he receives in many
adventures, among which is the taking of Babylon. The other Paladins,
his cousin Rinaldo especially, have their separate adventures, all more
or less mixed up with the treacheries and thanklessness of Gan (for they
assist even him), and the provoking trust reposed in him by Charlemagne;
and at length the villain crowns his infamy by luring Orlando with most
of the Paladins into the pass of Roncesvalles, where the hero himself
and almost all his companions are slain by the armies of Gan's
fellow-traitor, Marsilius, king of Spain. They die, however, victorious;
and the two royal and noble scoundrels, by a piece of prosaical justice
better than poetical, are despatched like common malefactors, with a
halter.

There is, perhaps, no pure invention in the whole of this enlargement of
old ballads and chronicles, except the characters of another giant, and
of a rebel angel; for even Morgante's history, though told in a very
different manner, has its prototype in the fictions of the pretended
archbishop.[7] The Paladins are well distinguished from one another;
Orlando as foremost alike in prowess and magnanimity, Rinaldo by his
vehemence, Ricciardetto by his amours, Astolfo by an ostentatious
rashness and self-committal; but in all these respects they appear to
have been made to the author's hand. Neither does the poem exhibit
any prevailing force of imagery, or of expression, apart from popular
idiomatic phraseology; still less, though it has plenty of infernal
magic, does it present us with any magical enchantments of the alluring
order, as in Ariosto; or with love-stories as good as Boiardo's, or even
with any of the luxuries of landscape and description that are to be
found in both of those poets; albeit, in the fourteenth canto, there is
a long _catalogue raisonne_ of the whole animal creation, which a lady
has worked for Rinaldo on a pavilion of silk and gold.

To these negative faults must be added the positive ones of too many
trifling, unconnected, and uninteresting incidents (at least to readers
who cannot taste the flavour of the racy Tuscan idiom); great occasional
prolixity, even in the best as well as worst passages, not excepting
Orlando's dying speeches; harshness in spite of his fluency (according
to Foscolo), and even bad grammar; too many low or over-familiar forms
of speech (so the graver critics allege, though, perhaps, from want of
animal spirits or a more comprehensive discernment); a