And what a creature is this Angelica! what effect has she not had upon the world in spite of all her faults, nay, probably by very reason of them!  I know not whether it has been remarked before, but it appears to me, that the charm which every body has felt in the story of Angelica consists mainly in that very fact of her being nothing but a beauty and a woman, dashed even with coquetry, which renders her so inferior in character to most heroines of romance.  Her interest is founded on nothing exclusive or prejudiced.  It is not addressed to any special class.  She might or might not have been liked by this person or that; but the world in general will adore her, because nature has made them to adore beauty and the sex, apart from prejudices right or wrong.  Youth will attribute virtues to her, whether she has them or not; middle-age be unable to help gazing on her; old-age dote on her.  She is womankind itself, in form and substance; and that is a stronger thing, for the most part, than all our figments about it.  Two musical names, “Angelica and Medoro,” have become identified in the minds of poetical readers with the honeymoon of youthful passion.

The only false acid insipid fiction I can call to mind in the Orlando Furioso is that of the “swans” who rescue “medals” from the river of oblivion (canto xxxv.).  It betrays a singular forgetfulness of the poet’s wonted verisimilitude; for what metaphor can reconcile us to swans taking an interest in medals?  Popular belief had made them singers; but it was not a wise step to convert them into antiquaries.

Ariosto’s animal spirits, and the brilliant hurry and abundance of his incidents, blind a careless reader to his endless particular beauties, which, though he may too often “describe instead of paint” (on account, as Foscolo says, of his writing to the many), spew that no man could paint better when he chose.  The bosoms of his females “come and go, like the waves on the sea-coast in summer airs."[47] His witches draw the fish out of the water

  “With simple words and a pure warbled spell."[48]

He borrows the word “painting” itself,—­like a true Italian and friend of Raphael and Titian, to express the commiseration in the faces of the blest for the sufferings of mortality

  “Dipinte di pietade il viso pio."[49]

  Their pious looks painted with tenderness.

Jesus is very finely called, in the same passage, “il sempiterno Amante,” the eternal Lover.  The female sex are the

  “Schiera gentil the pur adorna il mondo."[50]

  The gentle bevy that adorns the world.

He paints cabinet-pictures like Spenser, in isolated stanzas, with a pencil at once solid and light; as in the instance of the charming one that tells the story of Mercury and his net; how he watched the Goddess of Flowers as she issued forth at dawn with her lap full of roses and violets, and so threw the net over her “one day,” and “took her;”