Page:The Garden of Romance - 1897.djvu/110

98 he implored a savage; he importuned a statue; he hunted the wind; cried aloud to the desert; he was a slave to the most ungrateful of women; and the fruit of his servitude was death, which overtook him in the middle of his career; in short, he perished by the cruelty of a shepherdess, whom he has eternalised in the memory of all the people in this country; as these papers which you gaze at would show, if he had not ordered me to commit them to the flames as soon as his body shall be deposited in the earth."

"You will use them then with more cruelty and rigour," said Vivaldo, "than that of the author himself; seeing it is neither just nor convenient to fulfil the will of any man, provided it be unreasonable. Augustus Cæsar would have been in the wrong had he consented to the execution of what the divine Mantuan ordered on his death-bed. Wherefore, Signor Ambrosio, while you commit the body of your friend to the earth, you ought not likewise to consign his writings to oblivion; nor perform indiscreetly, what he in his affliction ordained: on the contrary, by publishing these papers, you ought to immortalise the cruelty of Marcella, that it may serve as an example in time to come, and warn young men to shun and avoid such dangerous precipices; for I, and the rest of this company, already know the history of that enamoured and unhappy friend, the nature of your friendship, the occasion of his death, together with the orders that he left upon his death-bed; from which lamentable story, it is easy to conclude how excessive must have been the cruelty of Marcella, the love of Chrysostom, the faith of your friendship, and the check which those receive, who precipitately run through the path exhibited to them by idle and mischievous love. Last night, we