and its liveliest and most idiomatic effusions.  From all these circumstances in combination arose, first, Pulci’s determination to write a poem of a mixed order, which should retain for him the ear of the many, and at the same time give rise to a poetry of romance worthy of higher auditors; second, his banter of what he considered unessential and injurious dogmas of belief, in favour of those principles of the religion of charity which inflict no contradiction on the heart and understanding; third, the trouble which seems to have been given him by critics, “sacred and profane,” in consequence of these originalities; and lastly, a doubt which has strangely existed with some, as to whether he intended to write a serious or a comic poem, or on any one point was in earnest at all.  One writer thinks he cannot have been in earnest, because he opens every canto with some pious invocation; another asserts that the piety itself is a banter; a similar critic is of opinion, that to mix levities with gravities proves the gravities to have been nought, and the levities all in all; a fourth allows him to have been serious in his description of the battle of Roncesvalles, but says he was laughing in all the rest of his poem; while a fifth candidly gives up the question, as one of those puzzles occasioned by the caprices of the human mind, which it is impossible for reasonable people to solve.  Even Sismondi, who was well acquainted with the age in which Pulci wrote, and who, if not a profound, is generally an acute and liberal critic, confesses himself to be thus confounded.  “Pulci,” he says, “commences all his cantos by a sacred invocation; and the interests of religion are constantly intermingled with the adventures of his story, in a manner capricious and little instructive.  We know not how to reconcile this monkish spirit with the semi-pagan character of society under Lorenzo di Medici, nor whether we ought to accuse Pulci of gross bigotry or of profane derision.” [1] Sismondi did not consider that the lively and impassioned people of the south take what may be called household-liberties with the objects of their worship greater than northerns can easily conceive; that levity of manner, therefore, does not always imply the absence of the gravest belief; that, be this as it may, the belief may be as grave on some points as light on others, perhaps the more so for that reason; and that, although some poems, like some people, are altogether grave, or the reverse, there really is such a thing as tragi-comedy both in the world itself and in the representations of it.  A jesting writer may be quite as much in earnest when he professes to be so, as a pleasant companion who feels for his own or for other people’s misfortunes, and who is perhaps obliged to affect or resort to his very pleasantry sometimes, because he feels more acutely than the gravest.  The sources of tears and smiles lie close to, ay and help to refine one another.  If Dante had been capable of more levity,