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He may think, with Origen, that God intends all his creatures to be ultimately happy, and yet be considered as loving a follower of Christ as a "dealer of damnation round the land," or the burner of a fellow-creature. Pulci was in advance of his time on more subjects than one. He pronounced the existence of a new and inhabited world, before the appearance of Columbus.
I had already a slight general notion of Italian letters from Leigh Hunt, and from other agreeable English Italianates; and I knew that I wanted to read not only the four great poets, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso, but that whole group of burlesque poets, Pulci, Berni, and the rest, who, from what I knew of them, I thought would be even more to my mind.
He had perused the numerous romantic poems, which, from the days of Pulci, have been a favourite exercise of the wits of Italy, and had sought gratification in the numerous collections of novelle, which were brought forth by the genius of that elegant though luxurious nation, in emulation of the 'Decameron. In classical literature, Waverley had made the usual progress, and read the usual authors; and the French had afforded him an almost exhaustless collection of memoirs, scarcely more faithful than romances, and of romances so well written as hardly to be distinguished from memoirs.
Take him then as a poser: give him, for the argument's sake, Boccace to his company, Cino; give him our Pulci, give him Ariosto, give him Lorenzo, Politian; give him Tasso for aught I care; you have no one left but the sugar-cured Guarino. The fellow is such a sturdy pagan we must e'en forgive him some of his quirks.
The principal Italian poets who have sung the adventures of the peers of Charlemagne are Pulci, Boiardo, and Ariosto. The characters of Orlando, Rinaldo, Astolpho, Gano, and others, are the same in all, though the adventures attributed to them are different. Boiardo tells us of the loves of Orlando, Ariosto of his disappointment and consequent madness, Pulci of his death.
Really, if Sir Philip Sidney and other serious and exquisite gentlemen had not sometimes taken a positively grave interest in the like pastimes of paronomasia, one should hardly conceive it possible to meet with them even in tragi-comedy. Did Pulci find these also in his ballad-authorities? King Manfredonio has come in loving hostility against her to endeavour to win her affection by his prowess.
Politian and the brothers Pulci admire again the ancient sculptures which are to them as illustrations of their readings, and Lorenzo notes the works of all the students who were destined to contribute to the glory of the many Medicean palaces. How the burly Torrigiano's heart burns within him when the Duke praises his compeer's works!
Luigi Pulci obviously imitates the Improvisatori in his 'Morgante, and both his poetry and Boiardo's are in part, at least, a half-conscious parody of the chivalrous poetry of the Middle Ages. Under the name of Limerno Pitocco, he composed the 'Orlandino, in which chivalry appears only as a ludicrous setting for a crowd of modern figures and ideas.
As the Magnificent Lorenzo had had the fancy to string together in more artistic shape the quaint and graceful love poems, hyperbolical, realistic, tender, and abusive, of the Tuscan peasantry; so also Messer Luigi Pulci appears to have been smitten with the notion of trying his hand at a chivalric poem like those to which he and his friends had listened among the butchers and pork-shops, the fishmongers and frying booths of the market, and giving an impression, in its ideas and language, of the people to whom such strains were sung.
From these she passes on to the followers of the romantic style begun by Pulci, Cieco da Ferrara, Burchiello, Bojardo; then Berni, born at the end of the fifteenth century, who carried on or recast Bojardo's Orlando Innamorato, which was followed by Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, the delight of Italy.
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