and ally of the Este princes in 1509. But, despite this friendship and alliance, a variety of other plans and schemes made Julius unwilling at that time to assist the Duke of Ferrara with the troops and money which the war waged against him by the Republic of Venice rendered very necessary to him. It was under these circumstances that Ariosto was sent to plead the cause of his patrons at the Court of Rome. It was a very different Court indeed from that which it so soon afterwards became under the immediate successor of Julius, Leo X. Warriors were more in Julius's line than poets. Nevertheless, difficult as the task of persuading the strong and obstinate will of that high-handed Pontiff to change its direction notoriously was, the eloquence of the poet-ambassador accomplished that feat. Julius made a grant of money, and promised troops, which, however, the rapid victory of Alphonso rendered eventually unnecessary.

The circumstances of his second mission made it a far more difficult one. It was again to the same Pontiff, Julius II., that he was sent, and this second journey to Rome was separated from the first by a space of less than twelve months. He went on the first occasion in December 1509, and on the second in August 1510. But in this short interval the shifting policy of Julius had veered to a position of open hostility to the Duke. Alphonso had, at the wish and following the example of the Pope, become the ally of the King of France, and had refused to be false to that alliance when a few months later the Pontiff wished him to be so. Julius gave

way to one of those excesses of passion to which he was subject, and Ariosto's business at Rome was if possible to appease him. But this turned out to be beyond the power of his eloquence. Julius II. was a terrible man in his wrath, which on this occasion was none the less dangerous because it was wholly unreasonable. The envoy found that his life was in danger from the fierce old man's anger, and that it behoved him, if he would reach Ferrara in safety, to make as much haste to leave Rome as he could, facing the dangers of the roads, then in a very disturbed and unsafe condition, rather than the enraged Pontiff.

Ariosto remained in the service of' the Cardinal Hippolito d'Este till the death of the latter on September 3, 1520. But the last three years of this period were such as left a painful memory in his mind. On October 20, 1517, the Cardinal went to Hungary, and wished Ariosto to accompany him. This the poet declined to do, giving as the motives of his refusal-as they are expressed at length in his first Satire-the care which his health required, and the duties he owed to his family-meaning perhaps his mother, but more probably merely his brothers and sisters, who, inasmuch as the poet was then in his forty-third year, must surely

have been able to take care of themselves. To these impediments one of his biographers suggests as an additional one, that he had not yet completed the revision of his great poem, according to his wishes; as if, remarks a subsequent writer, he could not have done that in Hungary as well as in Italy! Not, perhaps, quite so well. Nevertheless, I feel it difficult to believe that the poet's refusal to accompany his patron was based on any of the motives assigned. There must, I think, have been something-perhaps a crowd of very little things which rendered the relationship between the Cardinal and his protégé not so pleasant as it had been when they were both young men together. Partly it may have been, as seems not unlikely from various expressions to be met with here and there in his Satires, that he was tired of leading a dependent life, and longed for his liberty. But he does not speak in kindness of the Cardinal. In one place in the sixth Satire he speaks of the number of years during which he was oppressed by the yoke of the Cardinal.' Other phrases may be found, also, which seem to indicate that the hopes he had conceived from the friendship of his princely friend had ended in disappointment. Possibly he may have discovered that the Cardinal was scarcely fitted to be the friend and patron of a poet, when His Eminence, on being presented with the 'Orlando Furioso' for the first time, showed his sense of the value of the offering by saying, 'Why, Messer Ludovico! Where in the world have you scraped together such a parcel of nonsense?'

It is certain, however, that the Cardinal Hippolito was seriously offended at Ariosto's refusal to accompany him to Hungary. He does not seem to have altogether broken with him, however, at the moment, and three years later he died. It was during the years that he passed in the Court of the Cardinal Hippolito that he composed the immortal Orlando Furioso,' which must have been begun very shortly after he entered into his service. For it was in 1516 that, after' ten years bestowed upon his poem,' he resolved to allow it to be published, not because he conceived it to be as perfect as he still hoped to make it, but because he thought it desirable to hear the judgments and opinions of the world of readers. And it was not till 1532, that, having profited by the criticisms of the reading world, and by his own matured reflection and study, he caused it to be again printed, with innumerable corrections, alterations, and additions, to such an extent that the poem now consisted of fortysix cantos instead of forty as before. That the octave stanzas, which run so fluently, and seem to the reader to have been composed so easily, were in fact produced with much labour and care, that they were polished and repolished, and that no amount of lima labor was spared, may be seen by anybody who will visit the

public library at Ferrara, and there, under the courteous guidance o the director of that institution, examine the manuscripts of the 'Orlando Furioso' preserved there.

Nevertheless, even the second improved edition, which indeed almost may be considered a new version of the poem, was very far from satisfying the judgment of the poet. He complains that not only his domestic troubles-lawsuits about his little property and the like but the demands made upon his time by the Duke, into whose service' he entered after leaving that of the Duke's younger brother the Cardinal (i.e. about 1520), had prevented him from giving that amount of time and care to the perfection of his poem that he had wished to do. How much, however, he did accomplish in that respect is shown from a curious passage in the work of his intimate friend Cinzio Giambattista Giraldi, on the Composition of Romances,' which runs thus:

First of all, he (Ariosto) read and revised his poem for the space of sixteen years after the first edition of it (i.e. the years from 1516 to 1532). Nor did he ever pass a day during all that time without working at it either pen in hand or in his thoughts. (Three years must at least be deducted from this time, according to his own showing (Satires 4 and 6), as his biographer Barotti remarks, these years having been employed in a manner to be mentioned presently, which made all literary labour impossible.) At length, when it was brought to such a condition of correctness and increased bulk as seemed fitting to him, he carried it to many men of excellent genius in different parts of Italy to have their judgment on it-to Monsignore Bembo,2 to Molza,3 to Andrea Navagero the learned Venetian commentator, historian, and poet, and to many others, whom he mentions in his last canto. And, having received their criticisms, he took his work home; and as Apelles was wont to do with his pictures, so likewise did he with his poems. For during two whole years before sending the work to press, he exposed it in a room of his house, and there left it to be judged of by anybody. And finally, having gathered thus opinions in great number both within the city and abroad, he made choice of those which appeared to him the soundest.'

The reader curious in such matters must not be deceived by the date, 1515, given in an edition printed at Venice. The first edition is that of 1516. Bibliographers reckon ten editions printed during the lifetime of the poet. One or two of these seem to have been executed under his superintendence, and must be supposed to have been further essays towards that perfection which he was always hoping to reach, but never to the last succeeded in reaching to his own satisfaction.

2 The celebrated littérateur and Cardinal, he who wrote to the Bishop of Carpentras, Sudoleto, begging him for heaven's sake not to read the Epistles of St. Paul, as they would utterly spoil his Latin style.

A brother poet, a Modenese.

6

The domestic troubles, of which we hear much, from the poet's lamentations on this score in different passages of his Satires, seem to have all turned on the 'res angusta domi,' and the failure of certain sources of revenue, which eked out the smallness of a patrimony which had been reduced by drawing on it for the supply of the needs of a family of ten children. It would seem that he was, after the death of the Cardinal, in the receipt of what he calls a stipendio' from the Duke, and that this was in some way, or for some reason or other, 'suppressed.' It does not appear that the misfortune arose from any ill-will of the Duke. And Barotti suggests that probably Ariosto's allowance consisted of an assignment on some custom duty, which may have been itself abolished, and the poet's stipendio' thus not forthcoming. He held also another source of income, which is worth mentioning as a specimen of the ineradicable jobbery and abuses which afforded the means of providing for the hangers-on of princes, whether poets and men of learning, or other less creditable dependents. Ariosto received in partnership with one Costabili (the well-known name of a Ferrarese patrician family, now extinct) the third part of the notary's fee due in a certain office in Milan on every contract drawn up there. This brought him in seventy-five crowns a year, but it was continually liable to suspension from war in Lombardy or other disturbances.

At any rate, it is abundantly clear that Ariosto was discontented with his patrons, and deemed that all that he had ever received from them very insufficiently remunerated his services. This is expressed with sufficient pungency, and with marked intention to make the complaint a permanent and unforgotten one, by the poet's assumption of a device, consisting of a bee-hive from which a rustic is driving away the bees with fire and smoke, with the motto pro bono malum, and it may be found printed at the end of the poem in many editions, especially in that of 1532.

There is extant, however, a curious Latin letter from Paulo Maurizio to the second Hippolito Cardinal d'Este, nephew of Ariosto's patron, which shows that others thought themselves worse treated than the poet, and which is at all events worth quoting as a curious indication of the sort of relationship then existing between 'the learned' and 'the great.'

6

'Your mind,' he writes, was offended by the liberty I took in my letters. For I complained that whereas your father's brother, a young man of high intelligence, inflamed with the love of immortality, gave a golden chain worth 500 crowns for the fables about the madness of Orlando, printed with dedication to him, you, so great a man, so celebrated, and so wealthy, did not send me so much as a brass button for my book on Roman laws, to which those mad

stories of Orlando cannot in any wise, as it seems to me, be compared.'

Our Ludovico was much troubled, too, by a lawsuit respecting a family estate held by him in the neighbourhood of Ferrara, in which the Duke's fiscal officer was his opponent. It does not appear that the Duke himself meddled in the matter in any way, and we have no means of knowing what may have been the merits of the dispute. But the poet thought, as it should seem, that the Duke might have, and ought to have, interfered in his behalf; and this was another source of discontent, which in 1522, about two years after he had entered the Duke's service, impelled him to remonstrate with Alphonso, begging him either to provide for him more effectually, or to suffer him to leave his service, in order to better his fortune elsewhere. The Duke was unwilling to accept the latter alternative, and as a means of providing for his poet courtier gave him the appointment of Governor of the Garfagnana, a mountain district in the Apennines to the westward of Modena, of which Pontremoli is in modern times the capital.

Such an appointment was by no means what the poet wanted. It was to him very much like receiving a stone in return for a request for bread. The region in question is still to a great degree, and was in those days to a very much greater degree, a wild, remote, and rough country, where it was little likely that the poet would find one congenial soul to speak to in the whole length and breadth of his 'government!' The task proposed to him was, moreover, a specially difficult and disagreeable one at that particular conjuncture. Recent war had filled those hills with disbanded soldiers, who were in fact nothing else than mere banditti, and the whole district was in a most disturbed and dangerous condition. And the poet's disgust at having to go thither, the discomforts of his life there, and his own opinion of his own unfitness for the task entrusted to him, may be read at length in the fourth Satire. Nevertheless, he succeeded in it, as a ‘Governor' of more ordinary mould might probably not have succeeded. By a mixture of kindness, persuasion, and firmness, not a little aided probably (and it is very characteristic of Italy and Italian ways even to the present day that it should have been so) by his reputation as a poet, which had already reached the lawless bands infesting the district, he, before the three years, for which his appointment was to last, were at an end, succeeded in restoring a degree of order and tranquillity such as had not been known in the country for years. And one of his early biographers has preserved an account of an incident which affords us a singularly vivid and picturesque peep at the life of that epoch.