those who adopted them,--the rhymers and romancers, even in the rudest periods, blending all together, or borrowing from each, according to their fancy. There is scarcely an image, a monster, or an incident in all their raving chronicles--wild as the dreams of lunatics, or beautiful as those of infants are supposed to be--which cannot be traced to Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Lucan, or Statius; so narrow is the range of human invention; and so inextricably connected with what we have heard, and read, and seen, are all the imaginations or the thoughts of the heart of the most original genius. But the champions and the damsels, the giants and enchanters, nay, the dragons, the hippogriffs, and the demons themselves, in these legends, are but poetical representations of real classes and characters in society, such as existed, or were formed by the circumstances of the times, when war was the business, and gallantry the pastime of life, among the hybrid populations both of Christian and Mohammedan countries. The actors in the dramas of romance were, indeed, masked and buskined to raise them to heroic stature; yet the most disguised of these personages, in principle, passion, taste, and pursuit, were real men and women, magnified into monsters, like flies and spiders when looked upon through the eye-glass of a microscope. Orlando was but an exaggeration of the chevalier Bayard, as was the British Arthur of the English Richard, and Charlemagne himself of Francis I. Ariosto, in following the fashion of contemporaries, lighted upon a theme to which his wayward and versatile genius was peculiarly adapted, and which gave it an opportunity of displaying all its peculiarities to the utmost advantage. Of these, the most enviable and least imitable is that perfection of art, which he perhaps possessed beyond every other writer, to say things naturally. All his wonders and prodigies are made so easy and probable, that to the most fastidious reader, who does not resolutely resist the spell of the poet, and deprive himself of the pleasure of being beguiled by it, they appear as they would do if they were actual events, from the daylight effect of his truth-telling style; for whenever his delight in the extravagant carries him beyond the legitimately marvellous, he disarms resentment, and prevents the laugh against himself by a quiet pleasantry,--becoming himself the Cervantes of his own Quixotes. Satirists, however, have done little to improve mankind: they have condemned and promoted vice; they have ridiculed and recommended folly. Instead of being the most chaste, severe, and instructive, it is notorious that (with few exceptions) they have been the most profligate, pernicious, and corrupting of all writers. Many of the most illustrious deserve to be crowned and decapitated, and their laurelled heads fixed on poles round the heights of Parnassus, as warnings to others, while they affect to expose sin, not to betray