coming necessarily weaker in proportion to the indefinite augmentation of territory over which it extends; there is a lack of religious instruction in most places, an utter destitution of it in many; there is little to exalt the character of the settlers, less to refine and soften them; there is scarcely any other gradation of rank and manners than what arises from the hateful distinction between master and slave, in those new states where it is the pleasure of the sovereign people that slavery should be established. Contemplating this side of the picture, it might well be asked, whether the United States have more to hope or to fear from such prosperity ? But we must conclude. Time will show whether a people can become powerful without an efficient government; whether they can be prosperous without a liberal public expenditure; whether they can advance in arts and literature without a gradation of ranks, and the influence and permanence of hereditary wealth; whether they can be virtuous and happy without a religious establishment. Whatever may be our anticipations, our wish is, that such measures as may best provide against the existing evils and danger of their society may be adopted in good time; that the Americans may strengthen their general government, not weaken it; consolidate the local ones, not divide them; that they may become more and more enlightened, more and more religious, more and more virtuous, more and more worthy of their parentage; rivalling us in arts, sciences, literature, and whatever conduces to the general good, and that this may be the only rivalry between us. ART. II.-The Orlando Furioso. Translated into English Verse. By William Stewart Rose. Vol. 1. Post 8vo. THERE is nothing new under the sun!-Geologists discover the earth we inhabit to have been made out of one which previously existed; and the learned detect, in the writings of the present day, little but the spoils of generations past. Indeed in those inventions which seem to admit of dates, as in mechanical philosophical discoveries, it is no easy task to follow them to their origin; and were Beckman himself called upon to make out a list from Elysium of worthies, he would find himself often unable to determine to whom priority of place belonged. Hints are thrown out by one, which another picks up and improves. Principles are established, without any view to distant results; yet by means of them results the most important important are obtained. Ages are required to perfect what a moment has commenced, and by the time the work itself becomes useful, it is too late to ascertain its author. But if this be true in the progress of works of art and science, it is more obviously so in those of the imagination. It is wonderful how little pure invention is to be met with in the world, and with what difficulty we trace a popular story to its source. To cry stop thief,' is vain, when the property is transferred from hand to hand in endless succession, with so much expedition and secrecy. The most we can do is to trace a literary theft to Homer; and yet it is contrary to all experience, to suppose that a poem, so complete in its structure, so melodious in its verse, so finished in its language, should have been the first of its kind. No wonder then that the origin of that delightful species of writing, known by the name of Romance, should be involved in more than common obscurity, when, in addition to the ordinary causes which occasion it, we call to mind that romance was the offspring of an age, of which the records are scanty, and the attainments but very imperfectly known. Still however it has furnished ingenious men with a very fertile subject of investigation and conjecture-One theory maintains it to be purely of Arabic invention, and to have found its way into France, Italy, and Britain, through the Saracens of Spain. Another, assigning it the same Oriental birth, conveys it into Europe by a different and more recent channel, the Crusades. A third argues that we are indebted for it to the Scalds, or Bards of Norway and Denmark, some of whom, attending Rollo in his expedition to France, introduced it into Normandy. A fourth endeavours to reconcile these conflicting systems, and finds that soon after Mithridates had been overthrown by Pompey, a nation of Asiatic Goths, who possessed that region of Asia which is now called Georgia, and is connected on the south with Persia, alarmed at the progressive encroachments of the Roman armies, retired in vast multitudes, under the conduct of their leader Odin or Woden, into the northern parts of Europe, not subject to the Roman government,' and that having settled in Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and the neighbouring districts, they might thus have imported into Scandinavia those Arabian tales which Rollo perhaps forwarded to France. And lastly, there is a project for tracing it, without the help of that figure which the learned call the ambagatory, and the vulgar the circumbendibus,' directly to the writings of the classics. We confess that we are inclined to look with a favourable eye upon this last hypothesis, and are scarcely in charity with such men as Percy, Warton, and Ellis, when they pass over a theory so obvious, as if utterly unworthy their attention ;-more especially as as the last admits that the theory, which is most comprehensive and which embraces all the avenues of information to which the writers of the twelfth century can be supposed to have had access, has so far the greatest probability;'-and doubtless one avenue, nor that an inconsiderable one, must have been the works of the more popular Latin authors; whilst Warton confesses, in his second Dissertation, that those very Arabians, from whom he would derive romance, possessed, at a very early period, numerous translations from the Greek, not of scientific works only, but even of Pindar and Homer. -- The classical system then we are disposed to embrace, not simply because all our prejudices run in favour of the friends of our youth, or that we would ascribe to them, from groundless partiality, an honour to which they have no claim,-but because we honestly think that the rough material of romance is to be found in the writings of Greek and Roman story; (especially the latter ;) admitting, as we undoubtedly must, that it did not in their hands assume the regular and systematic form which it afterwards exhibited. For instance--the magical operations of Alcina are only counterparts of those of Circea cup duly drugged furnishes these ladies alike with the means of transforming men into monsters; and on the other hand, while a ring affords to Ruggiero protection against the arts of his mistress, the herb moly is a specific of precisely the same kind by which Ulysses is enabled to set at naught the enchantments of the daughter of the Sun; nay, the very ring itself, so favourite and powerful an instrument of the writers of romance, could boast very extraordinary properties in more ancient days too-and if, by virtue of wearing it, Bradamante could pass unseen amidst horse and foot, it was no more than Gyges could do by the very same help some hundred years before. Again, what need to recur to Arabian mythology for a hippogriff, which a cavalier might mount, and ride through the air in a reasonable time, if business called him, from France to the Indies, when Bellerophon and Pegasus performed the like journies together of old? and when Bojardo himself actually numbers pegasie' amongst the winged monsters with which Ruggiero in his youth had been taught to contend?* The polished shield, which it was destruction to look upon, is a defensive weapon endowed with the same qualities, and used for the same purposes, as the Gorgon's head; and Perseus and the necromancer, are alike subject to the reproach of stooping to the use of magical arms.' Or-if the hero of romance could expose to the enemy an invulnerable person, "Io dirò che anche Achille fu fatato.' † * Boj. lib. 3. c. 5. + Berni, c. 6. s. 3. Neither Neither does the favourite Horse form any distinctive feature of romance, for Bucephalus was upon the same terms with Alexander as Brigliadoro with Orlando, or Bojardo with his cousin. Caesar too had a charger of the like extraordinary sagacity, impatient of every rider but himself, and after death honoured by his master with a statue in front of the Temple of Venus;* and, not to multiply instances needlessly, Hector himself addresses his steeds by name, as his friends and companions in arms. The circumstances under which Perseus delivered Andromeda from the sea-monster, and released her from chains, manifestly suggest the exposure and rescue of Angelica and Olimpia; and if these latter adventurers wear a somewhat more extravagant and Munchausen air than their prototypes, (which must be allowed,) such exaggerations are sufficiently explained by a reference to the times in which they were told, without travelling to Arabic literature in search of more florid and excursive originals. Merlin's two fountains of Love and Hate are discoverable in those two arrows of mythology, "Quorum fugat hic, facit alter amorem ; the Or yet more clearly in the two Fountains of Claudian, whereof one ran honey and the other poison, and in whose mingled stream Cupid dipped his shafts. If a hero of romance ties his horse to a myrtle-bush and finds it inhabited by a gossiping ghost; or, if a magician impregnates a wood with plaintive disembodied spirits, ready to distil gouts of blood' at the fracture of a branch; the marvel is no other than that which a classical hero experienced when Polydorus bled and suffered and spoke from the body of a tree; or than that which a classical god beheld exercised upon forlorn and fugitive Daphne. Are the writings of romance adorned with the resplendent castles of an Atlante or a Logistilla? The palace of the Sun, glittering with gold and fiery gems, had been already described by the poet of Roman fable, and might have furnished a superb model of ideal architecture to those who should come after him. The Martial games, as Dunlop in his History of Fiction observes, may be fairly reckoned to have supplied the first idea of the tournament, and bards were at hand in both cases to celebrate the fortunes of the day in chivalrous songs; while Hercules and Bacchus are both represented as wandering over the world in quest of adventures, and may be set down (which indeed they are, by romancers themselves) as the legitimate heroes of ancient knight-errantry. Indeed very many stories from classical fables are introduced, without any attempt at concealment as that of Narcissus, by Berni;-that of the House of Sleep, + Nupt. Honor. et Mariæ. + Vide Pulci, c. 3. 58. Berni. 2, 19. * Sueton. Cæs. by by Ariosto;-that of the Sphinx, with her orthodox Ænigma, by Bojardo; even the quaint conclusions of the cantos, in which the romance writers so much delight, are not unclassical. Virgil himself, after a long work, breaks off 'Sed jam tempus equûm fumantia solvere colla;' And in the same spirit, and almost in the same words, Berni closes the subject of the second book of his poem, 'Sciolzo il collo fumante, e levo il morso, Però che spatio assai con esso ho corso.'. Neither will the case be altered if romances are to be reckoned instructive allegories, since Berni, who maintains that they are to be thus interpreted, still shelters himself under classical precedent, and argues with Horace, that the Odyssey itself is only a parable, And indeed, in general we may observe a disposition, on the part of these fabulists, to connect their subject with the heroic agesnow deducing the pedigree of Charlemagne and his Knights, from Hector and the Trojans; and now, by a like fanciful process, proving the Durindana of Orlando to have been the very sword which was once wielded by the Defender of Troy.* These instances (which might be multiplied tenfold) may suffice to show, that the elements of romantic poetry existed in the writings of the classics, scattered and uncombined perhaps, but only awaiting the genius of some master-hand to embody and produce them. Neither can it be objected to this theory, that such species of composition came into vogue at the very dawn of the revival of learning, and consequently at a period when classical literature was almost or altogether unknown. In Italy Latin was never forgotten. During the reign of the Goths, lived the famous Cassiodorus, and yet more famous Boetius, whose verses Scaliger scruples not to call divine ;-and though darkness, clouds, and thick darkness' beset the country, under the barbarous dynasty of the Lombards, yet, in the ninth century, we discover a ray of light again breaking out, a stirring amongst the dry bones; and application is now made by a French abbot to Benedict III. for Cicero's work de Oratore, the Institutions of Quintilian, Donatus on Terence, and S. Jerome on the Prophet Jeremiah; whilst Pope Sylvester II. who died in 1003, and to whom, it is said, we are indebted for the use of Arabic numerals, which he brought with him from Cordoba, has left behind him no mean proofs of his proficiency in the Latin tongue. About the same period too, the Monks of Cassino both composed treatises on music, astronomy, logic, and architecture ; and also employed a portion of their time in transcribing several * Bojardo, lib. 3. c. 5. and c. 1. Roman |