rom the genius of Lorenzo, in the "Morgante
Maggiore" from the stolidity of Pulci. The "Morgante," of which parts
were probably written as a mere sample to amuse a supper party, became
interesting to Pulci, in the mere matter of inventing and stringing
together new incidents; and despite its ludicrous passages, it must have
been more seriously written by him, and more seriously listened to by
his friends, than would a similar production now-a-days. For the men of
the Renaissance, no matter how philosophized and cultured, retained the
pleasure in mere incident, which we moderns seem to have given over to
children and savages; and Lorenzo, Ficino, and Politian probably
listened to the adventures of Luigi Pulci's paladins and giants with
much the same interest, and only a little more conscious sense of
grotesqueness, with which the crowd in the market listened to Cristofano
dell' Altissimo and similar story-tellers. The "Morgante Maggiore,"
therefore, is neither really comic nor really serious. It is not a piece
of realistic grotesqueness like "Gargantua" or "Pantagruel," any more
than it is a serious ideal work like "Amadis de Gaula:" the proportion
of deliberately sought effects is small; the great bulk, serious or
comic, seems to have come quite at random. It is not a caricatured
reproduction of the poems of chivalry sung in the market, for they were
probably serious, stately, and bald, with at most an occasional joke; it
is the reproduction of the joint impression received from the absurd,
harum-scarum, unpractical world of chivalry of the poet, and the real
world of prose, of good-humoured buffoonish coarseness with which the
itinerant poet was surrounded. The paladins are no Don Quixotes, the
princesses no Dulcineas, the battles are real battles; but the language
is that of Florentine wool-workers, housewives, cheese-sellers, and
ragamuffins, crammed with the slang of the market-place, its heavy jokes
and perpetual sententious aphorism. Moreover the prominence given to
food and eating is unrivalled except by Rabelais: the poet must have
lounged with delight through the narrow mediaeval lanes, crowded with
booths and barrows, sniffing with rapture the mingled scents of cheese,
pork, fish, spices, and a hundred strange concomitant market smells. And
the market, that classic _mercato vecchio_ (alas, finally condemned and
destroyed by modern sanitary prudishness, and which only those who have
seen can conceive in its full