Note 775 — Chapter VIII

Tiraboschi, vii. 195, censures Berni for motti e racconti troppo liberi ed empi, che vi ha inseriti. Ginguéné exclaims, as well he may, against this imputation. Berni has inserted no stories; and unless it were the few stanzas that remain at the head of the twentieth canto, it is hard to say what Tiraboschi meant by impieties. But though Tiraboschi must have read Berni, he has here chosen to copy Zeno, who talks of il poema di Boiardo, rifatto dal Berni, e di serio trasformato in ridicolo, e di onesto in iscandoloso, e però giustamente dannato dallo chiesa. (Fontanini, p. 273). Zeno, even more surely than Tiraboschi, was perfectly acquainted with Berni’s poem: how could he give so false a character of it? Did he copy some older writer? And why? It seems hard not to think that some suspicion of Berni’s bias towards Protestantism had engendered a prejudice against his poem, which remained when the cause had been forgotten, as it certainly was in the days of Zeno and Tiraboschi.