west
of these characters, who is an invention of the author's, and a most
extraordinary personage. He is the first unmitigated blackguard in
fiction, and is the greatest as well as first. Pulci is conjectured,
with great probability, to have designed him as a caricature of some
real person; for Margutte is a Greek who, in point of morals, has been
horribly brought up, and some of the Greek refugees in Italy were
greatly disliked for the cynicism of their manners and the grossness of
their lives. Margutte is a glutton, a drunkard, a liar, a thief, and
a blasphemer. He boasts of having every vice, and no virtue except
fidelity; which is meant to reconcile Morgante to his company; but
though the latter endures and even likes it for his amusement, he gives
him to understand that he looks on his fidelity as only securable by
the bastinado, and makes him the subject of his practical jokes. The
respectable giant Morgante dies of the bite of a crab, as if to spew on
what trivial chances depends the life of the strongest. Margutte laughs
himself to death at sight of a monkey putting his boots on and off; as
though the good-natured poet meant at once to express his contempt of
a merely and grossly anti-serious mode of existence, and his
consideration, nevertheless, towards the poor selfish wretch who had had
no better training.

To this wit and this pathos let the reader add a style of singular ease
and fluency,--rhymes often the most unexpected, but never at a loss,--a
purity of Tuscan acknowledged by every body, and ranking him among the
authorities of the language,--and a modesty in speaking of his own
pretensions equalled only by his enthusiastic extolments of genius in
others; and the reader has before him the lively and affecting, hopeful,
charitable, large-hearted Luigi Pulci, the precursor, and in some
respects exemplar, of Ariosto, and, in Milton's opinion, a poet worth
reading for the "good use" that may be made of him. It has been
strangely supposed that his friend Politian, and Ficino the Platonist,
not merely helped him with their books (as he takes a pride in telling
us), but wrote a good deal of the latter part of the Morgante,
particularly the speculations in matters of opinion. As if (to say
nothing of the difference of style) a man of genius, however lively, did
not go through the gravest reflections in the course of his life, or
could not enter into any theological or metaphysical question, to which
he chose t