devil, he longs to go and set free the
whole of the other world from devils. Indeed there is no end to his
affection for him. Rinaldo and other Paladins, meantime, cannot rest
till they have set out in search of Orlando. They never meet or part
with him without manifesting a tenderness proportionate to their
valour,--the old Homeric candour of emotion. The devil Ashtaroth
himself, who is a great and proud devil, assures Rinaldo, for whom he
has conceived a regard, that there is good feeling (_gentilezza_) even
in hell; and Rinaldo, not to hurt the feeling, answers that he has no
doubt of it, or of the capability of "friendship" in that quarter; and
he says he is as "sorry to part with him as with a brother." The passage
will be found in our abstract. There are no such devils as these in
Dante; though Milton has something like them:

"Devil with devil damn'd
Firm concord holds: men only disagree."

It is supposed that the character of Ashtaroth, which is a very new
and extraordinary one, and does great honour to the daring goodness
of Pulci's imagination, was not lost upon Milton, who was not only
acquainted with the poem, but expressly intimates the pleasure he took
in it.[11] Rinaldo advises this devil, as Burns did Lucifer, to "take a
thought and mend." Ashtaroth, who had been a seraph, takes no notice of
the advice, except with a waving of the recollection of happier times.
He bids the hero farewell, and says he has only to summon him in order
to receive his aid. This retention of a sense of his former angelical
dignity has been noticed by Foscolo and Panizzi, the two best writers on
these Italian poems.[12] A Calvinist would call the expression of the
sympathy "hardened." A humanist knows it to be the result of a spirit
exquisitely softened. An unbounded tenderness is the secret of all that
is beautiful in the serious portion of our author's genius. Orlando's
good-natured giant weeps even for the death of the scoundrel Margutte;
and the awful hero himself, at whose death nature is convulsed and the
heavens open, begs his dying horse to forgive him if ever he has wronged
it.

A charm of another sort in Pulci, and yet in most instances, perhaps,
owing the best part of its charmingness to its being connected with the
same feeling, is his wit. Foscolo, it is true, says it is, in general,
more severe than refined; and it is perilous to differ with such a
critic on such a point; for much of it, unfortunately, is lo