a tragedy, then a comedy; then mystified in some enchanted palace; then riding, dancing, dining, looking at pictures; then again descending to the depths of the earth, or soaring to the moon, or seeing lovers in a glade, or witnessing the extravagances of the great jealous hero Orlando; and the music of an enchanting style perpetually attends us, and the sweet face of Angelica glances here and there like a bud:  and there are gallantries of all kinds, and stories endless, and honest tears, and joyous bursts of laughter, and beardings for all base opinions, and no bigotry, and reverence for whatsoever is venerable, and candour exquisite, and the happy interwoven names of “Angelica and Medoro,” young for ever.

But so great a work is not to be dismissed with a mere rhapsody of panegyric.  Ariosto is inferior, in some remarkable respects, to his predecessors Pulci and Boiardo.  His characters, for the most part, do not interest us as much as theirs by their variety and good fellowship; he invented none as Boiardo did, with the exception, indeed, of Orlando’s, as modified by jealousy; and he has no passage, I thick, equal in pathos to that of the struggle at Roncesvalles; for though Orlando’s jealousy is pathetic, as well as appalling, the effects of it are confined to one person, and disputed by his excessive strength.  Ariosto has taken all tenderness out of Angelica, except that of a kind of boarding-school first love (which, however, as here-after intimated, may have simplified and improved her general effect), and he has omitted all that was amusing in the character of Astolfo.  Knight-errantry has fallen off a little in his hands from its first youthful and trusting freshness; more sophisticate times are opening upon us; and satire more frequently and bitterly interferes.  The licentious passages (though never gross in words, like those of his contemporaries,) are not redeemed by sentiment as in Boiardo; and it seems to me, that Ariosto hardly improved so much as he might have done Upon his predecessor’s imitations of the classics.  I cannot help thinking that, upon the whole, he had better have left them alone, and depended entirely on himself.  Shelley says, he has too much fighting and “revenge,"[44]—­which is true; but the revenge was only among his knights.  He was himself (like my admirable friend) one of the most forgiving of men; and the fighting was the taste of the age, in which chivalry was still flourishing in the shape of such men as Bayard, and ferocity in men like Gaston de Foix.  Ariosto certainly did not anticipate, any more than Shakspeare did, that spirit of human amelioration which has ennobled the present age.  He thought only of reflecting nature as he found it.  He is sometimes even as uninteresting as he found other people; but the tiresome passages, thank God, all belong to the house of Este!  His panegyrics of Ippolito and his ancestors recoiled on the poet with a retributive dulness.