he would have been guilty of less melancholy absurdities.  If Rabelais had been able to weep as well as to laugh, and to love as well as to be licentious, he would have had faith and therefore support in something earnest, and not have been obliged to place the consummation of all things in a wine-bottle.  People’s every-day experiences might explain to them the greatest apparent inconsistencies of Pulci’s muse, if habit itself did not blind them to the illustration.  Was nobody ever present in a well-ordered family, when a lively conversation having been interrupted by the announcement of dinner, the company, after listening with the greatest seriousness to a grace delivered with equal seriousness, perhaps by a clergyman, resumed it the instant afterwards in all its gaiety, with the first spoonful of soup?  Well, the sacred invocations at the beginning of Pulci’s cantos were compliances of the like sort with a custom.  They were recited and listened to just as gravely at Lorenzo di Medici’s table; and yet neither compromised the reciters, nor were at all associated with the enjoyment of the fare that ensued.  So with regard to the intermixture of grave and gay throughout the poem.  How many campaigning adventures have been written by gallant officers, whose animal spirits saw food for gaiety in half the circumstances that occurred, and who could crack a jest and a helmet perhaps with almost equal vivacity, and yet be as serious as the gravest at a moment’s notice, mourn heartily over the deaths of their friends, and shudder with indignation and horror at the outrages committed in a captured city?  It is thus that Pulci writes, full no less of feeling than of whim and mirth.  And the whole honest round of humanity not only warrants his plan, but in the twofold sense of the word embraces it.

If any thing more were necessary to shew the gravity with which our author addressed himself to his subject, it is the fact, related by himself, of its having been recommended to him by Lorenzo’s mother, Lucrezia Tornabuoni, a good and earnest woman, herself a poetess, who wrote a number of sacred narratives, and whose virtues he more than once records with the greatest respect and tenderness.  The Morgante concludes with an address respecting this lady to the Virgin, and with a hope that her “devout and sincere” spirit may obtain peace for him in Paradise.  These are the last words in the book.  Is it credible that expressions of this kind, and employed on such an occasion, could have had no serious meaning? or that Lorenzo listened to such praises of his mother as to a jest?