sometimes sketches the deities whom he derides, in the style of Volpato engravings after Guido.  They move across his canvas with ethereal grace.  What can be more charming than Diana visiting Endymion, and confessing to the Loves that all her past career as huntress and as chaste had been an error?  Venus, too, when she takes that sensuously dreamy all-poetic journey across the blue Mediterranean to visit golden-haired King Enzo in his sleep, makes us forget her entrance into Modena disguised as a lad trained to play female parts upon the stage.  This blending of true elegance with broad farce is a novelty in modern literature.  We are reminded of the songs of the Mystae on the meadows of Elysium in the Frogs.  Scarron and Voltaire, through the French imitators of Tassoni, took lessons from his caricature of Saturn, the old diseased senator traveling in a sedan chair to the celestial parliament, with a clyster-pipe in front of him and his seat upon a close stool.  Moliere and Swift, votaries of Cloacina, were anticipated in the climax of Count Culagna’s attempt to poison his wife, and in the invention of the enchanted ass so formidable by Parthian discharges on its adversary.  Over these births of Tassoni’s genius the Maccaronic Muse of Folengo and his Bolognese predecessors presided.  There is something Lombard, a smack of sausage in the humor.  But it remained for the Modenese poet to bring this Mafelina into the comity of nations.  We are not, indeed, bound to pay her homage.  Yet when we find her inspiring such writers as Swift, Voltaire, Sterne and Heine, it is well to remember that Tassoni first evoked her from Mantuan gutters and the tripe-shops of Bologna.

‘The fantastically ironical magic tree’ of the Secchia Rapita spread its green boughs not merely for chattering baboons.  Nightingales sang there.  The monkey-like Culagna, with his tricks and antics, disappears.  Virtuous Renoppia, that wholesome country lass, the bourgeois counterpart of Bradamante, withholds her slipper from the poet’s head when he is singing sad or lovely things of human fortune.  Our eyes, rendered sensitive by vulgar sights, dwell with unwonted pleasure on the chivalrous beauty of King Enzo.  Ernesto’s death touches our sympathy with pathos, in spite of the innuendo cast upon his comrade Jaconia.  Paolo Malatesta rides with the shades of doom, the Dantesque cloud of love and destiny, around his forehead, through that motley mock-heroic band of burghers.  Manfredi, consumed by an unholy passion for his sister, burns for one moment, like a face revealed by lightning, on our vision and is gone.  Finally, when the mood seizes him (for Tassoni persuades us into thinking he is but the creature of caprice), he tunes the soft idyllic harp and sings Endymion’s love-tale in strains soft as Marino’s, sweet as Tasso’s, outdoing Marino in delicacy, Tasso in reserve.  This episode moved rigid Alfieri to admiration.  It remains embedded in a burlesque poem, one of the