with full employment of his rare inventive gifts upon a multitude of episodical inventions. It is vain to regret that a poet of his caliber should not have bent his faculties to the task of a truly original epic—to the re-awakening of prostrate Italy, to the scourging of her feebleness and folly, or even to the celebration of her former glories. Had he done either of these things, his poem would not have been so truly national, and we should have lacked the final product of a most brilliant though defective period of civilization.

Ariosto's own temperament and the conditions of his age alike condemned him to the completion of a romance longer than the Iliad and the Odyssey together, which has for its sole serious aim, if serious aim it has of any sort, the glorification of an obscure family, and which, while it abounds in pathos, wisdom, wit, and poetry of dazzling brilliance, may at the same time be accused of levity, adulation, and licentiousness. To arraign Ariosto for these faults is tantamount to arraigning his whole century and nation. The greatest artist of the sixteenth century found no task worthier of his genius than to flatter the House of Este with false pedigrees and fulsome praises. He had no faith that could prevent him from laughing at all things human and divine, not indeed, with the Titanic play of Aristophanes, whose merriment is but the obverse of profound seriousness, but with the indulgent nonchalance of an epicurean. No sentiment of sublimity raised him above the grosser atmosphere in which love is tainted with lust, luxurious images are sought for their own sake, and passion dwindles in the languor of voluptuousness. The decay of liberty, the relaxation of morals and the corruption of the Church had brought the Italians to this point, that their representative Renaissance poem is stained with flattery, contaminated with licentiousness, enfeebled with levity. Poetic beauty of the highest order it cannot claim. That implies more earnestness of purpose and an ideal of sublimer purity. Still, though the Furioso misses the supreme beauty of the Iliad, the Antigone and the Paradise Lost, it has in superfluity that secondary beauty which expressed itself less perfectly in Italian painting. In one respect it stands almost alone. The form reveals no inequalities or flaws. This artist's hand has never for a moment lost its cunning; this Homer never nods.

Pulci approached the romance of Charlemagne from a bourgeois point of view. He felt no sincere sympathy with the knightly or the religious sentiment of his originals. Boiardo treated similar material in a chivalrous spirit. The novelty of his poem consisted in the fusion of the Carolingian and Arthurian Cycles; for while he handled an episode of the former group, he felt sincere admiration for errant knighthood as figured in the tales of Lancelot and Tristram. Throughout the Orlando Innamorato we trace the vivid influence of feudal ideals. Ariosto differed in his attitude from both of his predecessors. The irony that gives a special quality to his romance, is equally removed from the humor of Pulci and the frank enthusiasm of Boiardo. Ariosto was neither the citizen of a free burgh playing with the legends of a bygone age, nor yet the highborn noble in whose eyes the adventures of Orlando and his comrades formed a picture of existence as it ought to be. He was a courtier and a man of letters, and his poem is a masterpiece of courtly and literary art. Boiardo never flattered the princes of the House of Este. Ariosto took every occasion to interweave their panegyric with his verse. For Boiardo the days of chivalry were a glorious irrecoverable golden age. Ariosto contemplated this mythical past less with the regret of a man who had fallen upon worse days, than with the satisfaction of an artist who perceives the rare opportunities for poetic handling it afforded. He does not really believe in chivalry; where Boiardo is in earnest, Ariosto jests. It is not that, like Cervantes, he sought to satirize the absurdities of romance, or that he set himself, like Folengo, to burlesque the poems of his predecessors; but his philosophy inclined him to watch the doings of humanity with a genial half-smile, an all-pervasive irony that had no sting in it. A poet who stands thus aside and contemplates the comedy of the world with the dry light of a kindly and indulgent intellect, could not treat the tales of Paladins and giants seriously. He uses them as the machinery of a great work on human life, painting mankind, not as he thinks it ought to be, but as he finds it. This treatment of romance from the standpoint of good sense and quiet humor produces an apparent discrepancy between his practical knowledge of the world and his fanciful extravagance. In the artistic harmony effected by Ariosto between these opposite elements lies the secret of his irony. His worldly wisdom has the solidity of prose and embraces every circumstance of life. The creatures of his imagination belong to fairyland and exceed the wildest dreams in waywardness. He smiles to see them play their pranks; yet he never loses sight of reality, and moves his puppets by impulses and passions worthy of real men and women. Having granted the romantic elements of wonder and exaggeration for a basis, we find the superstructure to be natural. Never was sagacity of insight combined more perfectly with exuberance of fancy and a joyous lightheartedness than in this poem. Nowhere else have sound lessons in worldly wisdom been conveyed upon a stage of so much palpable impossibility.

We may here ask what is the main subject of the Orlando Furioso. The poem has three chief sources of interest—the siege of Paris and the final rout of the Saracen army, the insanity of Orlando, and the loves of Ruggiero and Bradamante. The first serves merely as a groundwork for embroidery, a background for relieving more attractive incidents. Orlando's madness, though it gives its name to the romance, is subordinate to the principal action. It forms a proper development of the situation in the Orlando Innamorato; and Ariosto intends it to be important, because he frequently laments that the Paladin's absence from the field injured the cause of Christendom. But Charlemagne, by help of Rinaldo, Bradamante, and Marfisa, conquers without Orlando's aid. Thus the hero's insanity is only operative in neutralizing an influence that was not needed; and when he regains his wits, he performs no critical prodigies of valor. Finding the Saracens expelled from France, and Charlemagne at peace, Orlando fights a duel with a crownless king upon a desert island more for show than for real service. Far different is the remaining motive of the poem. If the Furioso can be said to have constructive unity, the central subject is the love and marriage of Ruggiero. Ariosto found this solution of the plot foreshadowed in the Innamorato. The pomp and ceremony with which the fourth book opens, the value attached to the co-operation of Ruggiero in the war with Charlemagne, and the romantic beginning of his love for Bradamante, make it clear that Boiardo would have crowned his poem, as Ariosto has done, with the union of the ancestors of Casa d'Este. Flattery, moreover, was Ariosto's serious purpose. Consequently, the love of Ruggiero and Bradamante, whose protracted disappointments furnished the occasion for renewed prophecies and promises of future glory for their descendants, formed the artistic center of his romance. The growing importance of all that concerns this pair of characters, the accumulation of difficulties which interfere with their union, and the final honor reserved for Ruggiero of killing the dreadful Rodomonte in single combat, are so disposed and graduated as to make the marriage of the august couple the right and natural climax to