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to raise them to heroic stature ; yet the most disguised ofthese personages, in principle, passion, taste, and pur-suit, were real men and women, magnified into mon-sters, like flies and spiders when looked upon throughthe eye-glass of a microscope. Orlando was but anexaggeration of the chevalier Bayard, as was the BritishArthur of the English Richard, and Charlemagne him-self of Francis I.
Ariosto, in following the fashion of contemporaries,lighted upon a theme to which his wayward and ver-satile genius was peculiarly adapted, and which gave itan opportunity of displaying all its peculiarities to theutmost advantage. Of these, the most enviable andleast imitable is that perfection of art, which heperhaps possessed beyond every other writer, to saythings naturally. All his wonders and prodigies aremade so easy and probable, that to the most fastidiousreader, who does not resolutely resist the spell of thepoet, and deprive himself of the pleasure of being be-guiled by it, they appear as they would do if theywere actual events, from the daylight effect of his truth-telling style ; for whenever his delight in the extra-vagant carries him beyond the legitimately marvellous,he disarms resentment, and prevents the laugh againsthimself by a quiet pleasantry,—becoming himself theCervantes of his own Quixotes. Satirists, however,have done little to improve mankind: they have con-demned and promoted vice ; they have ridiculed andrecommended folly. Instead of being the most chaste,severe, and instructive, it is notorious that (with fewexcsptions) they have been the most profligate, perni-cious, and corrupting of all writers. Many of the mostillustrious deserve to be crowned and decapitated, andtheir laurelled heads fixed on poles round the heights ofParnassus, as warnings to others, while they affect toexpose sin, not to betray virtue; and while they de-claim against lewdness, not to become panders to de-bauch the young, the innocent, and the unsuspecting.To go no farther than the example before us. If ever