Luigi Pulci’s poem, which Lord Byron admired sufficiently to translate, tells of the hatred borne by the perfidious Ganellone to the chaste and generous Orlando and the other Christian Paladins. Charlemagne, deceived by Ganellone, whose envy, dissimulation, feigned humility and capacity for lying is admirably portrayed, sends him to Spain to treat for the cession of a kingdom for Orlando with King Marsilio. Instead of this he plots with the Spaniards for the destruction of Orlando, who is killed at Roncesvalle. Morgante the giant, after being baptised by Orlando becomes his faithful squire; the other giant Maggutte is a jovial pagan, laughing at everybody and everything, who ends his life in peals of loud laughter. The poem was composed for the amusement of Lucrezia Tornabuoni, the accomplished mother of Lorenzo de’ Medici, herself a poetess. “Luigi Pulci,” writes Symonds, “assumed the tone of a street-singer, opening each canto with the customary invocation to the Madonna or a paraphrase of some church collect, and dismissing his audience at the close with grateful thanks or brief good wishes. “But Pulci was no mere _Canta-storie_. The popular style served but as a cloak to cover his subtle-witted satire and his mocking levity. Tuscan humour keeps up an _obbligato_ accompaniment throughout the poem. Sometimes this humour is in harmony with the plebeian spirit of the old Italian romances; sometimes it turns aside and treats it as a theme of ridicule. In reading the _Morgante_ we must bear in mind that it was written canto by canto to be recited in the palace of the Via Larga, at the table where Poliziano and Ficino gathered with Michelangelo Buonarroti and Cristoforo Landino. Whatever topics may from time to time have occupied that brilliant circle, were reflected in its stanzas; and this alone suffices to account for its tender episodes and its burlesque extravagances, for the satiric picture of Margutte and the serious discourses of the devil Astarotte. The external looseness of construction and the intellectual unity of the poem, are both attributable to these circumstances. Passing by rapid transitions from grave to gay, from pathos to cynicism, from theological speculations to ribaldry, it is at one and the same time a mirror of the popular taste which suggested the form, and also of the courtly wits who listened to it laughing. The _Morgante_ is no _naïve_ production of a simple age, but the artistic plaything of a cultivated and critical society, entertaining its leisure with old-world stories, accepting some for their beauty’s sake in seriousness, and turning others into nonsense for pure mirth.”[71]