Having ourselves refused to be among those whose feet are caught in the insidious net of Caligorante, we shall have nothing further to say as to comparisons with Ariosto, because the poet of the _Furioso_ has always come out of those maladroit confrontations and the arbitrary judgments of merit which result from them, crowned above all others with the sign of victory, or at least unconquered by any other, and admitting but a very few as his equals. The preference accorded by romantic German men of letters to Boiardo (recently revived to some extent in Italy, by Panzini) belongs rather to the domain of anecdote than to the history of criticism: Boiardo is looked upon by them as the poet of grand heroic dreams, while Ariosto is a mere citizen poet; or Boiardo again is lauded for having better represented the logical form of the Italian poem of chivalry, prescribed according to a chemical combination drawn up in the philological laboratory of the anti-Ariostesque Professor Rajna, who is in other respects a most worthy and well-deserving person. But there is no denying that the peculiar beauty of Ariosto has often injured Boiardo, Pulci, Tasso and other poets, who have been illegitimately compared with him; and therefore, without talking of Tasso--who has now won his case, although he numbered a Galilei among the ranks of those who under-estimated him when making the above-mentioned confrontation,--it will not be inopportune to cast a rapid glance upon Pulci and Boiardo. Looking at Pulci in Pulci and not at Ariosto, since to place one physiognomy on the top of another is not a good way of seeing, what do we find? What is the _Morgante?_ It is above all a whimsicality, one of those works, born of a caprice or a bet, to which the author neither devotes himself after the necessary previous meditations, nor works at with the scrupulosity of the artist, who expends his powers and employs his utmost endeavour to do the best he can everywhere. But the occasion or the inspiration is never the substance of a work, which on the contrary always consists of what the author really brings to it in the course of his labour; and the mention of the occasional origin of the _Morgante_ only avails here to account for its ill-digested and undoubtedly chaotic nature. Nor is it to the purpose to recall what certainly seems to have been Pulci's intention, namely, to satisfy in his own way a wish of the pious Lucrezia Tornabuoni, by composing or re-writing a Christian poem of chivalry, for this in its turn only explains certain superficialities and extrinsicalities, such as the general plan of the poem and the parts of it possessing religious tone, which are successful to the extent that they could be successful with such a brain as Pulci's. A commencement will have been made towards a proper understanding of the substance of the _Morgante,_ its proper and intrinsic inspiration, by referring it first to the curiosity with which educated Florentine citizens observed and