Had Ariosto while in the act of composition not been keenly stirred in the various ways described, by the varied material employed in his poem, he would have lacked the impetus, the vivacity, the thought, the intonation, which were afterwards reduced and tempered by the harmonious disposition of his soul. He would have been a cold writer of poetry, and no one ever succeeded in writing poetry coldly. This was the case, as it seems to me, with the _Cinque Canti,_ which he excluded from the _Furioso_ and for which he substituted others. In them the cunning of Ariosto's hand is everywhere to be found in the descriptive passages and transitions, as are also all the elements of the every-day world, stories of war, knightly adventures, tales of love (the love of Penticone for the wife of Otto and that of Astolfo for the wife of Gismondo), satirical tales (the foundation of the city of Medea, with the sexual law which she imposed upon it), astonishing fancies (such as the knights imprisoned in the body of the whale, where they have their beds, their kitchen and their tub), copious moral and political reflections (on jealousy, ambition, wicked men, mercenary soldiers); yet we feel nevertheless that Ariosto wrote them in an unhappy moment, when Minerva was reluctant or averse: the poet did not take sufficient interest and lacked the necessary heat. And is there no part of the _Furioso_ itself that languishes? It would seem so, not indeed in the forty cantos of the first edition, which originated in his twelve-year-old poetical springtime, but in the parts which were added later, all of them (as could be shown) more or less intellectualiste of origin, and therefore (save the episode of Olympia) not among the most read and most popular. The most intellectualistic of all is the long delay introduced toward the end of the poem, the double betrothal of Bradamante and the contest in courtesy between Leone and Ruggiero, where the tone becomes here and there altogether pedestrian. It is true that philologists who have given themselves to art have discovered progress in Ariosto in just these languid parts, and above all in the _Cinque Canti,_ where he has lost his bearings and is out of tune. Here they suppose him to have become "serious," to join hands with no less a personage than Torquato Tasso.