are compelled to leave unexplored. He was a dissipated runaway monk, who repented, became serious, and resought his cell just as he seemed within an ace of turning Protestant. His Orlandino is a burlesque upon the poems of chivalry, with pieces of genuine poetry interspersed, and many digressions on the corruptions of the age, especially the vices of the religious orders. It is unfinished. What was published is gaid to have been written in three months, a statement confirmed by the energy of the verse.
It was a great step in Greek comedy when the mythological parodies which had constituted the substance of the middle comedy were replaced by the picture of contemporary manners which formed the staple of the new. So great an advance could not be made by Alessandro Tassoni (1565–1638), the chief representative of serio-comic poetry in the seventeenth century, for his age would not have tolerated it; but he effected much in the same direction by converting the mere parody of the chivalric romance which had satisfied his predecessors into the mock-heroic epic, a form of literature which, if he did not invent, he may claim to have perfected. Instead of contriving burlesque variations upon Ariosto, he took a real incident of a serio-comic nature—the war which in the thirteenth century had actually broken out between the republics of Modena and Bologna respecting a bucket carried off by the former. The treatment is admirable; the characters, some of whom are historical, and others sketched after Tassoni's contemporaries, have an air of reality altogether wanting to the personages of Folengo's parodies; there is enough of idyllic charm and tender pathos here and there to approve the writer a true poet, while humour domi-
