of a devil, he longs to go and set free the whole of the other world from devils.  Indeed there is no end to his affection for him.  Rinaldo and other Paladins, meantime, cannot rest till they have set out in search of Orlando.  They never meet or part with him without manifesting a tenderness proportionate to their valour,—­the old Homeric candour of emotion.  The devil Ashtaroth himself, who is a great and proud devil, assures Rinaldo, for whom he has conceived a regard, that there is good feeling (gentilezza) even in hell; and Rinaldo, not to hurt the feeling, answers that he has no doubt of it, or of the capability of “friendship” in that quarter; and he says he is as “sorry to part with him as with a brother.”  The passage will be found in our abstract.  There are no such devils as these in Dante; though Milton has something like them: 

  “Devil with devil damn’d
  Firm concord holds:  men only disagree.”

It is supposed that the character of Ashtaroth, which is a very new and extraordinary one, and does great honour to the daring goodness of Pulci’s imagination, was not lost upon Milton, who was not only acquainted with the poem, but expressly intimates the pleasure he took in it.[11] Rinaldo advises this devil, as Burns did Lucifer, to “take a thought and mend.”  Ashtaroth, who had been a seraph, takes no notice of the advice, except with a waving of the recollection of happier times.  He bids the hero farewell, and says he has only to summon him in order to receive his aid.  This retention of a sense of his former angelical dignity has been noticed by Foscolo and Panizzi, the two best writers on these Italian poems.[12] A Calvinist would call the expression of the sympathy “hardened.”  A humanist knows it to be the result of a spirit exquisitely softened.  An unbounded tenderness is the secret of all that is beautiful in the serious portion of our author’s genius.  Orlando’s good-natured giant weeps even for the death of the scoundrel Margutte; and the awful hero himself, at whose death nature is convulsed and the heavens open, begs his dying horse to forgive him if ever he has wronged it.

A charm of another sort in Pulci, and yet in most instances, perhaps, owing the best part of its charmingness to its being connected with the same feeling, is his wit.  Foscolo, it is true, says it is, in general, more severe than refined; and it is perilous to differ with such a critic on such a point; for much of it, unfortunately, is lost to a foreign reader, in consequence of its dependance on the piquant old Tuscan idiom, and on popular sayings and allusions.  Yet I should think it impossible for Pulci in general to be severe at the expense of some more agreeable quality; and I am sure that the portion of his wit most obvious to a foreigner may claim, if not to have originated, at least to have been very like the style of one who was among its declared admirers,—­and who was a very polished writer,—­Voltaire.