state. His majesty was somewhat embarrassed by the application, till, by advice of Bertoldo, he appeared to acquiesce in the demand, and sent a box to the wife of the prime minister, desiring her to keep it in the garden till next day, when the ladies and ministers were to deliberate on its contents. The minister's wife opened it from curiosity, and the bird which was inclosed flew off. She thus demonstrated how ill qualified the fair sex were to be intrusted with secrets of state.

The ladies resolved to be avenged on Bertoldo, for the disappointment they had sustained by his means. He was a second time summoned to the queen's apartments, but, before proceeding thither, he put two live hares in his pocket. On his way it was necessary to cross a court, which was guarded by two monstrous dogs, purposely unchained. Bertoldo occupied their attention by setting loose the two hares, and, while the dogs were engaged in the chase, he arrived safe in the apartments of the queen, to the utter mortification of her majesty and her attendants.

the

Perceiving that Bertoldo eluded all stratagem,

queen insisted that he should be hanged without farther ceremony, to which the king readily consented. Our hero acceded to this proposal with less reluctance than could have been ex

pected, but stipulated that he should be allowed to chuse the tree on which he was to expiate his offences. He was accordingly sent forth, escorted by the officers of justice and the executioner, in order to make his election, but cavilled at every tree which was recommended to his notice,

-an incident which occurs in the original Solomon and Marcolphus. During this search Bertoldo made himself so agreeable to the guards, by his pleasant stories, that they allowed him to escape, and he returned to his native village.

Her majesty afterwards repented of her cruelty, and, on being informed that Bertoldo was still alive, she requested that he might be recalled to court. With a good deal of difficulty he was persuaded to return, and was made a privy counsellor. Owing, however, to the change in his mode of life, he did not long survive his elevation.

I have given this abstract of the Life of Bertoldo, not on account of its merit, but celebrity; and, because it formed for two hundred years the chief literary amusement of one of the most interesting countries in Europe. It is unnecessary, however, to enlarge on the life of the son Bertoldino, written by the author of Bertoldo, but added a long while after his first composition, or on that of the

grandson Cacasenno, by Camillo Scaliger della Fratta. These works never attained the same popularity as their original, and are inferior to it in point of merit. The same king who had patronized Bertoldo, believing that talents were hereditary, brought the son to court, where he became as noted for folly and absurdity, as his father had been for shrewdness, and was speedily sent back in disgrace to his village. His majesty, not satisfied with one experiment, sent for the grandson, who proved a glutton and poltroon, and the incidents of the history hinge on the exhibition of his bad qualities.

The lives of these three peasants form the subject of a much-esteemed Italian poem, which was written in the end of the 17th, or commencement of the 18th century, under the following circumstances. Joseph Maria Crespi, a celebrated artist of Bologna, executed a series of paintings, illustrative of the adventures of Bertoldo and his descendants, in which the figures of the principal characters were delineated with infinite spirit. From his pictures a set of engravings was taken by a Bolognese artist, and, instead of publishing a new edition of the prose romance, in which these might have been introduced, several wits of Italy conceived the notion of making Bertoldo

and his family the heroes of a poem, in what the Italians call the Genere Bernesche, from Berni its inventor, which is somewhat of a higher tone than the French burlesque, but lower than our satire. This composition was divided into twenty cantos: Each member of the association wrote a canto, except three of the number; one of whom gave arguments in verse, another furnished an allegory, and the last appended learned annotations. The work was printed at Bologna in 1736, with all the decorations which accompany the finest Italian poems, and had soon a wonderful success. It was translated into the Bolognese and Venetian dialects, and a vocabulary of each of these jargons was appended to the editions 1746 and 1747. It has also been versified in modern Greek.

By far the most celebrated romance of the class with which we are at present engaged, is the Life and Exploits of

DON QUIXOTE,

which first appeared in the beginning of the 17th century, a few years posterior to the composition of the Life of Bertoldo.

At a time when the spirit of practical knight

errantry was extinguished, but the rage for the perusal of relations of chivalrous extravagance continued unabated, Cervantes undertook to ridicule the vitiated taste of his countrymen, and particularly, it is said, of the duke of Lerma, whose head was intoxicated with the fictions of romance. His work accordingly is not intended, as some have imagined, to expose the quest of adventures, the eagerness for which had ceased not only at the time in which Cervantes wrote, but in which Don Quixote is feigned to have existed. Indeed, if this had not been supposed, the merit of the work would be diminished, as a considerable portion of the ridicule arises from the singularity of the hero's undertaking. Don Quixote, therefore, was written with the intention of deriding the folly of those, whose time, to the neglect of other studies and employments, was engrossed with the fabrication or perusal of romantic compositions. The author indeed informs us in his prologue, that his object was, "deribar la maquina mal fundada de los libros caballerescos, y deshacer la autoridad y cabida que tenian en el mundo y en el vulgo."

With this view the Spanish author, as all the world knows, has represented a man of amiable disposition, and otherwise of sound understand