Eminent literary and scientific men of Italy, Spain, and Portugal. Vol. 1 (of 3)

Poor Angelica feels not less for Rinaldo; but, arriving at Ardennes, she is delivered from her misery, by drinking of the fountain, that turns all her love to hate; while Rinaldo, also arriving, drinks of the love-in-spiring waters, and with great joy seeing the lady, wonders at his past dislike, and congratulates himself now on her passion. He addresses her with tenderness; but is repulsed with scorn, while her champion Orlando is at hand to defend her. He challenges his cousin, and they fight; but Charlemagne, hearing of their arrival in his kingdom, seizes on the lady, and forces the knights to be reconciled, privately promising to both Angelica as a prize, if they will exert themselves during the impending battle with Agramante. The poem now relates the invasion of Agramante, of Mandricardo, son of the slain Agricane, of Gradasso, and Marsiglio. A great battle takes place, in which the Saracens are triumphant, Orlando being absent. Rinaldo goes in pursuit of his horse Bajardo; while his sister Bradamante, a brave heroine, falls in love with Ruggeri, and withdraws from the field. Charlemagne retires to Paris, and is besieged by the whole body of Saracens. The poem ends with the commencement of a sort of episode, in which Fiordespina, mistaking the sex of Bradamante, falls in love with her. In the middle of this, the poet is interrupted. The sound of arms, which betokens the invasion of the French, and the terror and misery of Italy, call him from his task of fiction, to be the witness of real woes. He promises, if the stars will permit, to continue his narration another time. This time never came, for the French invaded Italy in 1494; and it was in about the same year that Bojardo died.

This is but a brief abstract of a poem interspersed with numerous episodes, beautiful descriptions, and interesting reverses. The poet never flags. An untired spirit animates every stanza, every verse: the life, the energy, the variety, the fertility of invention, are truly surprising, and far transcend Ariosto. But minuter criticism is deferred, till an account is given of Berni and his rifacimento.

BERNI

Francesco Berni was born at Lamporecchio, in the Val di Nievole, towards the end of the fifteenth century. The first eighteen years of his life were spent at Florence; whence he transferred himself to Rome, and entered on the service of his relation, the cardinal Bibbiena. On the death of the cardinal, he attached himself to the nephew, Angelo Divizio Bibbiena. He was at one time obliged to leave Rome, on account of some adventure of gallantry[91]; and afterwards entered the service of Giberti, the papal Datario, with whom he remained seven years, accompanying him whenever Giberti's duties as a bishop took him to Verona. But Berni was a poet, and fond of pleasure, and fortune could not obtain from him the industry which might have advanced him with his patrons. His vivacity and his poetry were agreeable in society; he became courted as a literary man; and he was a distinguished member of the academy of the Vignaiuoli, or vine-dressers, composed of the first men in Rome. This learned association was established by a Mantuan gentleman, Oberto Strozzi. The members assumed names adopted from the vineyard; and its feasts became famous all over Italy. Berni was at Rome when it was plundered by the Colonna party in 1526, and was robbed of every thing: at the same time he was struck with horror at the cruelties committed by the invaders. He mentions them with horror in the "Orlando Innamorato." When describing the sacking of a town, he says, that his unhappy eyes saw similar outrages perpetrated in Rome. He quitted the service of the Datario after this, and retired to Florence, where he lived tranquilly, being possessed of a canonicate, which had before been given him in the cathedral of that city, and enjoying the protection of cardinal Ippolito de' Medici, and of the duke Alexander. There is a story of his being solicited by each of these princes to poison the other, which is not supported by dates or facts. Alexander was afterwards murdered by Lorenzino de' Medici. The cardinal Ippolito had died before: Alexander was accused of having poisoned him; but accusations of this sort were so frequent at that time, that, according to historians and the popular voice, no man of any eminence ever died a natural death. Berni is said to have died on the 26th of July, 1536.

Berni possessed, to an extraordinary degree, a liveliness of imagination, and a facetiousness, which caused him to invent a new style of poetry, light, witty, but highly fanciful, which became the delight of his contemporaries. Mr. Stebbing speaks with great disapprobation of him, saying, "that we shall not be guilty of much injustice, if we regard him as one of those ecclesiastical Epicureans of the sixteenth century, whose infidelity and licentiousness branded them with infamy." His minor poems are witty, but indecent: they appear to be written, says Tiraboschi, with ease and rapidity, yet the original manuscripts show that he blotted and corrected them with care. He wrote also Latin elegies; and came nearer to Catullus, the critics tell us, than any other poet of the age.

The work by which he is known to us, is the Rifacimento of Bojardo's "Orlando Innamorato," which was not published till after his death. He occupied himself with this poem at Verona, while in the service of the Datario. He addresses the Po in one of the cantos of the poem, begging of it to restrain its rapid course while he writes beside its banks; and yet at this very time his letters are full of complaints of the occupations that take up all his time.

It is a curious subject to enquire, what the fault was in Bojardo's poem, that rendered it necessary that it should be re-written. Berni was not the first to discover this, as Domenichi had already altered the style of every stanza; yet his rifacimento had not caused it to be popular. Meanwhile Ariosto wrote a continuation to it, which he named the "Orlando Furioso" and that became the delight and glory of Italy. The choice of subject in these poets is admirable. When Milton thought of making king Arthur and his knights the heroes of a poem, he selected a subject which was devoid of any quick interest to his countrymen: wars with France and civil struggles had caused the British name to be forgotten. But the Mahometans were still the terror of Italy. After the taking of Constantinople, they pressed near upon the peninsula; Venice was kept in check, and at one time Ancona was actually taken by them. Every Italian heart felt triumph in the overthrow of a Pagan and Saracen, and warmed with interest when it was related how they were driven from France. Bojardo made choice of the subject, and he added life to it, by the introduction of Angelica. His invention, his poetic fervour, his ceaseless flow of fancy, were admirable; yet he was forgotten. Many of Ariosto's episodes are more tedious, and they are less artificially introduced; but Ariosto was a greater poet: his style is perfectly beautiful, and his higher flights entitle him to a very high rank among the writers of verse. Perhaps, in the whole range of narrative poetry, there is no passage to compete with the progress of Orlando's madness.

Berni evidently appreciated Ariosto's merits, and he saw in Bojardo's a groundwork that emulated them. His faults are doubtless greater than we can judge, since style alone occasioned his want of popularity: he has many Lombardisms; and I heard a learned Tuscan say, that nothing to their refined ear was so intolerable as the pronunciation of the north. Style, however, was his only fault; and Berni, in altering that, brought at once to light the beauty of the poem: he changed no incident, no sentiment, scarcely a thought; stanza by stanza he remodelled the expression, and this was all; yet it would almost seem that he thus communicated a Promethean spark. Nothing can be more false than the accusation, that he added any thing licentious to the poem. Tiraboschi even gives credit to this idea; but, on the contrary, his expressions are always more reserved than those of the original. The comparison may easily be made, by collating, in the two authors, the passages which describe the meeting of Bradamante and Fiordelisa, the welcome given by Angelica to Orlando when he arrives at Albracca, and the journey of these two from Albracca to Provence; and the above assertion will at once be proved; nor is it true that Berni turned a serious poem into a burlesque. He added lightness and gaiety, but seldom any ridicule. It is now easy, since Dr. Panizzi's edition of the original poem, to compare it with the rifacimento: an Italian alone can be a competent judge; but it is easy for any one to see the difference between the earnest language of Bojardo, and the graceful wit of his improver. We will give, as a specimen of the usual style of his alterations, two stanzas, selected by chance in the poem: they describe the death of Agricane. Bojardo writes thus, speaking of Orlando, when his adversary, having received a mortal wound, asks him to baptize him[92]:—

"He had his face covered with tears, and he dismounted on the ground: he took the wounded king in his arms, and placed him on the marble of the fountain: he was never weary of weeping with him, entreating for pardon with a gentle voice. Then he baptized him with water from the fountain, praying God for him with joined hands. He remained but a short time, finding his face and whole person cold, whence he perceived that he was no more. He leaves him on the marble of the fountain, all armed as he was, with his sword in his hand, and his crown, and then he turned towards the horse, and thought that he recognised Bajardo."

Thus alters Berni[93]:—

"Having his face covered with tears, the count dismounts from Brigliadoro: he took the wounded king in his arms, and placed him on the brink of the fountain, entreating, while he kisses and embraces him, that all past injuries might be forgotten. Not able to say yes, the king inclines his head, and Orlando baptized him with water; and, at last, he found his face and whole person cold, whence he judged that he was no more; wherefore he left him on the verge of the fountain, all armed as he was, with sword in hand, and with his crown: then, turning his look upon his horse, it seemed to him that he recognised Bajardo."

This, of course, is a very clumsy mode of showing the difference; and yet it gives the mere English reader an idea of the extent of Berni's alterations.

But, although he did not materially change either event or thought, he added to the poem; and the real merits of Berni became very evident in the introductory stanzas which he appended to each canto. It seems to me that these have never been sufficiently appreciated: they are not jocose nor burlesque; they are beautiful apostrophes, or observations upon the heart and fortunes of human beings, embodied in poetic language and imagery. Many of them are to be preferred to those of Ariosto, whom he imitated in these additions. We have noticed his address to the Po, which is singularly beautiful; another well known interpolation is the introduction of a description of himself: this, it is true, is burlesque; but the style of irony is exquisite, and, surely, may be allowed, as it is directed against his own faults and person. Mr. Rose has translated this passage, and published it in his prose abstract of the "Innamorato." Dr. Panizzi has quoted it also in his work. He gives an account of his life; of his birth at Lamporecchio; of the "piteous plight" in which he sojourned at Florence till the age of nineteen; and his journey to Rome, when he attached himself to his kinsman, the cardinal Bibbiena, who neither did him harm nor good and, on his death, how he passed to the nephew,—

and then "in search of better bread," how he became secretary to the Datario. Yet, he could not please his new patron; although

Then he describes his own disposition and person:—

No one ever detested servitude as he did, though servitude was still his dole. He then whimsically describes himself as inhabiting the palace of a fairy; where, according to Bajardo, people are kept happily and merrily, amusing themselves, and passing their lives in indolence. Berni supposes himself to be one of the company, together with a French cook, Maitre Pierre Buffet, who had been in the service of Giberti; and he describes his beau-ideal of the indolent life he loved. Tired with noise, lights, and music, he finds a lonely room, and causes the servants to bring a bed into it,—a large bed,—in which he might stretch himself at pleasure; and, finding his friend the cook, another bed is brought into the same room for him, and between the two a table was placed: this table was well supplied with the most savoury viands:—

This is a specimen of Berni's humour, which gave the name of Bernesco to poetry of this nature. More serious and more elegant verses abound, as we have already remarked, and prove that Berni deserves a very high place among Italian poets.

ARIOSTO

Ludovico Ariosto was born in the castle of Reggio, a city of Lombardy, on the 8th of September, 1474. Both his parents were of ancient and honourable lineage: the Ariosti had long been distinguished in Bologna, when a daughter of their house, Lippa Ariosta, a lady of great beauty and address, being married to Obizzo III., marquis of Este, brought a number of her relatives to Ferrara: these, by her influence, she so fortunately established in offices of power and emolument, that they flourished for several generations among the grandees of that petty but splendid principality.

The poet's mother. Madonna Daria, belonged to a branch of the Malegucci, one of the wealthiest and noblest families in the north of Italy. Nicolo Ariosto, his father, held various places of trust and authority under the dukes of Ferrara. In youth he had been the companion of Borso, and steward of the household of Hercules, besides being occasionally employed on embassies to the pope and the king of France; in which he is said to have received more substantial recompence than barren dignities, in ample official salaries, and rich presents for special services. At the birth of the poet he was governor of the castle and territory of Reggio, and afterwards advanced to those of Modena; but as emolument came easily, and there were abundant temptations, besides heavy family expenses, to spend it lavishly, wealth never accumulated in his hands: wherefore, having nine younger children born to him, his views with respect to the eldest, Ludovico, were prudently directed towards establishing him in some profession, whereby he might acquire riches and rank for himself by perseverance in honourable labour. At the age of fourteen or fifteen years,—when he had already signalised himself by composing a drama on the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, which was performed by his little brothers and sisters,—no doubt as happily as the same subject in the Midsummer Night's Dream (whenever that happened) was enacted by Bottom the weaver and his comrades, or, rather, as happily as Oberon, Titania, and their train could have done it in fairy-land,—the young poet was sent, grievously against his will, to study civil law at Padua under two eminent practitioners, Angelo Castrinse and Il Maino. With them, like Ovid, Petrarch, Tasso, Marino, or our own Milton and Cowper, he spent five years to little profit, hating his profession, and studying so listlessly, that it became more and more manifest, the longer he drawled at it, that he never would excel in the strife of words and tournaments of tongues, by which the ample fortunes and broad lands of many families, whose founders the gods had fortunately not made poetical, were then, as now, like the prizes at hardier exercises, acquired. Nicolo Ariosto, therefore, at length abandoned the folly of spoiling a good poet to make a bad lawyer, and permitted his son to return to those learned studies and exercises of native talent, which had been either suspended, or indulged in by stealth, after his parent, "with spears and lances," had driven him from them into the toils of pleadings and precedents. Released from these trammels, (strewed as they were to his loathing eye with the mangled remains of causes, like cobwebs with sculls, wings, and fragments of flies,) Ludovico, at the age of twenty, found himself free to expatiate in that fields of classic literature, whose buried treasures, in his age, continued still to be dug up and brought to light from time to. time; or to roam abroad seeking adventures suited to his youthful imagination, in the wilds of French and Spanish romance, then recently thrown open to their countrymen by Pulci and Boiardo.

However enriched his mind in earlier youth might have been with knowledge of the dead languages—and we are required to believe that he had made a very promising Latin oration while he was a mere boy—he found, on returning to them, that he had lost so much as to need the help of a master to construe a fable of Æsop. But what he lost at law, he recovered at leisure, and added so much more to his stock; that he speedily became eminent among his contemporaries (at a time when Latin was more cultivated than Italian) for the critical skill; or, more probably; the quickness of apprehension and delicacy of taste; with which he elecidated obscure passages in Horace and Ovid. These appear to have been his favourite authors; and each of them; in the sequel; he not a little resembled; in their very dissimilar excellences. Under the tuition of Gregorio da Spoleti; a scholar of high repute; whom he has gratefully celebrated in the epistle to Bembo (Satire VI.); he so far perfected himself in the language of ancient Rome; that his verses in it were admired and commended by the greatest adepts in that factitious style of composition. It was the folly of the learned of that age and the preceding, to make Latin the universal language of writers who aimed at the honours of literature; a scheme so preposterous, that none but the learned could ever have stumbled upon it in their ignorance of every thing but what the relics of ancient books could teach them. To men of practical knowledge, it must have occurred, that all the fragments of Roman authors could, at the most, furnish a vocabulary comparatively small, and utterly inadequate to meet the demands of extending science, through new and ever-changing forms of society. Under such a servitude as made the Roman tongue itself pass under the Roman yoke, no phrase unauthorised by classic precedent could be hazarded, nor might a foreign word be engrafted upon the pure stock without appearing a barbarism. Meanwhile the very rhythm, accent, and pronunciation of the original being lost, scholars in every country were obliged to adapt these to the vernacular sounds of vowels and consonants among themselves; so that an Oxonian and a Tuscan, though they might understand each other by the eye on paper, would be nearly unintelligible by the ear and the living voice. It is manifest that nothing better than everlasting patchwork, of the same unchangeable materials, how diversely soever combined (like the patterns produced by the kaleidoscope, ever variable, yet little distinguishable from another), would have constituted the eloquence, poetry, and polite literature of modern Europe. No people would have suffered more than the Italians themselves, by employing a defunct and unimproveable tongue, in which their brightest geniuses must have been but secondary planets, dimly reflecting, through a hazy atmosphere, the borrowed beams of luminaries, themselves obscured by distance, as well as imperfectly seen from partial eclipses. It would then have been the glory of Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto, to have written what Virgil, Cicero, and Horace would have as little relished in diction as they could have comprehended in substance, where things, persons, customs, and arts, un existent in their time, were the burthen of every original theme. On the other hand, equally simple, obvious, and beautiful, was the only living use that could be made of the dead languages (beyond the profit and delight of studying them in their surviving models); namely, that which time has made of them by transmutation and transfusion into modern tongues of such terms as were congenial to the latter, or could be rendered so by being employed, first, in technical or peculiar, and afterwards in elegant and familiar senses, to obviate the necessity of inventing new and inexpressive words, as the occasion of science and taste required. The Italian, French, Spanish, and English languages have thus been enriched and adorned with classical interpolations, so gradually adopted, that they seemed to grow naturally out of their respective stocks, as the sphere of knowledge increased, and its details became more multiform.

This golden age of Ariosto's life was shortened by the death of his father; who left to his eldest son, with means exceedingly small, the responsibility of supporting his mother, and training up his nine brothers and sisters. In the sixth of his Satires,—satires which are almost wholly personal and autobiographic,—he says, that on this occasion he was obliged, at four and twenty years of age, to abandon Thalia, Euterpe, and all the nine Muses; to turn from quiet studies to active duties, and exchange Homer for waste-books and ledgers, (squarci e vacchette). These trusts, the young, ambitious, fiery-minded poet faithfully and self-denyingly fulfilled; and he who, under parental injunction, at the most docile period of life, would not submit to the profitable drudgery of the law, now, in the very flower and pride of his genius, with filial piety and fraternal affection, yielded to a domestic yoke, and became the father of his family. In this honourable character he so well husbanded his narrow patrimony, that he portioned off now one, then another sister, and provided education for his four brothers, who, as they grew up, entered into the service of sundry princes and nobles, as was the custom with the minor gentry in that half-feudal age. Gabriele cultivated literature, and excelled in the composition of Latin verse; but, making Statius his model, he was never worthy to compete, even in this respect, with his more illustrious brother. Galasso entered into the church, which was then the wealthy and lavish patroness of those, who, by their subserviency to her domination, or their able advocacy of it, sought the good things of the present life under the guise of having their affections fixed on higher, holier, and eternal things. Yet the latter could hardly be said to be used as a pretence for the purpose of deceiving; so lax, shameless, mercenary, and ambitious was the hierarchy of that age. Such profligacy, however, must not be laid to the charge of Galasso, of whom nothing bad is known. "Galasso, in the city of Evander, is seeking a surplice to put over his night-gown," says Ludovico in his second Satire; meaning, to obtain a bishop's robe and rochet—to become a prelate or a canon. Alexander was of a more enterprising disposition; and delighting in foreign travel, lie attached himself to the train of the cardinal Hippolito d'Este, brother to Alfonso duke of Ferrara, whom he accompanied into Hungary; and, according to his brother's description of that imperious patron's court, appears to have fretted away his hour upon a stage of artificial manners, dissipated pleasures, and emasculating duties. Carlo, of whom nothing particular is recorded, took up his abode in the kingdom of Naples, where he died. These particulars are gathered chiefly from the sixth Satire, with the additional intelligence, in the second, that, at the time of writing it, the author had to furnish a dowry to his fifth and last sister, then about to be married. Though this must have been twenty years after the death of their father, the mother was still living with him. The allusion to her in the context has often been quoted, but it is so simply and purely beautiful, that it cannot be quoted amiss here. Excusing himself by many reasons for not going abroad; and having mentioned, in the foregoing lines, the dispersion of all the other members of the family from their common home, except himself and her; he says,

But while Ariosto, from his twenty-fourth to his forty-fifth year, was thus humbly, yet honourably, nourishing his mother and training up his brothers and sisters—though his studies were much interrupted at first, and he was obliged to abandon the Greek language altogether (which he had recently been recovering)—he maintained his reputation among the first Latin scholars; and in the same busy interval achieved his greatest triumph in the literature of his own land. Under the voluntary burthen of domestic cares, the buoyancy of irrepressible genius bore him up from obscurity; and whatever might have been the secret misgivings, or the generous forecastings, of undeveloped but conscious powers, he found himself, at nine and twenty years of age, in the first circles of Italian society, courted, admired, applauded, and of course envied, both for his conversation, his learning, and his poetry. In the latter, indeed (judging by what remains), he seems to have produced nothing but two or three indifferent dramas, certain loose love elegies, with a few middling sonnets and madrigals,—all fantastic and pleasant enough in their way, but the best of them affording no great promise that their writer would ere long surpass all predecessors in one wide field of invention, and leave to successors nothing to do in it but—not to imitate him: so late and slowly, often, are the most extraordinary talents brought into exercise. It is difficult to imagine, in our cold clime, with our refractory tongue, and accustomed as we are to the phlegm of our countrymen, how such performances as the above could raise a man to celebrity: but verse was not then the pastime of every lover of verse; and reputations were not so numerous as they are in these days, when there are a thousand avenues to the temple of fame not then opened,—and quite as many out of it,—while candidates are seen crowding in such throngs as to tread on one another's heels, those behind forcing onward those in front; so that our literary ephemera resemble a procession of spectators through a palace, when a royal corpse lies in state; multitudes coming in, passing on, going out continually, a few pausing, none stopping. The Italian language, however, it must be observed, for all the minor and more exquisite forms of verse, is not less felicitously and inimitably adapted, than is the French to the badinage of prose. Ariosto gained credit for these bagatelles, in an age when Bembo, Molza, and many others were his contemporaries, who, to this hour, are chiefly known by such things, and nothing better. But, for some reason or other which is not apparent, Ariosto was certainly looked up to, and renowned by anticipation, for a long contemplated achievement of equal daring to any of the knights' adventures which in due course he celebrated, and which proved not less successful in the issue than his own "Astolpho's Journey to the Moon:" for in this (the "Orlando Furioso"), the madness of his hero covered him with more glory than the restoring of the Paladin's lost wits did the rider of the hippogriff. Ariosto, indeed, was the very Astolpho of song, and both his Paladins and their countries must be sought in the moon, or nowhere.

He was, during the greater portion of this eventful period of his life, in the service of cardinal Hippolito d'Este, who affected to be a Mæcenas, and who, at least as much from vanity and ostentation as from genuine taste or delight in their compositions, assembled round him the prime scholars and wits of the age. By some of his biographers, the poet is said to have received munificent proofs that the princely ecclesiastic knew how to value the endowments of the Muses more than personages of his rank are wont to do. But this seems very questionable, from the poet's own account of his patron's bounty in his second Satire, which may be noticed hereafter. Leisure and competence, however, he must have enjoyed during this irksome and almost menial servitude, under which, with all its debasements, he produced his "Orlando Furioso." Having commenced the poem, he communicated the specimen and plan to his friend cardinal Bembo, who, influenced by the pedantic prejudice formerly alluded to, seriously advised him to compose it in Latin; a language in which, with all the mastery that a modern could attain over it, the licentious fables of chivalry—licentious in every sense, in diction, sentiment, plot, narrative, and morals,—would have appeared as heterogeneous and outlandish as the wrath of Achilles in Chinese, or the piety of Æneas in Sanscrit. Mr. Roscoe says of Sanazzaro and Bembo, who were brother rivals for the honours of Parnassus, that while the former "turned all his talents for the improvement of Latin poesy, the latter persevered in cultivating his native tongue."[94] Most people can give better advice than they take: Bembo, it seems, took better than he gave; and Ariosto had sagacity enough to follow his counsellor's example rather than his precept, nobly answering, "I would rather stand among the first of writers in my own tongue, than below Ovid or Virgil himself in theirs."

This task, therefore, for fifteen years, he pursued, with occasional external interruptions, but none probably from within; for, his mind being impregnated with the great conception, he could not help brooding over it by day and by night, amidst business and pleasure, in crowds and in solitude, at Rome as ambassador from the duke to the pope, and at Ferrara as a courtier in the palace of cardinal Hippolito; but especially at his birth-place, Reggio, in the retirement of a villa belonging to one of his maternal relatives, Sigismondo Malegucci. Here, in one of the chambers of an ancient tower within the domain, he elaborated canto after canto of that most anomalous yet impressive poem, which, while it appears as unconnected as a tissue of dreams in its details, (as it resembles the stuff which dreams are made of in its materials,) is nevertheless one of the most perfect webs of narrative that fancy ever spun, or genius wove, from the silkworm produce of a poet's brain. No rival composition of the same or any other class of heroic verse has yet proved equally attractive to Italian readers in every rank of life; though, in the "Gerusalemme Liberata" of Tasso, consummate skill and genius of the highest order have constructed an epic according to the strictest rules of art, to conciliate the learned, and at the same time embellished it with all the graces of romance, to charm the multitude, who love to be pleased, because they cannot help it, and care not by what means, so that these be but "rich and strange."

Meanwhile the duke of Ferrara, wishing to pacify the wrath of Julius II., who threatened him not only with the thunders of the Vatican (which were no impotent artillery in those days), but with "force and arms," in the strongest sense of the legal verbiage, so terribly illustrated in appeals to the sword; it is no small proof of the ability and address in worldly affairs of one who lived amidst a creation of ideals of his own rearing, that Ariosto was despatched as ambassador to Rome on this occasion. Though in the sequel he did not effect his purpose of appeasing the ferocious pontiff; yet, by his eloquence; he persuaded him to feign a milder mood; and send an answer which meant less favour than the words seemed to imply. For soon afterwards, Julius, who had set his heart upon adding Ferrara to the ecclesiastical states, entered into a league with the Venetians, who coveted Padua as the quarter adjacent to their territories; and, while his holiness furnished an army, the doge sent a fleet up the Po, to attack the capital of Alfonso at once by land and by water. The papal forces, however, were defeated at the battle of Ravenna, and the republican squadron was beaten, dispersed, or captured on the river. On this occasion, Ariosto, unlike Horace (his master in verse, but not in arms), fought gallantly, and made prize of one of the enemy's richest vessels, laden with military stores. This appears to be authenticated, though he himself never alludes to the circumstance in his Satires (when he is boasting of his services, and murmuring at their ill requital), and notwithstanding his reputed timidity on the water. At the same time, the proof usually given of the latter, it must be allowed, is too equivocal to establish the fact; namely, that when he had occasion to disembark, he would pertinaciously wait till every body else had landed, before he would venture to descend from the deck, using the phrase, de "puppe novissimus exi:" but the coolest captain, when his ship is wrecked or foundering, makes it a point of honour and duty to be the last to abandon it. He is likewise said to have been as indifferent a horseman, as good seamen often are (though he was none), riding slowly and cautiously, and alighting on the least appearance of peril or inconvenience in his way. Personally a coward he may have been, but mentally courageous he undoubtedly was: there is no deficiency of spirit traceable in his conduct on some trying occasions, any more than there is in his verses at any time. Indeed, one who had not the keenest intellectual delight in the boldest enterprises, the most appalling dangers, and difficulties insurmountable except by magic intervention, would hardly have written "Orlando Furioso;" for in no work of imagination does the author more effectually dispossess himself of himself, and become for the time being the knight or the giant whose exploits he is celebrating.

After his victories, Alfonso, still anxious to conciliate the pope, proposed a second embassy to Rome; but none of his other diplomatists being willing to hazard themselves in the presence of tire fiery Julius, Ariosto was again induced to accept the charge,—no mean proof of constitutional intrepidity, or else an ascendancy of mind over nerves which few philosophers have attained. Accordingly he set out; but (as he tells us himself in one of his Satires) after escaping all the hazards of the way, every where infested by brigands in those troublous times, he met with so uncourteous a reception from the chafed pontiff, that he was glad to escape as quietly and secretly as he could, having received information that, as Alfonso's proxy, he ran no small risk of being treated as the holy father would have been happy to have treated his master, had he presented himself at the Vatican. Indeed, Julius is said to have openly threatened to throw the poet into the sea, if he did not make his way back as speedily as he might; a hint of which Ariosto promptly availed himself, not presuming to entertain a hope, had he been cast upon the mercy of the waves, that he should have the good fortune of Arion, to charm the dolphins with his minstrelsy, after finding that the sacred laurel, which even the lightning spares[95], could not make his head inviolable at Rome. Alfonso himself, in one of his fruitless negotiations with the implacable Julius, being at Rome, and under safe conduct, was so alarmed by the perfidious treatment which he experienced from the pontiff (who in the mean time, during a truce, had seized Reggio, and demanded Ferrara in exchange for his unjust capture), that he deemed it prudent to make his retreat in the various disguises of a huntsman, a livery servant, and a friar, under the protection of the family of Colonna, who by force rescued him from state-confinement in the Vatican, under the abused name of hospitality.

But the duke retaliated in a singular manner for the indignity shown to himself and his representative. The French having taken Bologna, a superb bronze statue of the military pope, by Michel Angelo, was pulled down from its pedestal, and dragged by the populace through the mire about the city, after which it was sent as a present to Alfonso. The indignant duke (a reckless barbarian in this instance), showing as little respect for the exquisite workmanship of the sculptor as he felt for the piety of the pope, with a felicity of revenge almost to be forgiven for its appropriateness, ordered the rich metal to be sent to the furnace, and re-cast into a cannon, to which he gave the name of Julio. The head, however, was spared, and placed as a trophy in the state museum. Julius never forgave the duke, either for the fault of his ancestors in bequeathing to him a territory which the see of Rome coveted, or for his own sin in defending that territory so successfully against both spiritual and secular violence, that he himself (the greatest warrior who ever wore the triple crown) could not wrest it from him. The disappointed pope expired, exclaiming, in his delirium, "Out of Italy, ye French! Out, Alfonso of Este!"[96]

The first edition of the "Orlando Furioso" appeared in 1515; eleven years after its commencement; a second and third; highly improved; followed in the course of six years; and the last from his hand; in 1532, the year of the poet's death. In each succeeding reprint; so many and such large amendments; exclusions; and variations of the original text were adopted; that the example has been very properly held up to young writers as worthy of their diligent imitation—never to think their best performances perfect while a touch is wanting which they can give to heighten their beauty, or a blemish remaining to lower it, which they can remove. In fact, Ariosto ceased not to elaborate his apparently completed work to the latest period of his life. Long after it had attained its full standard of bulk, this sole tree of his fancy continued to flourish, by the perpetuation of the same process which had reared it, putting forth fairer leaves and richer fruit, in perennial course, till the failure of further supply, from his own decay, left it to survive him in imperishable maturity. The principal interruptions of his literary labours seem to have been the necessary dissipation of mind during the aforementioned unfortunate embassies to Rome, his brief government of the disturbed province of Graffagnana, and occasional fits of silence which came upon him when his heart was wrung and his pride wounded by the inconsiderate neglect or the more flagrant ingratitude of mean-spirited patrons. Of the latter, cardinal Hippolito was the chief; and the cause of their mutual estrangement was the refusal of the poet to accompany the haughty priest as one of his retinue on a journey to Hungary to visit his archbishopric of Segovia, which had been bestowed upon him when he was not more than eighteen years old, by king Matteo Corvino, whose queen Beatrice was sister to Leonora of Aragon, Hippolito's mother. This spoiled child of fortune was not only cardinal, priest, statesman, and warrior (in each of which characters he greatly signalised himself, according to the lax notions of morality then prevalent); but in one instance, at least, he was a lover also, and a rejected one, who wreaked upon his favoured rival a revenge which has made his memory infamous. It appears that Hippolito, and his illegitimate brother don Giulio, both paid their addresses (dishonourable ones they must have been on the cardinal's part) to a lady of Ferrara, of singularly attractive accomplishments, who (if marriage were the question to be decided by the courtship of either), it may be presumed, very naturally preferred him with whom a virtuous alliance might be formed. Hippolito, pressing her one day to acknowledge the ground of her preference, she laid the blame of her love on Giulio's beautiful eyes. The cardinal secretly determined to dissolve that charm; and soon after, accompanying his brother on the chase, in a solitary situation, he led him into an ambush of assassins, who sprang upon the unsuspecting youth, dragged him from his horse, and tore out his eyes, while Hippolito stood by, directing the operation, and exulting in the extinction of those fatal luminaries that stood in his light. Guicciardini, indeed, says, that though Giulio's eyes were plucked out (tratti) by the cardinal, they were replaced, without the loss of sight (riposti senza perdita del lume nel luogo loro), by the prompt and careful skill of the chirurgeons. Be this as it might, the man concerning whom such a story could be told, and believed by contemporaries, must have had a character for cruelty and selfishness, which renders probable the arrogance, vindictiveness, and tyranny towards his dependents, of which Ariosto so bitterly, yet so humbly and playfully, complains in his Satires, whenever he alludes to his connection with Hippolito. The magnanimous conduct of Alfonso towards the same unfortunate youth was strikingly contrasted with the treachery and barbarity of Hippolito: for the duke not punishing the cardinal or his accomplices for this outrage, Giulio and his brother Ferdinand conspired against his life. The plot was discovered; and the brothers, having confessed their criminal purpose, were adjudged to lose their heads on the scaffold; but while the axe Avas suspended over them, their sentence was changed into one of perpetual imprisonment. Ferdinand, after suffering this for thirty years, died; but Giulio, at the expiration of fifty-two years, was set at liberty.[97]

The poet was, no doubt, proud of his own ancient blood, and jealous of his personal independence, while he coveted that leisure for the pursuits of literature, on which the felicity of his existence, and the glory of his name, in a great measure depended; feelings little understood or little regarded by superficial grandees, whether in church or state, in respect to those over whom they held authority or influence. A poet, more than any other man, lives within himself; and to do this he must have freedom, ease, and competence, however small: nor is it less for the benefit of others that he should enjoy these necessaries of literary life; since they are to reap the harvest of his hermit-thoughts, sown in secret and cherished in solitude, till they grow into beauty, like plants undistinguished till their blossoms appear, or till they shine through obscurity like stars that come out between light and darkness, because they can no longer be hidden. To writers of every other class, valuable as self-searching, self-knowledge, and self-gratification may be, for their various exercises and undertakings, they draw or collect the greater portion of their materials for study and composition from their converse with ordinary and public affairs, the records of the dead or the living, past or contemporary characters, manners, and events. The historian, the moralist, or the philosopher, may please and profit his own generation, and bequeath intellectual stores of wealth to posterity, by representing the images, tastes, and employments of his own times; but the poet, the perpetual poet, he who alone is a poet in the highest sense, whatever be his theme, and how similar soever his materials may be to those of others, must mould his subject according to the archetypes in his own mind, and yet cause such an universal and undying spirit to pervade it, as shall by sympathy make his thoughts understood and enjoyed in all ages and countries, among all people who can read his language.[98]

Hippolito, praised as he has been for his patronage of letters and arts, and poetically canonised by Ariosto himself, throughout the "Orlando Furioso," in strains as unworthy of his genius as they were unmerited by the hero of it, seems to have been a jackdaw patron, who loved to prank himself with the peacock-feathers of court-poets, and strut before them, well plucked, in his train. It is clear that he very indifferently appreciated those talents which were the admiration of all Italy, and as little understood the temper of their possessor. The proud cardinal scarcely rated them any higher than inasmuch as they afforded him the insolent gratification of saying (to exalt himself) that such rare endowments belonged to one of the creatures whom he affected to keep about him, who would fetch and carry for their patron, while they dare not call their souls their own—if souls they had, who could sell them for the luxury of eating toads, with pleasant countenances, in the great man's presence, and deserving the contempt with which they were treated by submitting to it. To the honour of Ariosto he was not one of this reptile species, though his narrow circumstances through life compelled him to eat hitter bread at tables where he would have loved to sit, if he could have found a place there otherwise than as a dependant. In his second satire he expatiates on the degradation of that bondage, from which his own high spirit, and the cardinal's mean one, had freed him. Writing to his brother Alessandro, who had followed his highness into Hungary, he inquires whether the latter ever names him, or alludes to his pertinacity in remaining behind: he then breaks into indignant complaints against the cardinal's courtiers, for misrepresenting the motives of his conduct:—"Oh! ye, profoundly learned in adulation! the art which you most cultivate and study still countenances him to blame me beyond measure. Mad is the man who dares to contradict his master, even though he say that he has seen the stars at noon, the sun at midnight. When he commends or censures, every voice, on either hand, is heard with one accord approving; and if there be a solitary one that has not hardihood, from downright baseness, to open a mouth, with his whole visage he applauds, and every feature says,—'I too agree with that.'" The writer proceeds to recapitulate the reasons, "many and true," which he had stated to the cardinal himself, face to face, without disguise, why he should stay at home. Several of these are whimsical enough, but they show the humour of the man; and may be comprised thus summarily:—

"I have no wish to make my life shorter than fortune and my stars shall please. Now every change, however slight, would aggravate my malady (an inveterate asthma), and I should either die of it, or my two physicians are mistaken. But over and above what they may say, I understand my own case best, and what is good and what is bad for me. My constitution ill endures hard winters, and theirs beneath the pole (Hungary beneath the pole! the poet was always a strange geographer, but here he is playing) are more intense than ours in Italy. And if the cold should not blast me, the heat would, from stoves which I abominate so much, that I shun them more than the plague. Besides all this, the folks so dress, and eat and drink, and play; in short, do every thing but sleep, in that strange land in winter, that, were I forced to gulp the air, so difficult to breathe, from the Riphean mountains, what with the vapours arising from my stomach, and the rheum falling on my lungs, I certainly should die some night of suffocation. Then heady wines, which are prohibited to me as mortal poison, are by the guests swilled down in monstrous draughts, for not to drink much and undiluted is sacrilege there. All their food too is high seasoned with pepper and spices, which my doctor condemns as pernicious for me. Here you may say, that I might sit down below stairs in a snug chimney corner, far from the ill savour of the company, where the cook would prepare my victuals to my own liking, and I might water my wine at my will, and drink little or none at all. What J while you are all well and feasting above, must I sit from morning till night alone in my cell, alone at my board, like a Carthusian? Then pots and pans for kitchen and chamber would be wanted, and I must have a dower of household furniture settled on me like a new married bride. Supposing, nevertheless, that master Pasquin, the cook, were pleased to dress dinner for me apart; once or twice he might do it, but assuredly the fourth or sixth time, he would set all his face in arms against me (mi farà 'l viso dell' arme). * * * * You will reply, 'begin housekeeping then in your own way, at your own expense; your footman may be your caterer, and you can cook and eat your pullets at your own fireside!'—Mighty well! but by my unlucky servitude under the cardinal, I have not got enough to set up an hotel for myself in his palace. And thanks to thee, Apollo! thanks to you, ye sacred college of the Muses! from your bounty I have not received so much as would buy me a cloak. 'Oh, but your patron has given you something!'[99]—I grant it; something more than would buy me a cloak; but that it was given me for your sake, I don't believe. He has said, and I am free to tell it to every body, that I may put my verses (there is an untranslatable quibble in the original) where I like. His praises composed by me are not the kind of services which he deems worthy of recompence; he doles out his rewards to those who ride post for him, follow him in the park and the city; who don and doff his clothes, and put his wine flasks in the well that they may be cool at the nones; he recompenses those who watch for him at nights, till the smiths rise in the morning to make nails, so that they often fall asleep with the torches burning in their hands. When I have made verses in honour of him, he says, I have done so for my own pleasure and idleness; whereas it would be far more agreeable to him to have me about his own person." After further complaints against his patron, scorn of that patron's flatterers, and vindication of himself for not being one of these, the angry poet exclaims, "What could I do in such a case? I have no skill to shoot partridges flying; nor to hold a hawk or a greyhound in leash. Let lads learn such arts, who wish to practise them. Nor can I conveniently stoop to draw on or pull off his boots and spurs, seeing I am somewhat tall. I have not much taste for victuals, and as for carvings I might very well have served that office in the age of the world when men fed on acorns. I would not choose to superintend Gismondi's[100] housekeeping accounts; nor does it fall to my lot to gallop again to Rome to appease the fury of the second Julius; but even if it did; at my time of life; with this cough, which I probably caught on such an occasion; it does not suit me any longer to run about the streets. If then to perform such drudgery, and seldom to go out of his presence, but stand there like Bootes by the Great Bear,—if this be required of the man who thirsts for gold, rather than enrich myself thus, I choose repose; repose, rather than to occupy myself with cares for which my studies must be abandoned and plunged into Lethe,—studies that do not, indeed, furnish pasture for the body, but feast the mind with food so noble that they deserve not to be neglected. And thus they do for me,—they make poverty less painful, and wealth to be so little desired, that for the love of it I will not part with my freedom: they cause me not to want that which I hope not to obtain; and that neither envy nor spleen consume me when my lord invites Celio and Marone, while I cannot expect to be seen at supper with his highness at Midsummer; amidst a blaze of torches, blinded with their smoke. Here I walk alone and on foot wherever I please, and when I choose to ride, I throw my saddle bags over my horse's back and mount: and this I hold to be a lesser sin than taking a bribe to recommend the cause of a vassal to the prince; or harassing a parish by iniquitous lawsuits, till the people offer pensions to stay proceedings. Wherefore I lift up both hands to heaven, and pray, that either among citizens or countrymen, I may live in peace under my own roof, and that by means of my small patrimony, I may be enabled to spend the remainder of my days without learning a new craft, or making my family blush for me." In the sequel of the epistle, the relenting poet (a freeman at heart, a slave by court habit) condescends to make an offer of certain honorary services which he could render to the cardinal at home (not having "felt himself so stout and nimble as to leap from the hanks of the Po to those of the Danube"), but before he has well concluded his humiliating overture, the exasperation, of which neither scorn, philosophy, nor poetic pride could rid his wounded spirit, returns like an access of disease upon him, and he breaks out into a rhodomontade of defiance. In this passage it is hard to know whether the unhappy writer be most entitled to pity, censure, or admiration: pity for unmerited harshness from his patron; censure for a manifest hankering towards sycophancy; and admiration for his magnanimous resolve, at any rate, to choose freedom and penury rather than abundance and bondage. "If," he says, "for a benefice bestowed on me of five and twenty crowns every four months (yet not so well secured but that they are often litigated), his highness has a right to make me wear a chain, hold me as a bondman, and oblige me to sweat and tremble before him, without any regard, till I break down and die,—let him not imagine such a thing, but tell him plainly that, rather than be a slave, I will bear poverty in patience." He goes on:—