errantry, or its main plot, or the cunning interweavement of its
minor ones, but in its endless variety, truth, force, and animal spirits;
in its fidelity to actual nature while it keeps within the bounds of the
probable, and its no less enchanting verisimilitude during its wildest
sallies of imagination. At one moment we are in the midst of flesh and
blood like ourselves; at the next with fairies and goblins; at the next
in a tremendous battle or tempest; then in one of the loveliest of
solitudes; then hearing a tragedy, then a comedy; then mystified in some
enchanted palace; then riding, dancing, dining, looking at pictures; then
again descending to the depths of the earth, or soaring to the moon, or
seeing lovers in a glade, or witnessing the extravagances of the great
jealous hero Orlando; and the music of an enchanting style perpetually
attends us, and the sweet face of Angelica glances here and there like
a bud: and there are gallantries of all kinds, and stories endless, and
honest tears, and joyous bursts of laughter, and beardings for all base
opinions, and no bigotry, and reverence for whatsoever is venerable,
and candour exquisite, and the happy interwoven names of "Angelica and
Medoro," young for ever.

But so great a work is not to be dismissed with a mere rhapsody of
panegyric. Ariosto is inferior, in some remarkable respects, to his
predecessors Pulci and Boiardo. His characters, for the most part, do not
interest us as much as theirs by their variety and good fellowship; he
invented none as Boiardo did, with the exception, indeed, of Orlando's,
as modified by jealousy; and he has no passage, I thick, equal in pathos
to that of the struggle at Roncesvalles; for though Orlando's jealousy
is pathetic, as well as appalling, the effects of it are confined to one
person, and disputed by his excessive strength. Ariosto has taken all
tenderness out of Angelica, except that of a kind of boarding-school
first love (which, however, as here-after intimated, may have simplified
and improved her general effect), and he has omitted all that was amusing
in the character of Astolfo. Knight-errantry has fallen off a little
in his hands from its first youthful and trusting freshness; more
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