To this wit and this pathos let the reader add a style of singular ease and fluency,—­rhymes often the most unexpected, but never at a loss,—­a purity of Tuscan acknowledged by every body, and ranking him among the authorities of the language,—­and a modesty in speaking of his own pretensions equalled only by his enthusiastic extolments of genius in others; and the reader has before him the lively and affecting, hopeful, charitable, large-hearted Luigi Pulci, the precursor, and in some respects exemplar, of Ariosto, and, in Milton’s opinion, a poet worth reading for the “good use” that may be made of him.  It has been strangely supposed that his friend Politian, and Ficino the Platonist, not merely helped him with their books (as he takes a pride in telling us), but wrote a good deal of the latter part of the Morgante, particularly the speculations in matters of opinion.  As if (to say nothing of the difference of style) a man of genius, however lively, did not go through the gravest reflections in the course of his life, or could not enter into any theological or metaphysical question, to which he chose to direct his attention.  Animal spirits themselves are too often but a counterbalance to the most thoughtful melancholy; and one fit of jaundice or hypochondria might have enabled the poet to see more visions of the unknown and the inscrutable in a single day, than perhaps ever entered the imagination of the elegant Latin scholar, or even the disciple of Plato.

[Footnote 1:  Literature of the South of Europe, Thomas Roscoe’s Translation, vol. ii. p.54.  For the opinions of other writers, here and elsewhere alluded to, see Tiraboschi (who is quite frightened at him), Storia della Poesia Italiana, cap. v. sect. 25; Gravina, who is more so, Della Ragion Poetica (quoted in Ginguene, as below); Crescimbeni, Commentari Intorno all’ Istoria della Poesia, &c. lib. vi. cap. 3 (Mathias’s edition), and the biographical additions to the same work, 4to, Rome, 1710, vol. ii. part ii. p. 151, where he says that Pulci was perhaps the “modestest sad most temperate writer” of his age ("il pin modesto e moderato"); Ginguene, Histoire Litteraire d’Italie, tom. iv. p. 214; Foscolo, in the Quarterly Review, as further on; Panizzi on the Romantic Poetry of the Italians, ditto; Stebbing, Lives of the Italian Poets, second edition, vol, i.; and the first volume of Lives of Literary and Scientific Men, in Lardner’s Cyclopaedia.]

[Footnote 2:  Canto xxv.  The passage will be found in the present volume.]

[Footnote 3:  Id.  And this also.]

[Footnote 4:  Canto xxvii. stanza 2.

  “S’ altro ajuto qui non si dimostra,
  Sara pur tragedia la istoria nostra.

  Ed io pur commedia pensato avea
  Iscriver del mio Carlo finalmente,
  Ed Alcuin cosi mi promettea,” &c. ]

[Footnote 5: 

“In fine to adorerai l’Ariosto, tu ammirerei il Tasso, ma tu amerai il Pulci.”—­Parn.  Ital. vol. ix. p. 344.]