or when Oliver, after a pathetic love-lament, complains that it is impossible:

Celar per certo l'amore e la tossa.

According to modern notions his jokes not unfrequently savor of profanity. Rinaldo and Ricciardetto are feasting upon ortolans, and give this punning reason for their excellence[544]:

Cioè che Cristo a Maddalena apparve
In ortolan, che buon sozio gli parve.

On the same occasion Rinaldo is so pleased with his fare that he exclaims:

Questi mi paion miracoli;
Facciam qui sei non che tre tabernacoli.

Such expressions flash forth from mere Florentine sense of fun in passages by no means deliberately comic.

The most diverting character of the Morgante is Margutte, an eccentric heteroclite creature, the prototype of Folengo's Cingar and Rabelais' Panurge, whom the giant met upon his wanderings and adopted for a comrade. It has been supposed with some reason that Pulci here intended to satirize the Greeks who flocked to Florence after the fall of Constantinople, and that either Marullo, the personal enemy of Poliziano, or Demetrius Chalcondylas, his rival in erudition, sat for Margutte's portrait. The character of the rogue, described by himself in thirty stanzas of fantastic humor, contains a complete epitome of the abuse which the scholars of those days used to vomit forth in their reciprocal invectives.[545] Part of the comic effect produced by his speech is due to this self-attribution of qualities which supplied the arsenals of humanistic combatants with poisoned arrows. But Margutte has far more than a merely illustrative or temporary value. He is the first finished humoristic portrait sketched in modern literature, the first broadly-conceived and jovially-executed Rabelaisian study. Though it is very improbable that Pulci had any knowledge of Aristophanes, though he died eight years or thereabouts before the Curé of Meudon was born, his Margutte is cousin-german of the Sausage-seller and Panurge.[546] Margutte takes an impish pride in reckoning up his villanies and vices. When Morgante asks him whether he believes in Christ or Appollino, he replies:

A dirtel tosto,
Io non credo più al nero ch' all'azzurro,
Ma nel cappone, o lesso, o vuogli arrosto ...
E credo nella torta e nel tortello,
L'una è la madre, e l'altro è il suo figliuolo;
Il vero paternostro è il fegatello,
E possono esser tre, e due, ed un solo,
E diriva dal fegato almen quello.