At length, thanks to the efforts of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Poliziano and Pulci at Florence, and of Boiardo at Ferrara, there was a revival of Italian letters, a new breath of spontaneity passing over literary creation. There is no need to speak in detail of the sonnets and _canzoni_ of Lorenzo de’ Medici, modelled on Petrarch and addressed to a Lucrezia Donato as the counterpart of Laura, nor of the lyric grace and descriptive beauty of the learned and tasteful Poliziano. But of Pulci’s romantic epic of _Morgante Maggiore_ and Boiardo’s _Orlando Innamorato_ it is necessary to say a word, for the reason that they are the precursors of Ariosto’s _Orlando Furioso_, of Tasso’s _Jerusalem Delivered_, and thence indirectly of Spenser’s _Faerie Queene_. It is Ariosto and Tasso who rank next to Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and who consummate that sixteenth century or “Cinque Cento” literature which constitutes the silver epoch of Italian letters. Pulci’s _Morgante Maggiore_ and Boiardo’s _Orlando Innamorato_ are both “chivalrous romances,” written in the _ottava rima_, or Italian equivalent of the Spenserian stanza. They are not exactly epics, but rather stories of knightly adventures, full of description and of the marvellous, of the romance of love and arms, full of knights who slay giants, liberate ladies, and fall in love with pagan maidens. Pulci’s work, though often sufficiently earnest and stirring, is also often seasoned with that mocking humour, that irony, that refusal to take ideals seriously, which is one of the most constant of Italian characteristics. That of Boiardo is of a more serious type. These books, as has just been hinted, mark a revival of the well-known French romances, of the adventures credited to the Paladins of Charlemagne. Such stories, which have no foundation in sober history, were early borrowed by the Italians, and everyone knew of Charlemagne, of Roland and Oliver, of the disaster of Roncesvalles, of the traitor Gano and the rest. It was for Pulci and Boiardo to take these legends of romance from the people, give them a literary shape, and so lead the way for the magnificent work of Ariosto. It may be mentioned in passing that Boiardo’s Moorish hero Rodamonte, the insolent and atheistic—a name utilized by Ariosto in the form Rodomonte—has supplied a term for that species of bombastic romancing which we call “rodomontade.” That Boiardo was read by Milton is clear from allusion in _Paradise Regained_. In the next generation the _Orlando Innamorato_ was recast by Berni into a mocking and satirical form, which was much more to the taste of the Italian mind. The language of this _rifacimento_ is marked by greater ease and polish than the original, but its chief claim to distinction lies in the peculiar humour of the writer—the “Bernesque”—of interest to students of English literature, from the fact that Berni largely determined the character of the great productions of Byron’s Italian period.