duced a new animal from the same regions. Herds of buffaloes, since naturalized in Italy, whose dingy hide, bent neck, curved horns, and lowering aspect, contrasted with the greyish hue and full mild eye of the Tuscan oxen, pastured in the valley, down which the yellow Arno steals silently through its long reaches to the sea.'-pp. 243-245.

There is no greater temptation to the author of a literary history than the departure from the general estimate of mankind concerning individual writers. The pride which delights in originality of opinion-the honest sense of justice, which is indignant at the unfair distribution of glory-the base and the noble motive mingle together at times to betray the judgment. Clever men aspire to the fame of discoverers in the darkness of past times-to draw forth some obscure name, and to resent, as it were, the injurious silence of posterity as to its transcendent merits. To many, the paradoxes of taste have an unspeakable charm; he who can see that to which all the world is blind, must be endowed with transcendent acuteness of vision. On the other hand, the literary historian is pledged, in some degree, to revise the sentences of past times; he is untrue to his high office if he acquiesces, without examination, in the common opinion, and timidly submits merely to record and sanction the popular and accredited judgment. One of the great merits of Mr. Hallam's book is the calm and equable line which he maintains between these conflicting forces—the proud disdain, or the servile deference, for established opinion. There is one case, indeed, where novelty of opinion is a welcome and acknowledged dutywhere the silence of cotemporaries, or of immediate posterity, has been from ignorance, not want of judgment-where either the author himself, or his friends, have not done justice to his memory by withholding valuable manuscripts from publication. Thus it seems to have been with Lionardo da Vinci, already one of the greatest names of his age and country-as one of the unequalled fathers of his art, and a scientific writer on its rules; but who, it appears, ought before this time to have assumed his rank as one of the boldest and most original thinkers—as one of those prophets who have been gifted with a premature foreknowledge of the future revelations of philosophy. He who has gazed with wonder and admiration on the intense depth of feeling, the glowing expression of character, as well as the wonderful breadth and vigour of colouring in the paintings of Lionardo, will be no less gratified than surprised at this modern accession to his fame.

'His greatest literary distinction is derived from those short fragments of his unpublished writings that appeared not many years since; and which, according at least to our common estimate of the age in which he lived, are more like revelations of physical truths vouchsafed to a single

single mind, than the superstructure of its reasoning upon any established basis. The discoveries which made Galileo, and Kepler, and Mæstlin, and Maurolycus, and Castelli, and other names illustrious, the system of Copernicus, the very theories of recent geologers, are anticipated by Da Vinci, within the compass of a few pages, not perhaps in the most precise language, or on the most conclusive reasoning, but so as to strike us with something like the awe of preternatural knowledge. In an age of so much dogmatism he first laid down the grand principle of Bacon, that experiment and observation must be the guides to just theory in the investigation of nature. If any doubt could be harboured, not as to the right of Lionardo da Vinci to stand as the first name of the fifteenth century, which is beyond all doubt, but as to his originality in so many discoveries, which, probably, no one man, especially in such circumstances, has ever made, it must be on an hypothesis, not very untenable, that some parts of physical science had already attained a height which mere books do not record. The extraordinary works of ecclesiastical architecture in the middle ages, especially in the fifteenth century, as well as those of Toscanelli and Fioravanti, which we have mentioned, lend some countenance to this opinion; and it is said to be confirmed by the notes of Fra Mauro, a lay brother of a convent near Venice, on a planisphere constructed by him, and still extant. Lionardo himself speaks of the earth's annual motion, in a treatise that appears to have been written about 1510, as the opinion of many philosophers in his age.'-vol. i. pp. 303, 304.

We must add, that the authorities adduced by Mr. Hallam fully bear out this splendid eulogy.

As the field of literature expands, it becomes, at the same time, more difficult to select, and more necessary to dwell on, insulated points in the comprehensive work of our author. The great religious strife was now about to commence; its slow but not silent approach, its secret and pervading influence, when it had begun to work upon the opinions, the interests, the passions of men, may be traced in every branch of literature. It is singular to observe it, partly in connexion, partly in contrast, with that department of letters which might seem most remote from such grave and solemn matters; too high in the airy regions of imagination to be disturbed by any impulse from actual and cotemporary life. Italian poetry might almost seem to have taken refuge in the romances of the elder chivalry from the distracting and unimaginative polemics of the day; and so in some respects perhaps was the case. Though there were many exceptions of profound and serious spirits, who brought an impetuous earnestness, a depth and intensity of thought to such questions,-in Italy the general mind was either too gay and light, or too much preoccupied by its passion for classical literature, to enter with any general or absorbing interest into the awful conflict. While Luther was agitating men's minds with religious passions and lessons-while his awakening pamphlets

were

were stirring up the depths of the human heart-Italy, even the Pope himself, was listening to the wild adventures of Ariosto's paladins; her printers were busily multiplying editions of the Orlando.

The earliest, however, of the more celebrated among these romantic poems, the Morgante of Pulci, strongly indicates the state of the Italian mind previous to the outbreak of the Reformation. Religious opinion, like everything else, was in a loose and floating state; the spirit of innovation had not yet awakened the fears or the jealousies of its conservators; the established creed was not taken under the austere protection of an affrighted hierarchy there was no Inquisition, for there was no Reformation. Pulci, who laughs at everything, laughs upon religious topics with as broad and unscrupulous humour as on profaner subjects; he plunges into religious controversies with a bold and careless irreverence, inexplicable to the feelings and judgments of another age and another country.

Pulci's own age took no very serious offence at that, which a few years later, and in a less-privileged person than a poet of a humorous vein, would have been of fearfully serious consequence to the peace or even the life of the author. Ariosto, when he ventures on allusions to such subjects, subdues himself to a more guarded and quiet irony. Yet, even in Pulci himself, there is a kind of incongruity, a wild revelry in all sorts of strange and interdicted opinions, which moves the wonder of the reader best instructed in the spirit of the times. There is, in fact, a freedom of burlesque and parody in southern nations which seems unintelligible to the more serious North. The Aristophanic comedy, though Aristophanes himself was of the party of the established religion in Athens, does not even spare the god in honour of whose festival it was performed. In some other writings there is a blending up of the elements of the comic and the serious, not only as in the Shaksperian drama, where ludicrous and tragical incident and character are constantly intermingled, but in the whole tone and essence of the poem. And this, though the comic and the whimsical predominates, appears to us the case with Pulci. We should so far differ from Mr. Hallam, as to doubt whether, in any part of his poem, he had an intention of bringing religion into contempt.' We should question altogether whether he had any deliberate design or intention at all. He surrendered himself with a sort of carnival license to the caprice or fancy of the moment, followed out and embodied his whimsical thoughts as they occurred; sometimes, as his subject developed itself, melting, as in the passage which Mr. Hallam points out, to real pathos; sometimes almost rising, as towards the end of the poem, in some of

the

the circumstances of the Roncesvalles battle, into grandeur. In short, Pulci's poem is, to the more serious chivalrous romances, what the satiric drama was to the tragic trilogies of Greece.

We rejoice to find that Mr. Hallam does justice to the Orlando Innamorato of Boiardo. Boiardo was likewise a writer of sonnets and of lyric poetry, a Latin poet, and, we believe, the first translator of Herodotus. Though Boiardo was by no means successful in any of these works, they deserved notice as connected with the character of this remarkable man. We must add, that we have always, we will not quite say, believed, but wished to believe, a different version of the story, alluded to by Mr. Hallam, of the Count of Scandiano borrowing the sonorous names, the Mandricardos and Gradassos of his verse, from the peasants on his own estate. It is said (we cannot immediately call to mind our authority), that he was sorely perplexed for a name to accord with the fiercest and proudest of his pagans, and was riding rather disconsolately through his domains, when he heard one peasant call another by the name of Rodomonte. The noble poet gallopped back to his castle, set the bells ringing, and ordered the castle to be illuminated to celebrate this fortunate event. Having differed in this important point with Mr. Hallam, we must express our cordial assent to his praise of the Innamorato, for boldness and novelty of design, for that inventive felicity, which taught him to associate the wonders of the newly discovered and gorgeous East, the Cathay of Marco Polo, with his western Paladins. Europe and Asia were first mingled by Boiardo in the romantic war. The terrors of the Tartar invasions, which spread forth from the remotest east, and might not yet be exhausted, with the vague rumours of immense cities, and monarchis on thrones of gold and ivory, are blended with the adventures of Archbishop Turpin's heroes, the knights of Charlemagne's court; and over all is thrown an air of genuine romance and of remote antiquity, which rarely disturbs us by the introduction of modern allusions, and is entirely withdrawn from the passions and opinions of his time. Boiardo alone writes in the serious tone of a bard of the old chivalrous times; if his execution had been equal to his conception-if his ruder language and inharmonious verse had not tempted a less congenial mind to remodel his work, and thus throw a dim uncertainty over his fame, as well as changed the character of his poem-the original author of the Orlando Innamorato would have maintained a much higher rank among the poets of modern Europe.

On Ariosto we admire the just and discriminating, as well as ardent, language of Mr. Hallam. We only regret that our limits compel us in some degree to curtail this brilliant and elaborate criticism.

'Ariosto

'Ariosto has been, after Homer, the favourite poet of Europe. His grace and facility, his clear and rapid stream of language, his variety and beauty of invention, his very transitions of subject, so frequently censured by critics, but artfully devised to spare the tediousness that hangs on a protracted story, left him no rival in general popularity. Above sixty editions of the Orlando Furioso were published in the sixteenth century. There was not one, says Bernardo Tasso, of any age, or sex, or rank, who was satisfied after more than a single perusal. If the change of manners and sentiments have already in some degree impaired this attraction, if we cease to take interest in the prowess of Paladins, and find their combats a little monotonous, this is perhaps the necessary lot of all poetry, which, as it can only reach posterity through the medium of contemporary reputation, must accommodate itself to the fleeting character of its own time. This character is strongly impressed on the Orlando Furioso; it well suited an age of war, and pomp, and gallantry; an age when chivalry was still recent in actual life, and was reflected in concentrated brightness from the mirror of romance.

'It has been sometimes hinted as an objection to Ariosto, that he is not sufficiently in earnest, and leaves a little suspicion of laughing at his subject. I do not perceive that he does this in a greater degree than good sense and taste permit. The poets of knight-errantry might in this respect be arranged in a scale, of which Pulci and Spenser would stand at the extreme points; the one mocking the absurdities he coolly invents, the other, by intense strength of conception, full of love and faith in his own creations. Between these Boiardo, Ariosto, and Berni take successively their places; none so deeply serious as Spenser, none so ironical as Pulci. It was not easy in Italy, especially after the Morgante Maggiore had roused the sense of ridicule, to keep up at every moment the solemn tone which Spain endured in the romances of the sixteenth century; nor was this consonant to the gaiety of Ariosto.'—p. 420.

After vindicating Ariosto for building on the foundation of Boiardo-chiefly by the example of the Iliad, which was only a fragment of the tale of Troy,' one episode and portion of the great Cycle of the war of Ilium-Mr. Hallam thus proceeds

'The inventions of Ariosto are less original than those of Boiardo, but they are more pleasing and various. The tales of old mythology and of modern romance furnished him with those delightful episodes we all admire, with his Olimpia and Bireno, his Ariodante and Geneura, his Cloridan and Medoro, his Zerbino and Isabella. He is more conversant with the Latin poets, or has turned them to better account than his predecessor. For the sudden transitions in the middle of a canto or even a stanza, with which every reader of Ariosto is familiar, he is indebted to Boiardo, who had himself imitated in them the metrical romancers of the preceding age. From them also, that justice may be rendered to those nameless rhymers, Boiardo drew the individuality of character, by which their heroes were distinguished, and which Ariosto has not been so careful to preserve. His Orlando has less of the honest simplicity,

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