From these last words, there can be no difficulty in seeing what must be our opinion as to the confrontations and comparative judgments instituted between Ariosto and Pulci or Boiardo, and even Cieco da Ferrara, and all the other Italian poets of chivalry. These have sometimes been extended so as to include poetical humourists, such as Folengo and Rabelais, or burlesque writers like Berni, Tassoni, Forteguerri, or neo-epical poets, like Tasso and Camoens, and finally to Cervantes, that direct and fully conscious ironist of chivalry. This is as perfectly admissible as it is natural that classes of "poems of chivalry" or "narrative poems" or "romances," should be formed, when once rhetoricians and writers of treatises have invented the genus and that these should be disposed in a series under such headings, thus forming a sort of artificial history, with no real foundation beyond the accidents of certain abstract literary forms, which are really representative of certain social tendencies and institutions. And it is equally, indeed more admissible, because relating to more nearly connected problems, that these documents afforded by poems of chivalry should be made use of among other documents in the investigation of the gradual dissolution of the ideal of chivalry in the first period of modern society. Salvemini has not neglected to do this in a temperate manner, in his monograph relating to "knightly dignity" in the commune of Florence. But the aesthetic judgment, which they strive to deduce from these comparisons, is inadmissible and illegitimate: when for instance they bestow the palm on this or that poet for having better observed than others the "genus" or a particular "species" and "variety" of the genus; or because chivalry or anti-chivalry has been better represented by one than by another. We can explain the fact that De Sanctis was sometimes entangled in this sociological net, in spite of his exquisite sense of individuality and poetry, when we consider the condition of studies in his time and his philosophical origins; but it is none the less true that the judgments which he pronounced upon this matter, deviate from true and proper aesthetic criticism, and carry with them the bad effects of every deviation.