Ariosto’s great poem, the Orlando Furioso, is too generally known to require a long discussion of its merits. It is by universal consent the first of all poems of chivalry and romance. It is a wonderful creation of man’s imaginative powers, extending far beyond the limits of the natural world. But the poet in his wildest flights takes care not to fall into too palpable extravagance or absurdity. He has the art of endowing the creatures of his fancy with features and attributes apparently so appropriate to their supposed nature, as to remove from his readers the feeling of the improbability of their existence. There are also other merits in the poem besides those of imagination and description. There is often a vein of moral allusion half concealed within Ariosto’s fanciful strains, the evidence of a mind deeply acquainted with the mysteries of the human heart, fully alive to the beauty of virtue, and imbued with sound notions of moral philosophy. At other times he tries to cast off his pensive mood and to appear careless and satirical, and he succeeds in exciting laughter at men’s follies and even vices; a laughter which we doubt whether the writer felt in his own heart. In his satire, however, although rather broad and licentious, he was not bitter or misanthropical. His is the humour of a good-tempered _poco curante_, who has no intention to break with mankind on account of its faults, and who wishes to make the best of the present world, such as it is. His touches of the pathetic, though not many, are exquisite of their kind: we will only mention, as instances, the story of Ginevra, that of Zerbino and Isabella, and the death of Brandimarte. His acquaintance with history, geography, and other sciences, was respectable, considering the time he lived in. His language is generally natural and flowing, and the justness and clearness of his expressions render the perusal of his poem of great use even to prose writers. Galileo used to say that he had formed his style chiefly by assiduous study of the Furioso. Ariosto has been accused of using trivial expressions, borrowed from popular use rather than from books. Many of these, however, have been since adopted by the best Italian writers. Several of his lines certainly are harsh and inharmonious, but it is not improbable that this was intentional, for the sake of expression, or to give variety to the sound of his verse, as it is well known that Ariosto was not a negligent writer; he corrected and recorrected his poem with the greatest care, and his apparent facility is the result of much study and labour. It is said that he altered not less than twenty times the 142d stanza of the eighteenth canto, in which he describes the beginning of a storm at sea, before he fixed on the text as it how stands.