eye with which Nature regards high and low.  So, give Ariosto his hippogriff, and other marvels with which he has enriched the stock of romance, and Nature takes as much care of the verisimilitude of their actions, as if she had made them herself.  His hippogriff returns, like a common horse, to the stable to which he has been accustomed.  His enchanter, who is gifted with the power of surviving decapitation and pursuing the decapitator so long as a fated hair remains on his head, turns deadly pale in the face when it is scalped, and falls lifeless from his horse.  His truth, indeed, is so genuine, and at the same time his style is so unaffected, sometimes so familiar in its grace, and sets us so much at ease in his company, that the familiarity is in danger of bringing him into contempt with the inexperienced, and the truth of being considered old and obvious, because the mode of its introduction makes it seem an old acquaintance.  When Voltaire was a young man, and (to Anglicise a favourite Gallic phrase) fancied he had profounded every thing deep and knowing, he thought nothing of Ariosto.  Some years afterwards he took him for the first of grotesque writers, but nothing more.  At last he pronounced him equally “entertaining and sublime, and humbly apologised for his error.”  Foscolo quotes this passage from the Dictionnaire Philosophique; and adds another from Sir Joshua Reynolds, in which the painter speaks of a similar inability on his own part, when young, to enjoy the perfect nature of Raphael, and the admiration and astonishment which, in his riper years, he grew to feel for it.[46]

The excessive “wildness” attributed to Ariosto is not wilder than many things in Homer, or even than some things in Virgil (such as the transformation of ships into sea-nymphs).  The reason why it has been thought so is, that he rendered them more popular by mixing them with satire, and thus brought them more universally into notice.  One main secret of the delight they give us is their being poetical comments, as it were, on fancies and metaphors of our own.  Thus, we say of a suspicious man, that he is suspicion itself; Ariosto turns him accordingly into an actual being of that name.  We speak of the flights of the poets; Ariosto makes them literally flights—­flights on a hippogriff, and to the moon.  The moon, it has been said, makes lunatics; he accordingly puts a man’s wits into that planet.  Vice deforms beauty; therefore his beautiful enchantress turns out to be an old hag.  Ancient defeated empires are sounds and emptiness; therefore the Assyrian and Persian monarchies become, in his limbo of vanities, a heap of positive bladders.  Youth is headstrong, and kissing goes by favour; so Angelica, queen of Cathay, and beauty of the world, jilts warriors and kings, and marries a common soldier.