But in all the rest there is a wonderful invigoration and enlargement.  The genius of romance has increased to an extraordinary degree in power, if not in simplicity.  Its shoulders have grown broader, its voice louder and more sustained; and if it has lost a little on the sentimental side, it has gained prodigiously, not only in animal vigour, but, above all, in knowledge of human nature, and a brave and joyous candour in shewing it.  The poet takes a universal, an acute, and, upon the whole, a cheerful view, like the sun itself, of all which the sun looks on; and readers are charmed to see a knowledge at once so keen and so happy.  Herein lies the secret of Ariosto’s greatness; which is great, not because it has the intensity of Dante, or the incessant thought and passion of Shakspeare, or the dignified imagination of Milton, to all of whom he is far inferior in sustained excellence,—­but because he is like very Nature herself.  Whether great, small, serious, pleasureable, or even indifferent, he still has the life, ease, and beauty of the operations of the daily planet.  Even where he seems dull and common-place, his brightness and originality at other times make it look like a good-natured condescension to our own common habits of thought and discourse; as though he did it but on purpose to leave nothing unsaid that could bring him within the category of ourselves.  His charming manner intimates that, instead of taking thought, he chooses to take pleasure with us, and compare old notes; and we are delighted that he does us so much honour, and makes, as it were, Ariostos of us all.  He is Shakspearian in going all lengths with Nature as he found her, not blinking the fact of evil, yet finding a “soul of goodness” in it, and, at the same time, never compromising the worth of noble and generous qualities.  His young and handsome Medoro is a pitiless slayer of his enemies; but they were his master’s enemies, and he would have lost his life, even to preserve his dead body.  His Orlando, for all his wisdom and greatness, runs mad for love of a coquette, who triumphs over warriors and kings, only to fall in love herself with an obscure lad.  His kings laugh with all their hearts, like common people; his mourners weep like such unaffected children of sorrow, that they must needs “swallow some of their tears."[45] His heroes, on the arrival of intelligence that excites them, leap out of bed and write letters before they dress, from natural impatience, thinking nothing of their “dignity.”  When Astolfo blows the magic horn which drives every body out of the castle of Atlantes, “not a mouse” stays behind;—­not, as Hoole and such critics think, because the poet is here writing ludicrously, but because he uses the same image seriously, to give an idea of desolation, as Shakspeare in Hamlet does to give that of silence, when “not a mouse is stirring.”  Instead of being mere comic writing, such incidents are in the highest epic taste of the meeting of extremes,—­of the impartial