justice forbids him from bringing his hand down too heavily upon the infidelity and the fragility of woman. Hence comes, not forgiveness, but resignation and indulgence. "My lady is a lady, and every lady is weak"; remarks Rinaldo wisely. Ariosto's is an indulgence without moral elevation, but also without cynicism and inspired with a certain element of goodness and humanity. Reciprocal deception and illusion are inherent to love affairs; but how can they be done away with, without also doing away at the same time with the charm of that bitter but amiable sport? The lover takes care to preserve the illusion by his very passion, which blinds him to what is visible and makes the invisible visible, leading him to believe what he desires, to believe the person who fascinates him, as does Brandimarte with his Fiordiligi, wandering about the world and returning to him uncontaminated: "To fair Fiordiligi, of whom I had believed greater things." Thus the imagination of Ariosto, as these various equal and conflicting sentiments wove their own images, became quite filled with marvellous seductive beauties, perfect of limb, and with voluptuous forms and scenes (Alcina and her arts, Angelica in the arms of Ruggiero who had set her free, Fiordispina); of others which oscillate between the passionate and the comic (Gicondo and Fiametta, the knight who tests the wife he loves too much, the judge Anselmo and his Argia): of others whose love was unworthy or criminal (Origille, whom Griffone strives to save from the punishment that she deserves, notwithstanding her wickedness proved on several occasions and her known treachery; the sons of King Marganorre; Gabrina, who did receive punishment, perhaps because her depraved old age was so repulsive); and above all of the woman who symbolises Woman, for whom the bravest knights sustain every sort of labour and danger, and because of whom a big strong man loses control of himself, and who, herself slave of a love which owns no law outside itself, ends by bestowing her hand upon a "poor servant" (Angelica, Orlando and Medoro). These are but a few instances of the many places in the _Furioso,_ bearing upon love in its various modes of presentation, in addition to the introductions to the cantos and the digressions into which Ariosto pours his whole store of feeling or sets forth his reflections. And the love matter is of so great a volume as to dominate all the rest, possibly in extent, certainly in relief and intensity; so much so, that it is a marvel that among the many attempts to establish the true motive and argument of the poem, by abstracting it from its subject matter, and to determine its design and unity in the same way, no one has yet insisted upon considering it, or has been able to consider it as "the poem of love," of the casuistry of love, to which knightly and warlike life should but provide the decorative background. This theory would certainly seem to be less