“un di lo prese[51].”

But he does not confine himself to these gentle pictures.  He has many as strong as Michael Angelo, some as intense as Dante.  He paints the conquest of America in five words

  “Veggio da diece cacciar mille."[52]
  I see thousands
  Hunted by tens.

He compares the noise of a tremendous battle heard in the neighbourhood to the sound of the cataracts of the Nile: 

  “un alto suon ch’ a quel s’ accorda
  Con che i vicin’ cadendo il Nil assorda."[53]

He “scourges” ships at sea with tempests—­say rather the “miserable seamen;” while night-time grows blacker and blacker on the “exasperated waters."[54]

When Rodomont has plunged into the thick of Paris, and is carrying every thing before him ("like a serpent that has newly cast his skin, and goes shaking his three tongues under his eyes of fire"), he makes this tremendous hero break the middle of the palace-gate into a huge “window,” and look through it with a countenance which is suddenly beheld by a crowd of faces as pale as death: 

  “E dentro fatto l’ ha tanta finestra,
  Che ben vedere e veduto esser puote
  Dai visi impressi di color di morte[55].”

The whole description of Orlando’s jealousy and growing madness is Shakspearian for passion and circumstance, as the reader may see even in the prose abstract of it in this volume; and his sublimation of a suspicious king into suspicion itself (which it also contains) is as grandly and felicitously audacious as any thing ever invented by poet.  Spenser thought so; and has imitated and emulated it in one of his own finest passages.  Ariosto has not the spleen and gall of Dante, and therefore his satire is not so tremendous; yet it is very exquisite, as all the world have acknowledged in the instances of the lost things found in the moon, and the angel who finds Discord in a convent.  He does not take things so much to heart as Chaucer.  He has nothing so profoundly pathetic as our great poet’s Griselda.  Yet many a gentle eye has moistened at the conclusion of the story of Isabella; and to recur once more to Orlando’s jealousy, all who have experienced that passion will feel it shake them.  I have read somewhere of a visit paid to Voltaire by an Italian gentleman, who recited it to him, and who (being moved perhaps by the recollection of some passage in his own history) had the tears all the while pouring down his cheeks.

Such is the poem which the gracious and good Cardinal Ippolito designated as a “parcel of trumpery.”  It had, indeed, to contend with more slights than his.  Like all originals, it was obliged to wait for the death of the envious and the self-loving, before it acquired a popularity which surpassed all precedent.  Foscolo says, that Macchiavelli and Ariosto, “the two writers of that age who really possessed most excellence, were the least praised during their lives.  Bembo was approached in a