The felicity of fortune which distinguished Ariosto's poem, was not less rare than the eccentric transmigrations to which Boiardo's was condemned. The "Orlando Furioso" was both an imitation and a sequel of the "Orlando Innamorato;" yet, contrary to all precedent, and without example in subsequent literature, the imitation surpassed the original, and the sequel the first draught. It was the offspring of one mind; it was produced entire by the inventor, and never altered by any hand but his own. Yet, after its first completion, it underwent a process of revisal nearly as long and laborious as that of composition; like a bird, it arrived not at the perfection of its song, or the full glory of its plumage, in the breeding season, nor till after its first moulting. It is strange, that, with all these advantages, there should still remain several glaring inconsistencies, which one hour's pains would have removed, had the author been aware of what any ordinary reader might detect. The poem consists of the contemporaneous adventures of many knights, ladies, and other personages, travelling in all lands, known and unknown, of the old continent, the moon, hell, and purgatory; those of each individual, in fact, forming a distinct story, begun, dropped, renewed, or concluded according to the pleasure of the narrator, who excites and keeps up, by every species of provoking artifice, the tortured yet unwearying curiosity of his hearers. And these materials, anomalous as they may seem, and as they are, he moulds and mixes with inimitable skill, and bodies them forth, as by magic, into such captivating forms, by varying, interweaving, disentangling, and cutting short the numberless threads of his many-coloured web, that he fails not to produce a present effect in every passage, with little recollection on the reader's part of its agreement with the past, as little regard to its connection with any thing but itself, and no care whatever about its future influence on the issue of the whole. The fable is a hydra, of which the Orlando, whose name it bears, is only one of the heads; and no otherwise entitled to pre-eminence, than as the hero of some of the most stupendous, amusing, and puerile events in a series not less heterogeneous or tragi-comic than the changes and chances of a holiday pantomime. It cannot be denied that the poem has a beginning and an end, with a prodigious quantity of action between, as the succession of pages, and the number of cantos, evince; but to prove that it has a necessary beginning, a decided progress, and a satisfactory end, would be a task which the author himself would have laughed to see a critic employed upon.