MATTEO BOJARDO, Count of Scandiano, was born in 1430 and died in 1494. He was favoured by nature and fortune; a soldier and a statesman, he had every opportunity of enriching his mind with varied experiences, nor can we say that those opportunities were neglected. His _Orlando Innamorato,_ which he did not live to finish, long as it is, displays great wealth of imagination and considerable creative power; but unfortunately, his style is heavy and rough, and was completely eclipsed by the extraordinary merits of Ariosto's _Orlando Furioso,_ which professes to be only a continuation of the earlier poem. Fifty years later, Berni entirely re-wrote Bojardo's work and certainly succeeded in giving it greater elegance, but he did not make it more interesting to modern readers. In truth, the knights of the epic cycle beginning with the _Morgante Maggiore_ and ending in the Eighteenth Century with the _Ricciardetto,_ appear terribly uninteresting in the present day, and it requires the picturesque and melodious style of a really great poet like Ariosto to entice the reader through the account of their numerous adventures. The celebrated scholar, ANGELO POLIZIANO, shows a poetical mind in his poems, and his _Orfeo_ may claim the credit of being the first dramatic work of any literary value in the Italian language. It has many lyric beauties and the choruses are spirited.[1] His poem in Ottava Rima on a tournament given by Giniano de Medici, was interrupted by the tragic death of his patron in the conspiracy organised by the Pazzi family, nor was the loss of the remainder of the poem the least deplorable consequence of that great crime. Politian died in the prime of life in 1494. It is reasonable to suppose that if his years had been prolonged, he might have enriched the literature of his country with works of even greater beauty. A poet of true tenderness and fire, but more remarkable for the extraordinary perfection of his Latin poems than for any other productions of his muse, was JACOPO SANNAZZARO, a Neapolitan. He survived until the year 1530, but his Italian poems are the productions of his youth. His _Arcadia,_ a pastoral romance in prose with poems interspersed, acquired a great celebrity and undoubtedly served as model to Sir Philip Sydney's work of the same name. It is tender and graceful, but the extreme unreality of the Nymphs and Shepherds makes it rather cloying to a modern taste. His Italian poems have not nearly so much melody and fire as those he wrote in Latin, which are, indeed, so perfect that they cannot be distinguished, as far as rhythm is concerned, from those of Virgil himself. These names practically exhaust the band of Italian writers of the Fifteenth Century, truly a meagre list, and in striking contrast to the countless painters who were an ornament to their country during the same period. [Footnote 1: The Chorus from the _Orfeo_-- "Noi seguiamo, Bacco, te; Bacco, Bacco, evoè, evoè!"