curious facts respecting Berni’s rifacimento, declares himself unable to pronounce which of the two poems is the better one, the original Boiardo, or the re-modelled.  It would therefore not very well become a foreigner to give a verdict, even if he were able; and I confess, after no little consideration (and apart, of course, from questions of dialect, which I cannot pretend to look into), I feel myself almost entirely at a loss to conjecture on which side the superiority lies, except in point of invention and a certain early simplicity.  The advantage in those two respects unquestionably belongs to Boiardo; and a great one it is, and may not unreasonably be supposed to settle the rest of the question in his favour; and yet Berni’s fancy, during a more sophisticate period of Italian manners, exhibited itself so abundantly in his own witty poems, his pen at all times has such a charming facility, and he proved himself, in his version of Boiardo, to have so strong a sympathy with the earnestness and sentiment of his original in his gravest moments, that I cannot help thinking the two men would have been each what the other was in their respective times;—­the Lombard the comparative idler, given more to witty than serious invention, under a corrupt Roman court; and the Tuscan the originator of romantic fictions, in a court more suited to him than the one he avowedly despised.  I look upon them as two men singularly well matched.  The nature of the present work does not require, and the limits to which it is confined do not permit, me to indulge myself in a comparison between them corroborated by proofs; but it is impossible not to notice the connexion:  and therefore, begging the reader’s pardon for the sorry substitute of affirmative for demonstrative criticism, I may be allowed to say, that if Boiardo has the praise of invention to himself, Berni thoroughly appreciated and even enriched it; that if Boiardo has sometimes a more thoroughly charming simplicity, Berni still appreciates it so well, that the difference of their times is sufficient to restore the claim of equality of feeling; and finally, that if Berni strengthens and adorns the interest of the composition with more felicitous expressions, and with a variety of lively and beautiful trains of thought, you feel that Boiardo was quite capable of them all, and might have done precisely the same had he lived in Berni’s age.  In the greater part of the poem the original is altered in nothing except diction, and often (so at least it seems to me) for no other reason than the requirements of the Tuscan manner.  And this is the case with most of the noblest, and even the liveliest passages.  My first acquaintance, for example, with the Orlando Innamorato was through the medium of Berni; and on turning to those stories in his version, which I have translated from his original for the present volume, I found that every passage but one, to which I had given a mark of admiration, was the property