This apparent naturalism, this objectivism, of which we have demonstrated the profoundly subjective character, has led to the erroneous statement, already met with, as to Ariosto's form consisting of indifference and chilly observation, directed to the external world. He has been coupled with his contemporary Machiavelli in this respect. Machiavelli examined history and politics with a sagacious eye, describing--as they say--their mode of procedure and formulating their laws, to which he gave expression in his prose with analogously inexorable objectivity and scientific coldness. It is true that both did in a certain but in a very remote sense, destroy a prior spiritual content and naturalised in different fields and with different ends (Machiavelli destroyed the mediaeval religious conception of history and politics). But this judgment of Machiavelli amounts to nothing more than a brilliant or principal remark, for Machiavelli, as a thinker, developed and explained facts with his new vigorous thought, and as a writer gave an apparently cold form to his severe passion. Ariosto's naturalistic and objective tendency is also to be regarded as nothing more than a metaphor, because Ariosto reduced his material to nature, in order to spiritualise it in a new way, by creating spiritual forms of Harmony. From the opposite point of view and arising out of what we have just said, we must refrain from praising Ariosto for his "epicity," for the epic nobility and decorum which Galilei praised so much in him, or for the force and coherence of his personages, so much admired by the old as well as by new and even recent critics. How could there be epicity in the _Furioso,_ when the author not only lacked the ethical sentiments of the epos and when even that small amount, which he might be said to have inherited, was dissolved with all the rest in harmony and irony? And how could there be true and proper characters in the poem, if characters and personages in art are nothing but the notes of the soul of the poet themselves, in their diversity and opposition? These become embodied in beings who certainly seem to live their own proper and particular lives, but really live, all of them, the same life variously distributed and are sparks of the same central power. One of the worst of critical prejudices is to suppose that characters live on their own account and can almost continue living outside the works of art of which they form a part and in which they in no wise differ nor can be disassociated from the strophes, the verses and the words. Since there is no free energy of passionate sentiments in the _Furioso,_ we do not find there characters, but figures, drawn and painted certainly, but without relief or density, portrayed rather as general or typical than individual beings. The knights resemble and mingle with one another, though differentiated by their goodness or wickedness, their greater polish or greater rudeness, or by means of