The Morgante Maggiore is a history of the fabulous exploits and death of Orlando, the great hero of Italian romance, and of the wars and calamities brought on his fellow Paladins and their sovereign Charlemagne by the envy, ambition, and treachery of the misguided monarch’s favourite, Gail of Magauza (Mayence), Count of Poictiers.  It is founded on the pseudo-history of Archbishop Turpin, which, though it received the formal sanction of the Church, is a manifest forgery, and became such a jest with the wits, that they took a delight in palming upon it their most incredible fictions.  The title (Morgante the Great) seems to have been either a whim to draw attention to an old subject, or the result of an intention to do more with the giant so called than took place; for though he is a conspicuous actor in the earlier part of the poem, he dies when it is not much more than half completed.  Orlando, the champion of the faith, is the real hero of it, and Gan the anti-hero or vice.  Charlemagne, the reader hardly need be told, is represented, for the most part, as a very different person from what he appears in history.  In truth, as Ellis and Panizzi have shewn, he is either an exaggeration (still misrepresented) of Charles Martel, the Armorican chieftain, who conquered the Saracens at Poictiers, or a concretion of all the Charleses of the Carlovingian race, wise and simple, potent and weak.[6]

The story may be thus briefly told.  Orlando quits the court of Charlemagne in disgust, but is always ready to return to it when the emperor needs his help.  The best Paladins follow, to seek him.  He meets with and converts the giant Morgante, whose aid he receives in many adventures, among which is the taking of Babylon.  The other Paladins, his cousin Rinaldo especially, have their separate adventures, all more or less mixed up with the treacheries and thanklessness of Gan (for they assist even him), and the provoking trust reposed in him by Charlemagne; and at length the villain crowns his infamy by luring Orlando with most of the Paladins into the pass of Roncesvalles, where the hero himself and almost all his companions are slain by the armies of Gan’s fellow-traitor, Marsilius, king of Spain.  They die, however, victorious; and the two royal and noble scoundrels, by a piece of prosaical justice better than poetical, are despatched like common malefactors, with a halter.

There is, perhaps, no pure invention in the whole of this enlargement of old ballads and chronicles, except the characters of another giant, and of a rebel angel; for even Morgante’s history, though told in a very different manner, has its prototype in the fictions of the pretended archbishop.[7] The Paladins are well distinguished from one another; Orlando as foremost alike in prowess and magnanimity, Rinaldo by his vehemence, Ricciardetto by his amours, Astolfo by an ostentatious rashness and self-committal; but in all these respects they appear to have been made