Note 2 — Le hore di recreatione:

I said, in speaking of Leoline and Sydanis, that we must take not merely the Heroic but the Mock-Heroic poem into consideration as origins for our English examples; and this is very much more the case with Albino and Bellama. Whiting almost parades his knowledge of Italian; and I should think, from some of the worst as well as the oddest parts of his poem, that he had pushed his researches as far as Macaronic. In fact you must go beyond Folengo—to Tifi Odassi and Fossa Cremonese2—to supply a 'further' to his excursions, into the unsavoury now and then. But turning willingly enough from this, it will be evident to any instructed reader—and his perlusive panegyrists point it out—that his purpose is largely satiric. Indeed, his uncouth lingo3 has a close connexion with that of Marston and the other early Elizabethan satirists forty years before him: while he gives one odd reminders, at the same time, of the prose pamphlet which was contemporary with these very satirists, and was actually written by some of them. Now all these links are links with the history of the Novel backwards; and there are others forward. Change the romance apparatus into that of common life, of which our examples are French and Spanish rather than Italian, and you will get out of parts of Albino and Bellama something by no means unlike the singular farrago which goes under the name of The English Rogue. Besides convincing the author that prose is much better for such work than verse (which Head himself saw4), present him with more wits, better taste, and a more advanced state of society and manners, and you will probably find him some way on the road which leads, however far away, and after whatever rise, over the hills beyond his dirty marsh, to Tom Jones itself. While, to make a less 'kangaroo' transition in quality though a farther one in time, much smaller alteration would make Albino and Bellama into very fair Mrs. Radcliffe.