for
other reasons--chiefly their excessive diffuseness. A paragraph of the
version will sometimes comprise many pages. Those of Boiardo and Ariosto
are more exact; and the reader will be good enough to bear in mind, that
nothing is added to any of the poets, different as the case might seem
here and there on comparison with the originals. An equivalent for
whatever is said is to be found in some part of the context--generally
in letter, always in spirit. The least characteristically exact passages
are some in the love-scenes of Tasso; for I have omitted the plays upon
words and other corruptions in style, in which that poet permitted
himself to indulge. But I have noticed the circumstance in the comment.
In other respects, I have endeavoured to make my version convey some
idea of the different styles and genius of the writers,--of the severe
passion of Dante; of the overflowing gaiety and affecting sympathies
of Pulci, several of whose passages in the Battle of Roncesvalles are
masterpieces of pathos; of the romantic and inventive elegance of
Boiardo; the great cheerful universality of Ariosto, like a healthy
_anima mundi_; and the ambitious irritability, the fairy imagination,
and tender but somewhat effeminate voluptuousness of the poet of Armida
and Rinaldo. I do not pretend that prose versions of passages from these
writers can supersede the necessity of metrical ones, supposing proper
metrical ones attainable. They suffice for them, in some respects, less
than for Dante, the manner in their case being of more importance to
the effect. But with all due respect to such translators as Harrington,
Rose, and Wiffen, their books are not Ariosto and Tasso, even in manner.
Harrington, the gay "godson" of Queen Elizabeth, is not always unlike
Ariosto; but when not in good spirits he becomes as dull as if her
majesty had frowned on him. Rose was a man of wit, and a scholar; yet
he has undoubtedly turned the ease and animation of his original into
inversion and insipidity. And Wiffen, though elegant and even poetical,
did an unfortunate thing for Tasso, when he gave an additional line and
a number of paraphrastic thoughts to a stanza already tending to the
superfluous. Fairfax himself, who, upon the whole, and with regard to
a work of any length, is the best metrical translator our language has
seen, and, like Chapman, a genuine poet, strangely aggravated the sins
of prettiness and conceit in his original, and added to them a