on has inserted it in "Broome's
Life."]

ARIOSTO AND TASSO.

It surprises one to find among the literary Italians the merits of
Ariosto most keenly disputed: slaves to classical authority, they bend
down to the majestic regularity of Tasso. Yet the father of Tasso,
before his son had rivalled the romantic Ariosto, describes in a letter
the effect of the "Orlando" on the people:--"There is no man of
learning, no mechanic, no lad, no girl, no old man, who is satisfied to
read the 'Orlando Furioso' once. This poem serves as the solace of the
traveller, who fatigued on his journey deceives his lassitude by
chanting some octaves of this poem. You may hear them sing these stanzas
in the streets and in the fields every day." One would have expected
that Ariosto would have been the favourite of the people, and Tasso of
the critics. But in Venice the gondoliers, and others, sing passages
which are generally taken from Tasso, and rarely from Ariosto. A
different fate, I imagined, would have attended the poet who has been
distinguished by the epithet of "_The Divine_." I have been told by an
Italian man of letters, that this circumstance arose from the relation
which Tasso's poem bears to Turkish affairs; as many of the common
people have passed into Turkey either by chance or by war. Besides, the
long antipathy existing between the Venetians and the Turks gave
additional force to the patriotic poetry of Tasso. We cannot boast of
any similar poems. Thus it was that the people of Greece and Ionia sang
the poems of Homer.

The Accademia della Crusca gave a public preference to Ariosto. This
irritated certain critics, and none more than Chapelain, who could
_taste_ the regularity of Tasso, but not _feel_ the "brave disorder" of
Ariosto. He could not approve of those writers,

Who snatch a grace beyond the reach of art.

"I thank you," he writes, "for the sonnet which your indignation
dictated, at the Academy's preference of Ariosto to Tasso. This judgment
is overthrown by the confessions of many of the _Cruscanti_, my
associates. It would be tedious to enter into its discussion; but it was
passion and not equity that prompted that decision. We confess, that, as
to what concerns invention and purity of language, Ariosto has eminently
the advantage over Tasso; but majesty, pomp, numbers, and a style truly
sublime, united to regularity of design, raise the latter so much above
the other that no comparison can fairly ex