ng;
third, the trouble which seems to have been given him by critics,
"sacred and profane," in consequence of these originalities; and lastly,
a doubt which has strangely existed with some, as to whether he intended
to write a serious or a comic poem, or on any one point was in earnest
at all. One writer thinks he cannot have been in earnest, because he
opens every canto with some pious invocation; another asserts that the
piety itself is a banter; a similar critic is of opinion, that to mix
levities with gravities proves the gravities to have been nought, and
the levities all in all; a fourth allows him to have been serious in his
description of the battle of Roncesvalles, but says he was laughing in
all the rest of his poem; while a fifth candidly gives up the question,
as one of those puzzles occasioned by the caprices of the human mind,
which it is impossible for reasonable people to solve. Even Sismondi,
who was well acquainted with the age in which Pulci wrote, and who, if
not a profound, is generally an acute and liberal critic, confesses
himself to be thus confounded. "Pulci," he says, "commences all his
cantos by a sacred invocation; and the interests of religion are
constantly intermingled with the adventures of his story, in a manner
capricious and little instructive. We know not how to reconcile this
monkish spirit with the semi-pagan character of society under Lorenzo
di Medici, nor whether we ought to accuse Pulci of gross bigotry or of
profane derision." [1] Sismondi did not consider that the lively
and impassioned people of the south take what may be called
household-liberties with the objects of their worship greater than
northerns can easily conceive; that levity of manner, therefore, does
not always imply the absence of the gravest belief; that, be this as
it may, the belief may be as grave on some points as light on others,
perhaps the more so for that reason; and that, although some poems, like
some people, are altogether grave, or the reverse, there really is
such a thing as tragi-comedy both in the world itself and in the
representations of it. A jesting writer may be quite as much in earnest
when he professes to be so, as a pleasant companion who feels for his
own or for other people's misfortunes, and who is perhaps obliged to
affect or resort to his very pleasantry sometimes, because he feels more
acutely than the gravest. The sources of tears and smiles lie close to,
ay and help to refine one a