LORD BYRON visited Ferrara, on his way to Rome in April 1817; and a visit to the prison of Tasso roused the energies of his genius, not only to the above fine allusion to the author of "Jerusalem Delivered," but to the poems of the "Lament of Tasso" and " Parasina." In June 1819, he again visited these scenes, and writes, "I went over the Ariosto MSS., &c. again at Ferrara, with the castle, and cell, and house, &c. Ferrara is much decayed and depopulated, but the castle still exists entire; and I saw the court where Parasina and Hugo were beheaded, according to the annal of Gibbon."

"Ferrara is supposed to occupy the site of Forum Allieni, which, contracted to Forum Arrii, would easily pass into its present name. The modern city dates its foundation from the fifth century, when the invasion of the Huns, and the destruction of Aquileia, drove the inhabitants to take refuge amid marshes and forests. Its origin is therefore similar to Venice itself. In 585, it was fortified by Smaragdus, the exarch of Ravenna, but it was subsequently enlarged at various times. The era of its glory dates from the thirteenth century, under the house of Este, first as its chief magistrates, and afterwards as hereditary princes, either holding of the Pope, or maintaining their independence. On the demise of the last duke it reverted to the Pope; and from that period we may date its rapid decline. A cardinal

FERRARA.

legate now resides in the ducal palace, which stands moated and flanked with towers in the heart of the subjugated town, like a tyrant entrenched among slaves. There is nothing very remarkable in its architecture, nor in that of any of the other buildings; but the palaces have an air of solidity and magnificence. The straight streets in the new parts of the town want houses, while every where there are traces of decay." "During the greater part of the sixteenth century there were few of the courts of Europe that could vie in splendour with that of Ferrara, and polished strangers from France and Germany were astonished at its magnificence."

The author of the "Orlando," the Homer of modern Italy, is claimed with pride by the Ferrarese as a fellow-citizen, although he was born at Reggio. They possess his bones, and can shew his arm-chair, his ink-stand, and his autographs. The house in which he resided, the room in which he died, are designated by his own memorial replaced on the outside, and by a recent inscription, which states that two hundred and eighty years after the death of the divine poet, the house was purchased and repaired by the Podesta, at the expense of the city. Ariosto was buried in the church of the Benedictines. The bust which there surmounted his tomb was struck by lightning about the middle of the last century, and a crown

of iron laurels which wreathed the brows of the poet was melted away; an incident of which Lord Byron has made an elegant use in his well-known stanzas descriptive of Ferrara —

"The lightning rent from Ariosto's bust

The iron crown of laurels' mimicked leaves;

Nor was the ominous element unjust,

For the true laurel-wreath which glory weaves

Is of the tree no bolt of thunder cleaves,

And the false semblance but disgraced his brow:

Yet still, if fondly superstition grieves,

Know that the lightning sanctifies below

Whate'er it strikes-yon head is doubly sacred now.”

Childe Harold, canto iv. st. 41.

Hazlitt, in his "Notes of a Journey through France and Italy," says: "Of all the places I have seen in Italy, it is the one I should by far most covet to live in. It is the ideal of an Italian city, once great, now a shadow of itself. Whichever way you turn, you are struck with picturesque beauty and faded splendours, but with nothing squalid, mean, or vulgar. The grass grows in the well-paved streets. You look down long avenues of buildings, or of garden-walls, with summer-houses or fruit-trees projecting over them, and airy palaces with dark portraits gleaming through the grated windows. You turn, and a chapel bounds your view one way—a broken arch another, at the end of the vacant, glim

FERRARA.

mering, fairy perspective. You are in a dream—in the heart of a romance; you enjoy the most perfect solitude-that of a city which was once filled with the busy hum of men,' and of which the tremulous fragments at every step strike the sense, and call up reflection. In short, nothing is to be seen of Ferrara but the remains, graceful and romantic, of what it was; no sordid object intercepts or sullies the retrospect of the past; it is not degraded and patched up, like Rome, with upstart improvements-with earthenware and oilshops; it is a classic vestige of antiquity, drooping into peaceful decay—a sylvan suburb

'Where buttress, wall, and tower,
Seem fading fast away

From human thoughts and purposes,
To yield to some transforming power,
And blend with the surrounding trees.'

Here Ariosto lived-here Tasso occupied first a palace, and then a dungeon. Verona has even a more sounding name, boasts a finer situation, and contains the tomb of Juliet; but the same tender melancholy grace does not hang upon its walls, nor hover round its precincts, as round those of Ferrara, inviting to endless leisure and pensive musing. Ferrara, while it was an independent state, was a flourishing and wealthy city, and contained 70,000 inhabitants; but from the time it

fell into the hands of the Popes, in 1597, it declined; and it has now little more than an historical and poetical being."

"The whole appearance of this city is mournful in the highest degree. The day we were there was some local festival; and if Ferrara ever could look gay, it would have looked gay then. But never did city exhibit a more dismal and desolate aspect. The grass waved all over the streets, where the bordering palaces were crumbling to ruin, and the walls falling to decay. On account of this festival, the cathedral was richly hung with glaring draperies, which, in some measure, turned our observation from the building itself. architecture appeared to resemble most of the cathedrals in the north of Italy.

Its

"The castle stands near the cathedral. It is still in good preservation-moated and towered as of old. But, no longer the scene of princely festivity or knightly gallantry, its decorated halls and wide courts resound only with the solemn tread of priests and the slowrolling equipages of the cardinal legate, who resides here in quality of governor for the Pope. The walls and ceilings of the principal apartments are covered with now faded frescos by Titian and Dosso Dosso, the only painter of any eminence in the Ferrarese school."