Perhaps the nearest literary analogy to the _Orlando Furioso_ in another language is the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid. In both poems appear the same perspicuity and facility of narration, the same sweetness of versification, the same art of interweaving episodes into a whole. Ariosto’s vigour and directness, nevertheless, are wanting to Ovid, and the palm of invention and of the delineation of character undoubtedly belongs to him, for Ovid was forbidden to introduce a new incident, or vary any of the personages afforded by his mythological repertory. The fact that the _Orlando_ is not, like the _Jerusalem_, a new _Æneid_, but a new _Metamorphoses_, entirely justifies the introduction of such burlesque satire as the abode of Discord among the monks, or such delightful extravagance as Astolfo’s flight to the moon in quest of Orlando’s brains, resulting in the recovery of no inconsiderable portion of his own. Such episodes are, indeed, the most characteristic passages of the _Furioso_; yet in others, such as the siege of Paris and the madness of Orlando, Ariosto shows himself capable of rising to epical dignity, which he could have assumed more frequently if it had entered into his plan. This rather required the gifts of the painter, whether of natural scenery or of human emotion, which he possessed in the most eminent degree; and of the ironic but kindly observer of human life, which he exhibited so fully that even his descriptions are less popular and admired than the reflective and moralising introductions to his cantos. Never was such wildness of imagination ballasted with such solid good sense. Yet, when all is said, his most distinctive merit remains his unsurpassed talent of exposition, his unfaltering flow of energetic, perspicuous, melodious narrative; excellence apparently spontaneous and unstudied, but in truth due to the strenuous revision of one who judged himself severely, and deemed with Michael Angelo that trifles made perfection, and perfection was no trifle. Mr. Courthope, in an admirable parallel, has pointed out his great superiority as a narrator to his disciple Spenser, whose pictures, nevertheless, glow with deeper and softer tints, and whose voluminous melody tills the ear more perfectly than Ariosto’s ringing stanza.