many and many another most beautiful passage?--Yet the _Innamorato,_ notwithstanding its poetical abundance, has never been numbered among really classical works, so that after the vogue which for ephemeral reasons it enjoyed in its own day, it has not received and does not receive the affection and homage of any but those who love what is little loved and prize what is pure, spontaneous and rude. The poem does not conclude in itself; it is not satisfied with itself: there is a break somewhere in the circle: the representation of the energetic and primitive, which is a sort of formal epicity, has something in it of the monotonous and arid, and the pleasure derived from it has something of the solitary and sterile. Like the charger that sniffs the battle, so says Boiardo: Ad ogni atto degno e signorile, Quai se raconti di cavalleria, sempre se allegra l'animo gentile, come nel fatto fusse tuttavia, manifestando fuore il cor virile....[5] That is well, but the manly heart is not slow to express a certain feeling of delusion, when it recognises that the images in question are all body, without depth of soul, and without the guidance and inspiration of a superior spirit. He says somewhere else: Già molto tempo m'han tenuto a bada Morgana, Alcina e le incantazioni, Nè ve ho mostrato un bel colpo di spada, E pieno il cel de lancie e de tronconi....[6] But there are too many lances that meet and clash, too many limbs flying about without our ever seeing the cause, the meaning or the justification of all that fighting--even Boiardo himself becomes melancholy, when he thinks of those blows exchanged in a spiritual void, exclaiming in one of those frequent purely spontaneous epigrams, which invest his noble person with sympathy: Fama, seguace degli imperatori, Ninfa, che e' gesti a' dolci versi canti, che dopo morte ancor gli uomini onori, e fai coloro eterni, che tu vanti, ove sei giunta? a dir gli antichi amori, e a narrar battaglie de' giganti; mercè del mondo, che al tuo tempo è tale, che più di fama o di virtù non cale. Lascia a Parnaso quella verde pianta, che da salvivi ormai perso è il cammino, e meco al basso questa istoria canta del re Agramante, il forte Saracino....[7]