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"Cervantes' serious air."-Pope. If Don Quixote

had been in verse it would have been called a chivalrous burlesque or mock-heroic poem; but being without poetical feet, which forms, though not the most essential, yet a necessary component part or ingredient in our common idea of poetry, it is no more in strictness and wholly a poem, than Cervantes, if he had been born without his natural feet, would have been wholly a man.

The same might be said of many other celebrated poems in prose-to unlearned ears a contradiction in terms, of Telemachus, the Castle of Otranto, Attala, Tom Jones, Gesner's Idylls, the German Undine of La Motte Fouqué (so happily translated by Mad. de Mon

tolieu), &c. &c. and of the late* work called the "Solitaire," by the Vicomte d'Arlincourt, which has been la fureur in Paris for the last six months, and growing so in London for the latter half of that time.

Though to man, as an animal, the head and heart are more vital and essential than the upper or lower extremities, yet a child born without hands or feet, however complete in other respects, would be considered and described as a monster: so, though, to constitute poetry, thought and sentiment are much more essential, and, as it were, vital component parts than that metrical arrangement of the words and syllables called verse; yet to common feeling and understanding, a composition without such metre, however abundant in thought and sentiment, if it claims to be a poem, should, in my opinion, be regarded as a sort of monster.

Note 3, page 6.

Vide, infra, note 35, to stanza 7.

Note 4, page 6.

Tasso afterwards, when his noble intellect had been broken down by vexation, misfortune, and distemper, adopted the blank verse of Trissino in his poem called "Le Sette Giornate del Mondo Creato."

*This was written Sept. 1821.

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Those who have read the collection of sonnets, &c. by Luigi Pulci and Matteo Franco, can have little doubt of the spirit in which the very objectionable passages in the Morgante referred to by Sismondi were written. That collection was republished (after two rare editions in the 15th century, and one in 1520), in 1759, by a certain Marchese Filippo de Rossi, but without the name of any printer or place,-several of those sonnets being addressed to Lorenzo de Medici himself. The editor of that last edition says of Pulci, "Era di carattere assai bizzarro.-Fu esso il primo che, a persuasione del Magnifico, introdusse col suo Morgante, i Romanzi nella nostra poesia, cantando, ad imitazione degli antichi rapsodi, ai conviti del suo Mecenate," and, of both the authors, "La maggior gloria per altro di quei due poeti, oltre la piacevolezza satirica, si è la purità della nostra ́lingua, ond 'essi sono annoverati tra i padri della Toscana favella."

Note 6, page 9.

From such differences of opinion between Pulci's countrymen and foreigners, one might be tempted to say, that to have a proper taste for the beauties of his work, his readers ought to have been born and bred on the banks of the Arno, as it was said that no one could be expected to relish the black broth of Sparta but such as had bathed in the Eurotas.

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Alas! I am afraid there are still readers, not only in our own country but in Italy itself, who consider Ariosto in no other light than that of a sort of poetical buffoon, who has strung together in pleasing rhymes a great number of merry and diverting, though absurd and extravagant, stories; persons who would be ready to concur in the well-known apostrophe addressed to the poet, by his illiberal, ungenerous, and tasteless patron, the Cardinal D'Este.

Note 8, page 16.

Why is it necessary to adopt the invidious and too common practice of weighing the transcendent talents of those matchless poets in opposite, and as it were contending scales? Reader! if you have already had the delight of perusing the last productions of Lord Byron's Muse*, how must you have admired those exquisitely beautiful and affecting portraitures of Ariosto and Tasso which conclude the 3d Canto of the " Prophecy of Dante."

We there see them contrasted without such invidious comparison, or depreciation of the one to exalt the other; and characterized in numbers **, style, and sentiment, so wonderfully Dantesque, that-mastering our uncongenial language, and habitual modes of thought as well as ex

* Written May, 1821.

** Terzette.

pression-they seem to have been inspired by the very genius of the " inarrivabile" Dante himself.

manner.

Vincenzo Monti, in his "Rivoluzione Francese, Visione alla Dantesca", republished in this country by Mr. Mathias, and dedicated by him to the late Mr. Perceval, is among the most successful of the Italian imitators of Dante's He is said to have aimed in that poem at uniting the vigour of Dante's style with the harmonious sweetness of Ariosto. Monti has since become distinguished equally by the versatility of his talents and of his politics. One of his numerous works best known with us is his translation of the Iliad, first published at a time when he hardly denied his almost total ignorance of the Greek; a circumstance which gave rise to the following epigram --he had then lately been made a knight by Napoleon :

"Evviva Cincio Monti, cavaliero,

Gran traduttor dei traduttor' d'Omero!"

One of the earliest, and, I believe, scarcest editions of the Gerusalemme,-printed at Lyons in 1581, appresso Alessandro Marsilij, in 16mo. published by Angelo Ingegneri, and dedicated by him to Charles Emanuel, Duke of Savoy-(a copy whereof I possess, and which now lies before me), contains at the beginning of the dedication so affecting a picture of the miserable state in which the unfortunate Torquato, after his escape from Urbino, arrived at the gates of Turin, that I hope I shall be pardoned for inserting it here.

"Serenissimo Signore, due anni e mezzo fà, quand' il

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