good advice in vain of his friend Salvigno, and the final revolt of the injured swain, are all told in a series of Eclogues, Sonolegie, and Strambottolegie, in elegiacs or hexameters, where the quaint lingo suits itself to the purpose singularly well.

The Baldus or

The Baldus tries a higher flight, and (though Folengo was, in fact, anticipating most of the critics) observes, with what looks like intentional irreverence, all the conditions which for two centuries were to exercise the mind of critical Europe about a "heroic poem ":-the noble origin of the hero, his early struggles, his friends and enemies, the deorum ministeria, the visit to the infernal regions, and the rest. It is also in uniform hexameters, which sometimes observe fairly classical Latin for a batch of lines together and then break off, only the more amusingly, into the grotesque, but spirited and by no means always unmusical, jargon of Macaronic proper.

From more than one feature in his work Folengo would seem to have been of those who, sometimes not The Macaronea in the least from poverty of imagination, itself. like to repeat and re-work their motives. The earlier cantos of the Macaronea exhibit this feature, both in reference to the Orlandino, which, though published later, was we know written earlier, and to the Zanitonella. The birth and parentage of Baldus and Orlandino are extremely similar, and many points of the Zanitonella repeat themselves with a difference in the earlier Macaronea. It is only after the Tenth Canto, when the hero is freed from prison by the devices of Cingar, that the poem rises higher

1

than village and domestic quarrels. Baldus, Cingar, the giant Fracassus, and the dog-man Falchettus set out on a series of adventurous travels, in which they are joined by others, from the Virgin Knight Leonardo (who is slain by bears because he will not yield to the blandishments of a sorceress) down to miscellaneous ne'er-do-wells. They suffer a great tempest-wherein Cingar's terrors furnished the model to those of Panurge 2-they visit the stars, they study the sciences, they have difficulties with pirates. But the later books settle down into a curious battle between Baldus and his "barons" on the one hand and the community of witches and warlocks on the other. They first encounter the above-mentioned sorceress, Muselina, and then the Queen of the Witches, Smyrna Culfora (Mr Symonds reads Gulfora), in her capital, which Fracassus destroys, while Baldus and the rest make a murder grim and great of the queen and her courtiers. Emboldened by this success, they visit the infernal regions themselves in the last three books; and the poem closes half abruptly, half properly, in the depths of an enormous gourd, the destined region of vain poets in Hell, where they lose teeth and grow them again perpetually in punishment for their lies.

1 It is worth observing that at the outset of the voyage Folengo brings in, as an already known and settled thing, the hatred between peasants and soldiers, which, beginning no doubt still earlier, is so evident in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and which serves as a motive as late as the Simplicissimus of Grimmelshausen, and perhaps later still.

"As the adventure of the sheep had previously done. Rabelais, however, improves on both most remarkably.

Now Merlinus Coccaius himself is a false poet: therefore he will be detained in the gourd: therefore he can go no farther. Nothing can be more logical.

The respectable folk who think that everything has an explanation, and are miserable till they have got this explanation into a condition satisfactory to themselves, have not meddled much with Folengo; indeed, for centuries past he has been very little read. But it is obvious that the Delilah of interpretative allegory would have not the slightest difficulty in spreading her snares for his readers; in fact, Mr Symonds all but falls into them, and wrenches himself out with a kind of effort. Those who are content to understand without explaining, and to appreciate without hypothesis, will have no great difficulty in untwining, if they care to do so, the various strands which at least may have made up the fantastic rope of Folengo's thought. It is one of the main glories of Romance that burlesques of it always end by glorifying and illustrating the charms of the Muse of Romance herself, and Folengo is no exception. Baldus is a burlesque romance of adventure, no doubt, but it is a romance of adventure all the The wayward ex-monk availed himself of what has been called the glorious Romantic freedom to hunt many subordinate hares, and bring a vast amount of miscellaneous oddities into his treasure-house. Lucian was a particularly popular author at this time, and the influence of The True History and perhaps other pieces is clear. The character-sense was being much developed, and Cingar is one of the earliest very ambitious and elaborate exercises of it in modern times.

same.

In wit and a certain perenniality and universality he is not the equal of Panurge at his best; but he is a rather better fellow, more practically ingenious, and perhaps truer to the comic side of specially Latin nature. Baldus, like most heroes, is rather colourless; and his anger at finding that his wife Berta, whom he has practically deserted, has married somebody else, is more natural than reasonable; while Berta herself, though quite flesh and blood in her battles with her sister and her pranks on the amorous Tognazzo, disappears early, reappearing but dimly as a witch. The witchcraft episodes are certainly very curious in connection with the extraordinary outburst of fanaticism on that subject in the hundred or hundred and fifty years following. It is not at all improbable that the semi - Protestantism which is unmistakable in the Orlandino, and which may hide itself under the mystical circumlocutions of the Caos, counts for something in the Macaronea itself. And though Italy was never (her sons always having been well educated in a manner) bitten with the education-mania to the same extent as Germany, France, and England, this also appears. But on the whole Folengo exhibits, in a singularly suitable medium, the quaint waywardness of a soul et vitiis et virtutibus impar, not quite fortunate in its surroundings at any time, having lost its way in so far as any coherent scheme of life is concerned, but generous, instructed, aspiring. No Italian writer of his time is more affected by Dante, which is in itself a mighty quality. None speaks more generously of Ariosto, his own contemporary, and to some extent

the subject of his ironic exercises. His swashingblows in the combat of Lombard v. Tuscan are thoroughly good-humoured; and his Macaronic dialect itself is a sort of sneering concession to the general Italian refusal to recognise an Illustrious Vulgar, and to the endless naggings and nigglings of philological pedants. His hatreds-of the French, who were the curse of Italy throughout his life; of the monks, his sojourn with whom had proved so intolerable; of the landlords, with whom he had also had difficulties in his resourceless wanderings-are never bad-blooded, and always relieved by humour.1 And as for his lingo, whosoever does not perceive the charm of parlatus in

"Et sic parlatus subito discedit ab illis"

will never perceive it, and whoso does will perceive it at once.2

To pass from the artificial verse of the Renaissance,

1 There are indeed ugly exceptions which remind us that we have, after all, to do with an Italian of the sixteenth century. The worst of these-under the rubric, it is true, of "Atroce supplicio," but related with perfect coolness and apparently no kind of disgust at the torturers-is the story of the horrible mutilations inflicted, without despatching him, but leaving him to be eaten alive by gadflies, on the wretched Podesta, not merely by Baldus, who thinks himself a peasant's son, and though a brave is a decidedly brutal champion throughout, not merely by Cingar, who is a peasant, and of a ruthless and cowardly nature,-but by the stainless knight, Leonardo.

2 Better still, perhaps, as a single line is the description of the third kind of wine furnished by the abominable hosts

"Et qui dum bibitur ventris penetralia raspat,"

where the sudden barbarism after the orderly Latin of the first six words gives the real comic surprise.