This resuscitation of the Helen of antiquity, under a more seducing form, was an invention of Boiardo’s; so was the subjection of Charles’s hero Orlando to the passion of love; so, besides the heroine and her name, was that of other interesting characters with beautiful names, which afterwards figured in Ariosto.  This inventive faculty is indeed so conspicuous in every part of the work, on small as well as great occasions, in fairy-adventures and those of flesh and blood, that although the author appears to have had both his loves and his fairies suggested to him by our romances of Arthur and the Round Table, it constitutes, next to the pervading elegance above mentioned, his chief claim to our admiration.  Another of his merits is a certain tender gallantry, or rather an honest admixture of animal passion with spiritual, also the precursor of the like ingenuous emotions in Ariosto; and he furthermore set his follower the example, not only of good breeding, but of a constant heroical cheerfulness, looking with faith on nature.  Pulci has a constant cheerfulness, but not with so much grace and dignity.  Foscolo has remarked, that Boiardo’s characters even surpass those of Ariosto in truth and variety, and that his Angelica more engages our feelings;[4] to which I will venture to add, that if his style is less strong and complete, it never gives us a sense of elaboration.  I should take Boiardo to have been the healthier man, though of a less determined will than Ariosto, and perhaps, on the whole, less robust.  You find in Boiardo almost which Ariosto perfected,—­chivalry, battles, combats, loves and graces, passions, enchantments, classical and romantic fable, eulogy, satire, mirth, pathos, philosophy.  It is like the first sketch of a great picture, not the worse in some respects for being a sketch; free and light, though not so grandly coloured.  It is the morning before the sun is up, and when the dew is on the grass.  Take the stories which are translated in the present volume, and you might fancy them all written by Ariosto, with a difference; the Death of Agrican perhaps with minuter touches of nature, but certainly not with greater simplicity and earnestness.  In the Saracen Friends there is just Ariosto’s balance of passion and levity; and in the story which I have entitled Seeing and Believing, his exhibition of triumphant cunning.  During the lives of Pulci and Boiardo, the fierce passions and severe ethics of Dante had been gradually giving way to a gentler and laxer state of opinion before the progress of luxury; and though Boiardo’s enamoured Paladin retains a kind of virtue not common in any age to the heroes of warfare, the lord of Scandiano, who appears to have recited his poem, sometimes to his vassals and sometimes to the ducal circle at court, intimates a smiling suspicion that such a virtue would be considered a little rude and obsolete by his hearers.  Pulci’s wandering gallant, Uliviero, who in Dante’s time would have been a scandalous profligate,