Presented in its outstanding features, and to the extent which suits our purpose, such is the complex of sentiments which flowed together to form the _Furioso_ and to produce the images of which it consists. They produced them all the same, where he seems to have taken them from other poems or books, from Virgil or from Ovid, from French or Spanish romances, because in the taking and with the taking of them, he made them images of his own sentiment, that is to say, he breathed into them a new life and poetically created them in so doing. But although this material of the poem may seem to us who have considered it to be anterior and external to the poem itself and owing to our analysis, disaggregated, it must not be supposed that those sentiments ever existed in the spirit of Ariosto as mere matter or in an amorphous condition, because there is nothing in the spirit without some form and without its own form. Indeed, we have seen a great part of it take form in the minor works, while some dwelt in his mind, expressed and realised in their own way, even if unfulfilled or if we lack written record of their existence. But they possessed a different aspect in this anterior form, differing therefore from that which they assumed in the poem. In the lyrics and satires, words of love and nostalgia, of friendship and complaint, of anger and indignation against princes who take little interest in poets, of impatience and contempt for the ambitious throng, and the like, are more lively and direct; and it would be easy to find parallels for identical thoughts appearing with different intonations in the two different places. Had Ariosto always accorded artistic treatment to those sentiments at the moment of experiencing them, he would have continued to write songs, sonnets, epistles and satires, and would not have set to work upon the _Furioso._ An examination of the poem upon Obizzo D'Este as to the material of chivalry, or if we like the sound of it better, as to feats of arms and of daring, will at least yield us a glimpse of what it would have become, had it received immediate treatment, whether this poem belongs to the early years of Ariosto, prior to the composition of the _Furioso,_ or whether (as is more probable), it be later than the composition of the poem and the appearance of the first edition. The fragment is notable for its great limpidity and narrative fluency, but one sees that if the poet had continued in this direction, the poem would have been nothing but an elegant book of songs; Ariosto did not wish to be a song-writer, so he ceased the work which had been begun. Had he versified his mockeries of sacred things, he would have become a wit, a collector of burlesque surprises, capable of arousing laughter about friars and saints; but Ariosto disdained such a trade, Ariosto whose many grandiose distractions are on record, but no witticisms or smart sayings: he was too much of a dreamer, too fine an artist to take pleasure in such things.