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I allude, exquisite specimens, making allowances for what is obsolete, are to be found in the Canterbury Tales of Chaucer, and his Troilus and Cressida; and you have only to open the first books of Pulci and Ariosto to meet with two charming ones, the interview of Orlando with the Abbot, in the Morgante Maggiore (canto 1. towards the conclusion), and the flight of Angelica, her meeting with Rinaldo's horse, &c. in the Orlando Furioso. Homer abounds with them, though, by the way, not in the translation; and I need not, of course, warn any reader of taste against trusting Mr. Hoole for a proper representation of the delightful Italian. Such versions, more or less, resemble bad engravings, in which all the substances, whether flesh, wood, or cloth, are made of one texture, and that a bad one. With the Greek dramatists I am ashamed to say I am unacquainted; and of the Latin
