untress and as
chaste had been an error? Venus, too, when she takes that sensuously
dreamy all-poetic journey across the blue Mediterranean to visit
golden-haired King Enzo in his sleep, makes us forget her entrance into
Modena disguised as a lad trained to play female parts upon the stage.
This blending of true elegance with broad farce is a novelty in modern
literature. We are reminded of the songs of the Mystae on the meadows of
Elysium in the _Frogs_. Scarron and Voltaire, through the French
imitators of Tassoni, took lessons from his caricature of Saturn, the
old diseased senator traveling in a sedan chair to the celestial
parliament, with a clyster-pipe in front of him and his seat upon a
close stool. Moliere and Swift, votaries of Cloacina, were anticipated
in the climax of Count Culagna's attempt to poison his wife, and in the
invention of the enchanted ass so formidable by Parthian discharges on
its adversary. Over these births of Tassoni's genius the Maccaronic Muse
of Folengo and his Bolognese predecessors presided. There is something
Lombard, a smack of sausage in the humor. But it remained for the
Modenese poet to bring this Mafelina into the comity of nations. We are
not, indeed, bound to pay her homage. Yet when we find her inspiring
such writers as Swift, Voltaire, Sterne and Heine, it is well to
remember that Tassoni first evoked her from Mantuan gutters and the
tripe-shops of Bologna.

'The fantastically ironical magic tree' of the _Secchia Rapita_ spread
its green boughs not merely for chattering baboons. Nightingales sang
there. The monkey-like Culagna, with his tricks and antics, disappears.
Virtuous Renoppia, that wholesome country lass, the _bourgeois_
counterpart of Bradamante, withholds her slipper from the poet's head
when he is singing sad or lovely things of human fortune. Our eyes,
rendered sensitive by vulgar sights, dwell with unwonted pleasure on the
chivalrous beauty of King Enzo. Ernesto's death touches our sympathy
with pathos, in spite of the innuendo cast upon his comrade Jaconia.
Paolo Malatesta rides with the shades of doom, the Dantesque cloud of
love and destiny, around his forehead, through that motley mock-heroic
band of burghers. Manfredi, consumed by an unholy passion for his
sister, burns for one moment, like a face revealed by lightning, on our
vision and is gone. Finally, when the mood seizes him (for Tassoni
persuades us into thinking he is but the creature of caprice), h