injured by their quarrelsome subtleties; nor has
it been subject, more than to a very slight ex.
tent, to the intermittences from which other
notable poetical works have suffered, owing to
the varying conditions of culture at different
times. Great men and ordinary readers have
been in as complete agreement about it, as, for
instance, about the beauty, let us say, of a
Madame Récamier; and the list of great men,
who have experienced its fascination, goes from
Machiavelli and the Galilei, to Voltaire and to
Goethe, without mentioning names more near
to our own time.

Yet, however unanimous, simple and unre-
strainable be the aesthetic approbation ac-
corded to the poem of Ariosto, the critical judg-
ments delivered upon it are just as discordant,
complicated and laboured; and indeed this is
one of those cases where the difference of the
two spiritual moments, intuitive or aesthetic,
the apprehension or tasting of the work of art,
and intellective, the critical and historical judg-
ment,-- a difference wrongly disputed from
one point of view by sensationalists and from
another by intellectualists,-- stands out so
clearly as to seem to be almost spatially di-
vided, so that one can touch it with one's hand.

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