Really, if Sir Philip Sidney and other serious and exquisite gentlemen had not sometimes taken a positively grave interest in the like pastimes of paronomasia, one should hardly conceive it possible to meet with them even in tragi-comedy.  Did Pulci find these also in his ballad-authorities?  If his Greek-loving critics made objections here, they had the advantage of him:  unless indeed they too, in their Alexandrian predilections, had a sneaking regard for certain shapings of verse into altars and hatchets, such as have been charged upon Theocritus himself, and which might be supposed to warrant any other conceit on occasion.]

[Footnote 10:  See, in the original, the story of Meridiana, canto vii.  King Manfredonio has come in loving hostility against her to endeavour to win her affection by his prowess.  He finds her assisted by the Paladins, and engaged by her own heart to Uliviero; and in he despair of his discomfiture, expresses a wish to die by her hand.  Meridiana, with graceful pity, begs his acceptance of a jewel, and recommends him to go home with his army; to which he grievingly consents.  This indeed is beautiful; and perhaps I ought to have given an abstract of it, as a specimen of what Pulci could have done in this way, had he chosen.]

[Footnote 11:  “Perhaps it was from that same politic drift that the devil whipt St. Jerome in a lenten dream for reading Cicero; or else it was a fantasm bred by the fever which had then seized him.  For had an angel been his discipliner, unless it were for dwelling too much upon Ciceronianisms, and had chastised the reading and not the vanity, it had been plainly partial; first to correct him for grave Cicero, and not for scurrile Plautus, whom he confesses to have been reading not long before; next, to correct him only, and let so many more ancient fathers wax old in those pleasant and florid studies without the lash of such a tutoring apparition; insomuch that Basil teaches how some good use may be made of Margites, a sportful poem, not now extant, writ by Homer; and why not then of Morgante, an Italian romance much to the same purpose?”—­Areopagitica, a Speech for the Liberty of Unlicensed Printing, Prose Works, folio, 1697, p. 378.  I quote the passage as extracted by Mr. Merivale in the preface to his “Orlando in Roncesvalles,”—­Poems, vol. ii. p. 41.]

[Footnote 12:  Ut sup. p. 222.  Foscolo’s remark is to be found in his admirable article on the Narrative and Romantic Poems of the Italians, in the Quarterly Review, vol. xxi. p. 525.]

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HUMOURS OF GIANTS