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Stories from the Italian Poets: with Lives of the Writers, Volume 2 by Leigh Hunt
page 15 of 371 (04%)
suspicion that such a virtue would be considered a little rude and
obsolete by his hearers. Pulci's wandering gallant, Uliviero, who in
Dante's time would have been a scandalous profligate, had become the
prototype of the court-lover in Boiardo's. The poet, however, in his most
favourite characters, retained and recommended a truer sentiment, as in
the instance of the loves of Brandimart and Fiordelisa; and there is
a graceful cheerfulness in some of his least sentimental ones, which
redeems them from grossness. I know not a more charming fancy in the
whole loving circle of fairy-land, than the female's shaking her long
tresses round Mandricardo, in order to furnish him with a mantle, when he
issues out of the enchanted fountain.[5]

But Boiardo's poem was unfinished: there are many prosaical passages
in it, many lame and harsh lines, incorrect and even ungrammatical
expressions, trivial images, and, above all, many Lombard provincialisms,
which are not in their nature of a "significant or graceful" sort,[6] and
which shocked the fastidious Florentines, the arbiters of Italian taste.
It was to avoid these in his own poetry, that Boiardo's countryman
Ariosto carefully studied the Tuscan dialect, if not visited Florence
itself; and the consequence was, that his greater genius so obscured the
popularity of his predecessor, that a remarkable process, unique in the
history of letters, appears to have been thought necessary to restore
its perusal. The facetious Berni, a Tuscan wit full of genius, without
omitting any particulars of consequence, or adding a single story except
of himself, re-cast the whole poem of Boiardo, altering the diction of
almost every stanza, and supplying introductions to the cantos after the
manner of Ariosto; and the Florentine idiom and unfailing spirit of this
re-fashioner's verse (though, what is very curious, not till after a long
chance of its being overlooked itself, and a posthumous editorship which
has left doubts on the authority of the text) gradually effaced almost
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