'Orlando Furioso> opens with the Saracens in France; they have defeated Charlemagne and are besieging Paris. The episode of this war ending in the victory of the Christian emperor, and the flight of Agramonte and his death in combat with Orlando, is the plot which binds together the many stories and endless episodes. The story of Prince Ruggiero the Saracen, and his marriage, after conversion, to Bradamante, the Christian heroine, is a glorification of the House of Este, which was the issue of this marriage. The episode of the fair and frigid Angelica rescued from the sea monster is very popular. Crowds of personages swarm in this poem, so full of imagination and actu ality. Some of Ariosto's heroines are verit able amazons testifying to their love by feats of warlike valor, and contrasting with other heroines, full of sweetly touching timid ity. Ariosto's style and versification are fault less. To have written with such perfect ca dence and just management of measure, it is said he must have thought in octave.
No history of Cinquecento literature should omit the shadow typified by Pietro Aretino (1492-7556), the cynic pamphleteer, whose im pudence in selling his defamatory verse, or his silence, is equalled by the immorality of the popes and princes who bought and flattered him. Machiavelli the philosopher has an ideal of virtue; Ariosto the poet has an ennobling vision of beauty; even time-serving Guicciar dini lives an unblemished life and believes that virtue is a good policy; but defamatory Aretino, son of a courtesan, bullies and blackmails; like a ravenous wolf he seizes his prey with violence and impudence. He wears his pen like a dag ger, ostentatiously; he wields it like a cowatd. He surpasses the villain in the villainy of his libels, and is chief among braggarts. Yet, if we are content to take his viewpoint, his picture of his times and contemporaries is true. In this consists its value in a history of Italian litera ture.