Berni’s chief characteristics as a poet are graceful ease and perfect mastery of style and diction. He is fluent and entirely unembarrassed, never at a loss for the right word, and handles the difficult _terza rima_ with the facility of prose. This command of language would have raised him high if he had possessed any of the elements of greatness; but he is incapable of elevated sentiment, and has the good sense never to aspire to it. What is most admirable in him, his poetical gift apart, is the evident sincerity and consistency of his Epicurean view of life, and his eupeptic sanity. As regards his strictly original compositions, he occupies about the same position in Italian poetry as Goldsmith would have filled in English if he had written nothing but _Retaliations_ and _Haunches of Venison_. In his _rifacimento_ of Boiardo’s _Orlando Innamorato_ he has attempted something more considerable, and, from his own point of view, with much success. Modern taste will hardly sympathise with his disfigurement of the romantic grace and simple sincerity of the original, for the mere sake of heightening the comic element and improving its style. In his own day men thought differently, and it must be admitted that the disparity between Boiardo’s comparatively unadorned groundwork and the brilliant superstructure of Ariosto marred the continuity of the _Orlando_ as a whole, and that the chasm may well have seemed to require filling up. Berni could not impart the special qualities of Ariosto, but he could bring Boiardo’s style more nearly up to Ariosto’s level, and he could adorn his original by graceful introductions to the respective cantos. Both these objects have been achieved with taste and success; and although Boiardo’s comparatively artless composition is still the best, as nearest to Nature, it cannot be denied that Berni’s alterations must have appeared to his contemporaries great improvements, and that his embellishments may be read with abundant pleasure. Conscious of his lack of poetical invention, he has abstained from interfering with the narrative. His work was not published until after his death, and there is reason to suspect that it was considerably adulterated by or at the instance of the great literary bully of the day, Pietro Aretino.