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by any hand but his own. Yet, after its first com-pletion, it underwent a process of revisal nearly as longand laborious as that of composition ; like a bird, itarrived not at the perfection of its song, or the fullglory of its plumage, in the breeding season, nor tillafter its first moulting. It is strange, that, with allthese advantages, there should still remain several glaringinconsistencies, which one hour’s pains would have re-moved, had the author been aware of what any ordinaryreader might detect.

The poem consists of the contemporaneous adventuresof many knights, ladies, and other personages, travellingin all lands, known and unknown, of the old continent,the moon, hell, and purgatory ; those of each individual,in fact, forming a distinct story, begun, dropped, re-newed, or concluded according to the pleasure of thenarrator, who excites and keeps up, by every species ofprovoking artifice, the tortured yet unwearying curiosityof his hearers. And these materials, anomalous as theymay seem, and as they are, he moulds and mixes withinimitable skill, and bodies them forth, as by magic,into such captivating forms, by varying, interweaving,disentangling, and cutting short the numberless threadsof his many-coloured web, that he fails not to producea present effect in every passage, with little recollectionon the reader’s part of its agreement with the past,as little regard to its connection with any thing but it-self, and no care whatever about its future influence onthe issue of the whole. The fable is a hydra, of whichthe Orlando , whose name it bears, is only one of theheads ; and no otherwise entitled to pre-eminence, thanas the hero of some of the most stupendous, amusing,and puerile events in a series not less heterogeneous ortragi-comic than the changes and chances of a holidaypantomime. It cannot be denied that the poem hasa beginning and an end, with a prodigious quantity ofaction between, as the succession of pages, and the num-ber of cantos, evince ; but to prove that it has a necessarybeginning, a decided progress, and a satisfactory end,