cantos.  The fragment, though bearing marks of want of correction, is in some respects a beautiful, and altogether a curious one, especially as it seems to have been written after the Furioso; for it touches in a remarkable manner on several points of morals and politics, and contains an extravagance wilder than any thing in Pulci,—­a whale inhabited by knights!  It was most likely for these reasons that his friend Bembo and others advised him to suppress it.  Was it written in his youth?  The apologue itself is not one of the least daring attacks on the Borgias and such scoundrels, who had just then afflicted Italy.

Did Ariosto, by the way, omit Macchiavelli in his list of the friends who hailed the close of his great poem, from not knowing what to make of his book entitled the Prince? It has perplexed all the world to this day, and is not unlikely to have made a particularly unpleasant impression on a mind at once so candid and humane as Ariosto’s.]

[Footnote 2:  A tremendous fancy this last!

  “Sta for la pena, de la qual dicea
    Che nacque quando la brutt’Ira nacque,
  La Crudeltade, e la Rapina rea;
    E quantunque in un ventre con for giacque,
  Di tormentarle mai non rimanea.”]

ISABELLA.[1]

Rodomont, King of Algiers, was the fiercest of all the enemies of Christendom, not out of love for his own faith (for he had no piety), but out of hatred to those that opposed him.  He had now quarrelled, however, with his friends too.  He had been rejected by a lady, in favour of the Tartar king, Mandricardo, and mortified by the publicity of the rejection before his own lord paramount, Agramante, the leader of the infidel armies.  He could not bear the rejection; he could not bear the sanction of it by his liege lord; he resolved to quit the scene of warfare and return to Africa; and, in the course of his journey thither, he had come into the south of France, where, observing a sequestered spot that suited his humour, be changed his mind as to going home, and persuaded himself he could live in it for the rest of his life.  He accordingly took up his abode with his attendants in a chapel, which had been deserted by its clergy during the rage of war.