claim to our admiration. Another of his merits is a certain tender
gallantry, or rather an honest admixture of animal passion with
spiritual, also the precursor of the like ingenuous emotions in Ariosto;
and he furthermore set his follower the example, not only of good
breeding, but of a constant heroical cheerfulness, looking with faith on
nature. Pulci has a constant cheerfulness, but not with so much grace and
dignity. Foscolo has remarked, that Boiardo's characters even surpass
those of Ariosto in truth and variety, and that his Angelica more engages
our feelings;[4] to which I will venture to add, that if his style is
less strong and complete, it never gives us a sense of elaboration. I
should take Boiardo to have been the healthier man, though of a less
determined will than Ariosto, and perhaps, on the whole, less robust.
You find in Boiardo almost which Ariosto perfected,--chivalry, battles,
combats, loves and graces, passions, enchantments, classical and romantic
fable, eulogy, satire, mirth, pathos, philosophy. It is like the first
sketch of a great picture, not the worse in some respects for being a
sketch; free and light, though not so grandly coloured. It is the morning
before the sun is up, and when the dew is on the grass. Take the stories
which are translated in the present volume, and you might fancy them all
written by Ariosto, with a difference; the _Death of Agrican_ perhaps
with minuter touches of nature, but certainly not with greater simplicity
and earnestness. In the _Saracen Friends_ there is just Ariosto's balance
of passion and levity; and in the story which I have entitled _Seeing and
Believing_, his exhibition of triumphant cunning. During the lives of
Pulci and Boiardo, the fierce passions and severe ethics of Dante had
been gradually giving way to a gentler and laxer state of opinion before
the progress of luxury; and though Boiardo's enamoured Paladin retains a
kind of virtue not common in any age to the heroes of warfare, the lord
of Scandiano, who appears to have recited his poem, sometimes to his
vassals and sometimes to the ducal circle at court, intimates a smiling