nother. If Dante had been capable of more
levity, he would have been guilty of less melancholy absurdities. If
Rabelais had been able to weep as well as to laugh, and to love as well
as to be licentious, he would have had faith and therefore support in
something earnest, and not have been obliged to place the consummation
of all things in a wine-bottle. People's every-day experiences might
explain to them the greatest apparent inconsistencies of Pulci's muse,
if habit itself did not blind them to the illustration. Was nobody ever
present in a well-ordered family, when a lively conversation having been
interrupted by the announcement of dinner, the company, after listening
with the greatest seriousness to a grace delivered with equal
seriousness, perhaps by a clergyman, resumed it the instant afterwards
in all its gaiety, with the first spoonful of soup? Well, the sacred
invocations at the beginning of Pulci's cantos were compliances of the
like sort with a custom. They were recited and listened to just as
gravely at Lorenzo di Medici's table; and yet neither compromised the
reciters, nor were at all associated with the enjoyment of the fare that
ensued. So with regard to the intermixture of grave and gay throughout
the poem. How many campaigning adventures have been written by gallant
officers, whose animal spirits saw food for gaiety in half the
circumstances that occurred, and who could crack a jest and a helmet
perhaps with almost equal vivacity, and yet be as serious as the gravest
at a moment's notice, mourn heartily over the deaths of their friends,
and shudder with indignation and horror at the outrages committed in a
captured city? It is thus that Pulci writes, full no less of feeling
than of whim and mirth. And the whole honest round of humanity not only
warrants his plan, but in the twofold sense of the word embraces it.

If any thing more were necessary to shew the gravity with which our
author addressed himself to his subject, it is the fact, related by
himself, of its having been recommended to him by Lorenzo's mother,
Lucrezia Tornabuoni, a good and earnest woman, herself a poetess, who
wrote a number of sacred narratives, and whose virtues he more than
once records with the greatest respect and tenderness. The _Morgante_
concludes with an address respecting this lady to the Virgin, and with
a hope that her "devout and sincere" spirit may obtain peace for him
in Paradise. These are the last words in the boo