emagne and Richard had resounded throughout the world. The _chevalier
sans peur et sans reproche_, who dedicated himself to the service of God
and of his lady, was a less natural, but he was a far more elevated being,
than either Achilles or AEneas. Knights-errant, who went about in quest of
adventures, redressing wrongs, succouring damsels, combating giants,
defying sorcerers, delivering captives--faithful amidst every temptation
to their lady-love, true amidst every danger to the Polar-star of
duty--formed the leading characters in a species of romance, which is less
likely, in all probability, to be durable in fame than the _Iliad_ or the
_AEneid_; but which is so, in a great degree, from the circumstance that
the characters it portrays had, from an extraordinary combination of
events, been strung upon a higher key than is likely to be sympathized
with by future generations of man.

Ariosto was the great original mind in this extravagant but yet noble
style of poetry; he was the Homer of this romance of modern Europe. He
possessed the same fruitful invention, the same diversified conception,
the same inexhaustible fancy as the Grecian bard; and in melody and
occasional beauty of versification, he is often his superior. But he will
bear no sort of comparison with Homer in knowledge of character or the
delineation of the human heart. His heroes are almost all cast in one of
two models, and bear one of two images and superscriptions. The Christian
paladins are all gentle, true, devoted, magnanimous, unconquerable; the
Saracen soldans haughty, cruel, perfidious, irascible, but desperately
powerful in combat. No shades of difference and infinite diversity in
character demonstrate, as in the _Iliad_, a profound knowledge and
accurate observation of the human heart. No fierce and irascible Achilles
disturbs the sympathy of the reader with the conquerors; no
self-forgetting, but country-devoted Hector enlists our sympathies on the
side of the vanquished. His imagination, like the winged steed of Astolfo,
flies away with his judgment; it bears him to the uttermost parts of the
earth, to the palace of the syren Alcina, to the halls in the moon, but it
destroys all unity or identity of interest in the poem. The famous siege
of Paris by the Saracens in the time of Charlemagne, which was so often
expected during the middle ages, that it at last came to be believed to
have been real, was the main point of his story; but he diverges