as strong as Michael Angelo, some as intense as Dante. He paints the
conquest of America in five words

"Veggio da diece cacciar mille."[52]
I see thousands
Hunted by tens.

He compares the noise of a tremendous battle heard in the neighbourhood
to the sound of the cataracts of the Nile:

"un alto suon ch' a quel s' accorda
Con che i vicin' cadendo il Nil assorda."[53]

He "scourges" ships at sea with tempests--say rather the "miserable
seamen;" while night-time grows blacker and blacker on the "exasperated
waters."[54]

When Rodomont has plunged into the thick of Paris, and is carrying every
thing before him ("like a serpent that has newly cast his skin, and
goes shaking his three tongues under his eyes of fire"), he makes this
tremendous hero break the middle of the palace-gate into a huge "window,"
and look through it with a countenance which is suddenly beheld by a
crowd of faces as pale as death:

"E dentro fatto l' ha tanta finestra,
Che ben vedere e veduto esser puote
Dai visi impressi di color di morte[55]."

The whole description of Orlando's jealousy and growing madness is
Shakspearian for passion and circumstance, as the reader may see even
in the prose abstract of it in this volume; and his sublimation of a
suspicious king into suspicion itself (which it also contains) is as
grandly and felicitously audacious as any thing ever invented by poet.
Spenser thought so; and has imitated and emulated it in one of his own
finest passages. Ariosto has not the spleen and gall of Dante, and
therefore his satire is not so tremendous; yet it is very exquisite, as
all the world have acknowledged in the instances of the lost things found
in the moon, and the angel who finds Discord in a convent. He does not
take things so much to heart as Chaucer. He has nothing so profoundly
pathetic as our great poet's _Griselda_. Yet many a gentle eye has
moistened at the conclusion of the story of Isabella; and to recur once
more to Orlando's jealousy, all who have experienced that passion will
feel it shake them. I have read somewhere of a visit paid to Voltaire by
an Italian gentleman, who recited it to him, and who (being moved perhaps
by the recollection of some passage in his own history) had the tears all
the while pouring down his cheeks.

Such is the poem which the gracious and good Cardinal Ippolito designated
as a "parcel of trumpery." It had, indeed, to contend with more slights
than his. Like