It consists in treating an absurdity with an air as if it were none; or as if it had been a pure matter of course, erroneously mistaken for an absurdity.  Thus the good abbot, whose monastery is blockaded by the giants (for the virtue and simplicity of his character must be borne in mind), after observing that the ancient fathers in the desert had not only locusts to eat, but manna, which he has no doubt was rained down on purpose from heaven, laments that the “relishes” provided for himself and his brethren should have consisted of “showers of stones.”  The stones, while the abbot is speaking, come thundering down, and he exclaims, “For God’s sake, knight, come in, for the manna is falling!” This is exactly in the style of the Dictionnaire Philosophique.  So when Margutte is asked what he believes in, and says he believes in “neither black nor blue,” but in a good capon, “whether roast or boiled,” the reader is forcibly reminded of Voltaire’s Traveller, Scarmentado, who, when he is desired by the Tartars to declare which of their two parties he is for, the party of the black-mutton or the white-mutton, answers, that the dish is “equally indifferent to him, provided it is tender.”  Voltaire, however, does injustice to Pulci, when he pretends that in matters of belief he is like himself,—­a mere scoffer.  The friend of Lucrezia Tornabuoni has evidently the tenderest veneration for all that is good and lovely in the Catholic faith; and whatever liberties he might have allowed himself in professed extravaganzas, when an age without Church-authority encouraged them, and a reverend canon could take part in those (it must be acknowledged) unseemly “high jinks,” he never, in the Morgante, when speaking in his own person, and not in that of the worst characters, intimates disrespect towards any opinion which he did not hold to be irrelevant to a right faith.  It is observable that his freest expressions are put in the mouth of the giant Margutte, the lowest of these characters, who is an invention of the author’s, and a most extraordinary personage.  He is the first unmitigated blackguard in fiction, and is the greatest as well as first.  Pulci is conjectured, with great probability, to have designed him as a caricature of some real person; for Margutte is a Greek who, in point of morals, has been horribly brought up, and some of the Greek refugees in Italy were greatly disliked for the cynicism of their manners and the grossness of their lives.  Margutte is a glutton, a drunkard, a liar, a thief, and a blasphemer.  He boasts of having every vice, and no virtue except fidelity; which is meant to reconcile Morgante to his company; but though the latter endures and even likes it for his amusement, he gives him to understand that he looks on his fidelity as only securable by the bastinado, and makes him the subject of his practical jokes.  The respectable giant Morgante dies of the bite of a crab, as if to spew on what trivial chances depends the life of the strongest.  Margutte laughs himself to death at sight of a monkey putting his boots on and off; as though the good-natured poet meant at once to express his contempt of a merely and grossly anti-serious mode of existence, and his consideration, nevertheless, towards the poor selfish wretch who had had no better training.