external and accidental attributes, often by their names alone; in like manner the women are either amorous or perfidious, virtuous and content with one love, or dissolute and perverse, often distinguished merely by their different adventures or the names that adorn them. The same is to be said of the narratives and descriptions (typical and non-individual, or but little individual, is the madness of Orlando, to compare which with Lear's is a rhetorician's fancy), and of natural objects, landscapes, palaces, gardens, and all else. Reserves have been and can with justice even be made as to the coherence of the characters taken as a whole and forming part of a general scheme, for Ariosto's personages take many liberties with themselves, according to the course of the events with which they find themselves connected, or rather according to the services which the author asks of them. Such warnings as these are indispensable, because, if some readers realise their expectation of finding objectively described and coherent characters in Ariosto and consequently praise him for creating them, others with like expectations equally unfounded are disappointed and consequently blame him. Thus for De Sanctis Ariosto's feminine characters have seemed to be inferior to those of Dante, of Shakespeare and of Goethe: but this is an impossible comparison, because Angelica, Olympia, and Isabella, although they certainly lack the passionate intensity of Francesca, Desdemona and Margaret, yet the latter for their part lack the harmonious octaves in which the first trio lives and has its being, consisting of just these octaves. And what is more, neither trio suffers from the imperfections, which are imperfections only in the light of imperfect critical knowledge and consequent prejudice, but not real imperfections and poetical contradictions in themselves. De Sanctis also blamed Ariosto for his lack of sentiment for nature, as though it were a defect; but what is called sentiment for nature (as for that matter the great master De Sanctis himself taught) does not depend upon nature, but rather upon the attitude of the human spirit, upon the feelings of comfort, of melancholy or of religious terror, with which man invests nature and finds them where he has placed them; but this attitude was foreign to the fundamental attitude of Ariosto, and were there to be by chance some reference to it in the poem, were some note of sentiment to sound there, we should immediately be sensible of the discord and impropriety. To Lessing, another objective critic, the portrayal of the beauties of Alcina seemed to be a mistake and to exceed the limit of poetry, to which De Sanctis replied that this materiality which Lessing blamed was the secret of the poetry, because the beauty of the magician Alcina required a material description, since it was fictitious in its nature. This blame was unjust, and although the answer to it was ingenious,