and his bright fiddle and lute music jars
and ends: "While I am singing, O Redeeming God, I see all Italy set on
fire by these Gauls, coming to ravage I know not what fresh place."

And thus, with the earlier and more hopeful Renaissance of the fifteenth
century, Matteo Boiardo broke off with his "Orlando Innamorato." The
perfect light-heartedness, the delight in play of a gentle, serious,
eminently kindly nature, which gives half the charm to Boiardo's work,
seems to have become impossible after the ruin of Italian liberty and
prosperity the frightful showing up of Italy's moral and social and
political insignificance at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
Lombardy especially became a permanent battle-field, and its towns mere
garrison places of French, German, Spanish, and Swiss barbarians, whose
presence meant slaughter and pillage and every foulest outrage; and
then, between the horrors of the unresisted invasions and the unresisted
exactions, came plague and famine, and industry and commerce gradually
died out. A few princes, subsidised and guarded by French or
Imperialists, kept up an appearance of cheerfulness, but the courts even
grew more gloomy as the people grew more miserable. There is more
joking, more resonant laughter in Ariosto than in Boiardo, but there is
very much less serenity and cheerfulness; ever and anon a sort of
bitterness, a dreary moralizing tendency, a still more dreary fit of
prophesying future good in which he has no belief, comes over Ariosto.
Berni, who rewrote the "Orlando Innamorato" in choice Tuscan, and who
underlined every faintly marked jest of Boiardo's, with evident
preoccupation of the ludicrous effects of the "Morgante Maggiore"--Berni
even could not keep up his spirits; into the middle of Boiardo's serene
fairyland adventures he inserted a description of the sack of Rome which
is simply harrowing. All real cheerfulness departed from the people, to
be replaced only by pleasure in the debaucheries of the buffoonish
obscenity of Aretino, Bandello, and so forth, to which the men of the
dying Italy of the Renaissance listened as the roysterers of the plague
of Florence, with the mortal sickness almost upon them, may have
listened to the filthy songs which they trolled out in their
drunkenness. Or at best, the poor starved, bruised, battered, humiliated
nation may have tried to be cheerful on the principle of its harlequin
playwright Beolco, who, more honest than the Ariostos an