sophisticate times are opening upon us; and satire more frequently and
bitterly interferes. The licentious passages (though never gross in
words, like those of his contemporaries,) are not redeemed by sentiment
as in Boiardo; and it seems to me, that Ariosto hardly improved so much
as he might have done Upon his predecessor's imitations of the classics.
I cannot help thinking that, upon the whole, he had better have left them
alone, and depended entirely on himself. Shelley says, he has too much
fighting and "revenge,"[44]--which is true; but the revenge was only
among his knights. He was himself (like my admirable friend) one of the
most forgiving of men; and the fighting was the taste of the age, in
which chivalry was still flourishing in the shape of such men as Bayard,
and ferocity in men like Gaston de Foix. Ariosto certainly did not
anticipate, any more than Shakspeare did, that spirit of human
amelioration which has ennobled the present age. He thought only of
reflecting nature as he found it. He is sometimes even as uninteresting
as he found other people; but the tiresome passages, thank God, all
belong to the house of Este! His panegyrics of Ippolito and his ancestors
recoiled on the poet with a retributive dulness.

But in all the rest there is a wonderful invigoration and enlargement.
The genius of romance has increased to an extraordinary degree in power,
if not in simplicity. Its shoulders have grown broader, its voice louder
and more sustained; and if it has lost a little on the sentimental side,
it has gained prodigiously, not only in animal vigour, but, above all, in
knowledge of human nature, and a brave and joyous candour in shewing it.
The poet takes a universal, an acute, and, upon the whole, a cheerful
view, like the sun itself, of all which the sun looks on; and readers are
charmed to see a knowledge at once so keen and so happy. Herein lies the
secret of Ariosto's greatness; which is great, not because it has the
intensity of Dante, or the incessant thought and passion of Shakspeare,