It is not our province to follow the operations of this war, farther than to state, that Ariosto was present in several battles, and employed in two political missions to Pope Julius II. The second time, he was compelled to make a hasty retreat from Rome, as Julius had publicly threatened to have him thrown into the Tiber. In 1513, Leo X. succeeded to the Papal throne. Ariosto soon after repaired to Rome to congratulate the new Pope. Leo received him as an old and intimate acquaintance. “He stooped graciously from his holy chair towards me, took me by the hand, and saluted me on both the cheeks. From that moment my credulous hopes were raised to the unknown regions of heaven.” In short, Ariosto now thought his fortune was made. But he had not sufficient patience; he soon grew tired of waiting at Rome without receiving any more substantial proofs of Leo’s benevolence, and, too independent to be importunate at levees and audiences, he turned his back upon all his prospects from that quarter. Having returned to Ferrara, he applied himself with renewed earnestness to his favourite studies. He had long since formed the plan of a great poem on the subject of the wars of Charlemagne against the Saracens, a traditional theme derived from the fabulous chronicle of Turpin, in which some truth was intermixed with a mass of exaggerations, anachronisms, and wondrous tales of paladins, knights-errant, and giants, the offspring of older traditions of Welch or Armorican invention. (See Warton’s “History of English Poetry,” Ellis’s “Specimens of early English Metrical Romances,” etc.) Many French, Spanish, and Italian ballad and romance writers had treated this fanciful theme, each adding something to the common stock of the marvellous from his own imagination. In Italy, three poets of considerable genius, Pulci, Boiardo, and Bello, had composed long poems on the subject, in which the celebrated Orlando or Roland, figured as the great champion of Christendom. Boiardo, departing from his predecessors, gave a new interest to his poem by making Orlando fall in love with Angelica, a Pagan or Saracen (the two are often taken as synonymous in all these romances) princess, of supernatural beauty, and possessed of magical powers, who had come from the farthest Asia to Charlemagne’s camp for the express purpose of exciting the jealousy of the Christian leaders, and thus, by spreading dissension among them, rendering them unable to cope successfully with the infidels. Boiardo did not complete his poem, which he called “Orlando Innamorato;” and he left off the story of Angelica, where Charlemagne, weary of the discord which raged in his camp since Angelica’s appearance, gives her in charge to Namo, one of his squires, until such time as he shall have decided upon the rival claims of Rinaldo and Orlando, his two bravest paladins, to her hand. It is from this point that Ariosto took up the thread of his story, and in consonance with the proverb that from love to madness