The Orlando Innamorato

Produced by Kathleen Ethington
HENRY RICHARD, LORD HOLLAND, &c. &c. &c.
Who, at a late period of my labours upon the Furioso , suggested the present work as its necessary prologue.
Kind peer, who, mid the tempest of debate, Hast gladly wooed and won the Southern muse. Where, crowned with fruit and flower of mingling hues, She in a grove of myrtle keeps her state.
This I had entered by a postern gate, Like stranger, who no certain path pursues. Or garden's lord, that hath his own to choose, Hadst thou not shewn a better entrance late:
That portal led me to Morgana's towers, Where fierce Orlando found the dame at play; And though, too fast for me, from fields of flowers, She flies to savage waste, and will not stay. It will content me but to paint her bowers, If this be granted by the scornful fay.
William Stewart Rose.
See the adventure of Morgana, the type of Fortune, who, flying from her garden into a wilderness, is taken by Orlando, Book II.
It is many years since I first entertained a vague idea of translating the Orlando Furioso , and circumstances of little importance to the reader, led me more recently to undertake it in earnest. This work was again laid down; and afterwards resumed at the instance of a distinguished friend; and by an odd coincidence, I am indebted also to the suggestion of another eminent person for the idea of the present translation of the Orlando Innamorato , which, I should observe, is intended to be auxiliary to that, my first and greater undertaking, though I need scarcely say, that the story of Boiardo is a necessary prologue to the poem of Ariosto.
It was my intention to have translated the first mentioned work, exactly upon the model adopted by Tressan in his version of the French romances, a scheme afterwards executed with so much better success, by my late excellent friend, Mr. George Ellis, in his English work of the same description. A further consideration of the subject, however, induced me to imitate them only in their general plan of illustrating a compendious prose translation by extracts, without seeking to add poignancy to this, by what might give a false idea of the tone of my original. I recollected that I stood in a very different predicament from that of either of these authors; that, to compare my work with the one, which is most likely to be familiar to my readers, the 'Specimens of early English Romances,' the originals are composed in a spirit of gravity which can hardly be confused with the gay style of the translator, and therefore nobody can be misled by the vein of pleasantry which runs through Mr. Ellis's work, and which is sure to be exclusively ascribed to the author of the Rifacimento . This, however, would possibly not be the case with me, as the Innamorato is in a great measure a humourous work, of which I might give a false impression, by infusing into it a different species of wit, from that which distinguishes it;—a consideration which induced me to adopt the scheme I have pursued in the following sheets.