Oberto takes to wife Olympia fair,
And her of countess makes a puissant queen.
Stanza lxxx. lines 1 and 2.
So ends this beautiful, though strange episode, made up of classical and Gothic fictions, and in which figure the champion of Christendom, and the heathen god Proteus, who is described as exercising all the powers of an angry and puissant divinity. One of the late translators of the Furioso, in commenting upon this canto of his author, seems here to think him indefensible, and what would justly be thought so glaring an offence against costume in a modern, will probably be deemed in the eyes of many, a defect in Ariosto. But those many, who judge by rule, should, on their own principles, have regard to authority: and by what many and weighty authorities may he not be justified? To come near to our own times; is not the mixture in Lycidas, of “the pilot of the Galilean lake,” and of heathen gods and goddesses, “Sleek Panope, with all her sisters,” and, “old Hippotades,” shepherds and bishops, a more anomalous assemblage than that which we find in the story of Olympia? Yet who could wish, except those who pride themselves as philosophical critics, that Milton had conformed to our modern notions of propriety, or who of real poetical feeling subscribes to the censure which Dr. Johnson has pronounced upon this exquisite poem? But if I have been tempted to recur to authority, I ought to confess it is not by authorities that Ariosto is generally to be estimated. He will never relish the Furioso who expects to find in it a series of classical reliefs; let him rather come to it as to the contemplation of a magnificent and fanciful arabesque, in which the natural mingles with the extravagant, and the beautiful with the grotesque.
