Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 2.djvu/563

Rh A E I S T 503 love of study, the care of his private affairs, and the age of his mother, whom it would have been disgraceful to leave. His excuses were not received, and even an interview was denied him. Ariosto then boldly said, that if his emin ence thought to have bought a slave by assigning him the scanty pension of 75 crowns a year, he was mistaken and might withdraw his boon which it seems the cardinal did. The cardinal s brother, Alphonso, duke of Ferrara, now took the poet under his patronage. This was but an act of simple justice, Ariosto having already distinguished himself as a diplomatist, chiefly on the occasion of two visits to Rome as ambassador to Pope Julius II. The fatigue of one of these hurried journeys brought on a com plaint from which he never recovered ; and on his second mission he was nearly killed by order of the violent Pope, who happened at the time to be much incensed against the duke of Ferrara. On account of the war, his salary of only 84 crowns a year was suspended, and it was with drawn altogether after the peace ; in consequence of which Ariosto asked the duke either to provide for him, or to allow him to seek employment elsewhere. A province, situated on the wildest heights of the Apennines, being then without a governor, Ariosto received the appointment, which he held for three years. The office was no sinecure. The province was distracted by factions and banditti, the governor had not the requisite means to enforce his autho rity, and the duke did little to support his minister. Yet it is said that Ariosto s government satisfied both the sovereign and the people confided to his care ; and a story is added of his having, when walking out alone, fallen in with a party of banditti, whose chief on discovering that his captive was the author of Orlando Furioso, humbly apologised for not having immediately shown him the re spect which was due to his rank. Although he had little reason to be satisfied with his office, he refused an embassy to Pope Clement VII. offered to him by the secretary of the duke, and spent the remainder of his life at Ferrara, writing comedies, superintending their performance, as well as the construction of a theatre, and correcting his Orlando Furioso, of which the complete edition was published only a year before his death. He died of con sumption on the 6th of June 1533. That Ariosto was honoured and respected by the first men of his age is a fact ; that most of the princes of Italy showed him great partiality is equally true ; but it is not less so that their patronage was limited to kind words. It is not known that he ever received any substantial mark of their love for literature : he lived and died poor. He proudly wrote on the entrance of a house built by himself, &quot; Parva, sed apta milii, sed nulli obnoxia, sed non Sordida, parta meo sed tamen tere domus ; &quot; which serves to show the incorrectness of the assertion of flatterers, followed by Tiraboschi, that the duke of Ferrara built that house for him. The only one who seems to have given anything to Ariosto as a reward for his poetical talent was the Marquess del Vasto, who assigned him an annuity of 100 crowns on the revenues of Casteleone, in Lombardy ; but it was only paid, if ever, from the end of 1531. That he was crowned as poet by Charles V. seems untrue, although a diploma may have been issued to that effect by the emperor. The character of Ariosto seems to have been fully and justly delineated by Gabrielle, his brother : &quot; Ornabat pietas et grata modcstia Vatem, Sancta fides, dictique memor, munitaque recto Jastitia, et millo patientia victa labore, Et coustans virtus animi, et dementia mitis, Ambitione procul pulsa, fastusque tumore.&quot; His satires, in which we see him before us such as he was, show that there was no flattery in this portrait. In these compositions we are struck with the noble inde pendence of the poet. He loved liberty with a most jealous fondness. His disposition was changeable withal, as he himself very frankly confesses in his Latin verses, as well as in the satires. &quot; Hoc olhn ingenio vi tales hausimus auras, Multa cito ut placeant, displicitura brevi. Non in amore modo mens hrec, sed in omnibus impar Ipsa sibi longa non retinenda rnora.&quot; Hence he never would bind himself, either by going into orders, or by marrying, till towards the end of his life, when he espoused Alessandra, widow of Tito Strozzi. He had no issue by his wife, but he left two natural sons by different mothers. His Latin poems do not perhaps deserve to be noticed : in the age of Flaminio, Vida, Fracastoro, and Sannazzaro, better things were due from a poet like Ariosto. His lyrical compositions show the poet, although they do not seem worthy of his powers. His comedies, of which he wrote four, besides one which he left unfinished, are avowedly imitated from Plautus and Terence ; and although native critics may admire in them the elegance of the diction, the liveliness of the dialogue, and the novelty of some scenes, few will feel interest either in the subject or in the characters, and none would now approve the immoral passages by which they are disfigured, however grateful these might be to the audiences and patrons of theatrical representations in Ariosto s own day. Of all the works of Ariosto, the most solid monument of his fame is the Orlando Furioso, the extraordinary merits of which have cast into oblivion the numberless romance poems which inundated Italy during the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries. The popularity which an earlier poem on the same theme, Orlando Innamorato, by Boiardo, enjoyed in Ariosto s time, cannot be well conceived, now that the enthusiasm of the Crusades, and the interest which was attached to a war against the Moslems, have passed away. Boiardo wrote and read his poem at the court of Ferrara, but died before he was able to finish it. Many poets undertook the difficult task of its completion ; but it was reserved for Ariosto both to finish and to surpass his original. Boiardo did not, perhaps, yield to Ariosto either in vigour or in richness of imagination, but he lived in a less refined age, and died before he was able to recast or even finish the poetical romance which he had written under the impulse of his exuberant fancy. Ariosto, on the other hand, united to a powerful imagination an elegant and cultivated taste. He began to write his great poem about 1503, and after having consulted the first men of the age of Leo. X., he published it in 1516, in only 40 cantos (extended afterwards to 46); and up to the moment of his death never ceased to correct and improve both the subject and the style. It is in this latter quality that he excels, and for which he had assigned him the name of Divino Lodovico. Even when he jests, he never compromises his dignity ; and in pathetic descrip tion or narrative, he excites the reader s deepest feelings. In his machinery he displays a vivacity of fancy with which no other poet can vie ; but he never lets his fancy carry him so far as to omit to employ, with an art peculiar to himself, those simple and natural pencil-strokes which, by imparting to the most extraordinary feats a colour of reality, satisfy the reason without disenchanting the imagination. The death of Zerbino, the complaints of Isabella, the effects of discord among the Saracens, the flight of Astolfo to the moon, the passion which causes Orlando s madness, teem with beauties of every variety. The supposition that the poem is not connected througnout is wholly unfounded ; there is a connection which, with a little attention, will become evident. The love of Kuggero