had become the prototype of the court-lover in Boiardo’s.  The poet, however, in his most favourite characters, retained and recommended a truer sentiment, as in the instance of the loves of Brandimart and Fiordelisa; and there is a graceful cheerfulness in some of his least sentimental ones, which redeems them from grossness.  I know not a more charming fancy in the whole loving circle of fairy-land, than the female’s shaking her long tresses round Mandricardo, in order to furnish him with a mantle, when he issues out of the enchanted fountain.[5]

But Boiardo’s poem was unfinished:  there are many prosaical passages in it, many lame and harsh lines, incorrect and even ungrammatical expressions, trivial images, and, above all, many Lombard provincialisms, which are not in their nature of a “significant or graceful” sort,[6] and which shocked the fastidious Florentines, the arbiters of Italian taste.  It was to avoid these in his own poetry, that Boiardo’s countryman Ariosto carefully studied the Tuscan dialect, if not visited Florence itself; and the consequence was, that his greater genius so obscured the popularity of his predecessor, that a remarkable process, unique in the history of letters, appears to have been thought necessary to restore its perusal.  The facetious Berni, a Tuscan wit full of genius, without omitting any particulars of consequence, or adding a single story except of himself, re-cast the whole poem of Boiardo, altering the diction of almost every stanza, and supplying introductions to the cantos after the manner of Ariosto; and the Florentine idiom and unfailing spirit of this re-fashioner’s verse (though, what is very curious, not till after a long chance of its being overlooked itself, and a posthumous editorship which has left doubts on the authority of the text) gradually effaced almost the very mention of the man’s name who had supplied him with the whole staple commodity of his book, with all the heart of its interest, and with far the greater part of the actual words.  The first edition of Berni was prohibited in consequence of its containing a severe attack on the clergy; but even the prohibition did not help to make it popular.  The reader may imagine a similar occurrence in England, by supposing that Dryden had re-written the whole of Chaucer, and that his reconstruction had in the course of time as much surpassed the original in popularity, as his version of the Flower and the Leaf did, up to the beginning of the present century.

I do not mean to compare Chaucer with Boiardo, or Dryden with Berni.  Fine poet as I think Boiardo, I hold Chaucer to be a far finer; and spirited, and in some respects admirable, as are Dryden’s versions of Chaucer, they do not equal that of Boiardo by the Tuscan.  Dryden did not apprehend the sentiment of Chaucer in any such degree as Berni did that of his original.  Indeed, Mr. Panizzi himself, to whom the world is indebted both for the only good edition of Boiardo and for the knowledge of the most