Art. VI.-ARIOSTO. 1. Orlando Innamorato di Bojardo; Orlando Furioso di Ariosto. With an essay, memoirs, and notes. Antonio Panizzi. London: Pickering, 1830. By Two vols. 2. Opere Minori di Lodovico Ariosto. Ordinate e annotate per cura di Filippo-Luigi Polidori. Florence: Successori Le Monnier, 1857. 3. Lettere di Lodovico Ariosto. Con prefazione storicocritica, documenti e note per cura di Antonio Cappelli. Third edition. Milano: Hoepli, 1887. 4. Lodovico Ariosto nei Prologhi delle sue Comedie. Studio storico e critico. By Naborre Campanini. Bologna: Zanichelli, 1891. 5. Spenser's Imitations from Ariosto. By R. E. Neil Dodge. 'Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,' vol. XII, No. 2. Baltimore: (Jas. W. Bright, Secretary), 1897. 6. Le Fonti dell' Orlando Furioso. Ricerche e studi di Pio Rajna. Second edition. Florence: Sansoni, 1900. 7. The King of Court Poets. A study of the Work, Life, and Times of Lodovico Ariosto. By Edmund G. Gardner. London: Constable, 1906. THE vicissitudes of reputation among the shades of letters are as great as or greater than among those of history. Homer, we say, is safe propter mille annos, and Shakespeare, and Dante, and some one or two besides. But below the very highest class there comes a time when the poet too-a Euripides, a Byron-needs his sacer vates, his new interpreter, his pious editor; and, with the phonetic or linguistic millennium and aeroplanes once established, and the tribes of man in restless flight from continent to continent, the survival of all but a very few seems doubtful. Contrast the present English knowledge and estimate of Ariosto with that of his contemporary, Machiavelli, who would not have dreamed of rivalling his literary repute in their joint lifetime. Each connects himself conspicuously with a first-rate English man of letters-Ariosto with Spenser, Machiavel with Bacon; and Ariosto has the advantage of working in the more imaginative and attractive material. But Machiavel received, in March 1827, the attention of the smartest and most eloquent of English critics, and has further profited by our increased attention to historiography. The result is that we are continually reprinting, translating, and discussing the Florentine; while as to the Ferrarese we are silent, save in some general work on Italian literature or in notes to some book of The Faerie Queene.' Since Harington, we have translated the complete Furioso' but three times in the eighteenth century and once in the nineteenth, as against a total of fourteen translations (excluding nine partial or looser renderings) issued in France, followed in 1905 by yet another, that of M. Hector Lacoche. The 'Satires' were Englished by Robert Tofte in 1608, and by Horton and T. H. Croker in 1759. Of the Comedies,' which have the best claim to have restored the drama to modern Europe, only the 'Suppositi' has ever been rendered into any other European tongue; into French by P. de Mesmes in 1552, into English by George Gascoigne in 1566. Mr Gardner's book does something to remedy this neglect; but the literary side is too much sacrificed to the historical. The perfect fusion of the two was perhaps impossible; for Ariosto was not, like Machiavelli, first and foremost a politician. He wrote neither history nor political philosophy, and his incursions into politics were occasional, incidental to his position as the dependant of princes rather than sought independently as his proper outlet. In this interesting and able account of a most complicated time, he stands somewhat out of the focus of highest light; he appears as something of an intruder amid great affairs, in which he has too little real share to justify entirely the position assumed for him in the title. Of his life, Mr Gardner supplies fuller and more accurate details than have yet appeared in England, though he accepts a little too readily some of the more picturesque statements of the early biographers. Such are the six months' stay a-wooing in Florence (1513), reported by Fornari, which Barotti showed to be hardly compatible with the cardinal's service; Pigna's story of his silent submission to his father's unmerited rebuke in order the better to study the bearing of an angered parent for the scene in La Cassaria' (v, ii) already commenced-a story savouring of myth, rejected by Panizzi, and rendered more improbable by the establishment of the date 1508 for the performance of the first form of the comedy; and the incident, related by Garofalo, of the brigand's homage when he was crossing the Apennines. Into his three purely literary chapters Mr Gardner has put a good deal of sound research and bibliographical work, and of the Furioso' at least some thoughtful general criticism and some comparison of the female figures. But the treatment of the Comedies is inadequate ; the poet's general literary characteristics are nowhere formulated, nor is his place allotted in the literary and linguistic development of Italy. Nor is his important relation to Spenser and English literature dealt with. On the whole, Mr Gardner's wide reading in his subject, his preoccupation with dukes and popes and cardinals, the women they loved and the towns they took-the whole splendid show which leaves, as compared with poetry, so little trace and his further keen interest in the painters, have a little swamped in him the power of original thought and literary grasp. Nor do we feel his styleeasy, fluent, fairly clear, but lacking in point and conciseness-to be the best for literary criticism. Notwithstanding which we can accept his work with gratitude, and look forward to the swelling act to which this and a former volume stand as prologues. Mr Gardner has rendered needless more than the briefest reference to the poet's life. We should divide it into three periods. The first, one of almost unbroken study, would extend from his birth at Reggio d' Emilia, September 8, 1474, to his father's death in 1500, which 'forced him to turn his thoughts from Mary to Martha,** to the practical need of providing for his four brothers and five sisters. The second period might be designated roughly as that of his service to the Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, entered in 1503 and quitted in September 1517, when he refused on grounds of health to accompany him to his Hungarian see. It was a period of more or less constant travel about Italy on confidential missions, 'changing horses and guides, scouring in hot haste over mountain and precipice, and playing tricks with death,'† an allusion, perhaps, to that affection of the throat which finally developed into the consumption that killed him; and it may fitly close with the second Satire (1518), written at forty-four, wherein, a year after quitting the cardinal's service, the poet, not too impartially, sums up the account between them. In this period, besides ripening and displaying that literary power which is more to its possessor than a kingdom, besides composing the Furioso' (pub. 1516) and his first two comedies, he has acquired that satisfying grasp and hold on life with which even the literary can ill dispense. He has known famous men and borne a part in great events. He has run the risk of being thrown into the Tiber by an angry pontiff; he has seen, if not the battle, yet the corpsestrewn field of Ravenna (1512), where his presence recalls that of Goethe with his curiosity about 'cannon-fever' at Valmy in 1792; he has shared, in the autumn of the same year, the perils of Alfonso's escape from the Papal States -on October 1 he is still quaking with fear, like a hare 'chased by greyhounds: . . .' 'I have passed the night in the shelter of a hut near Florence with a masked noble (the duke), ears on the alert and heart in mouth." He has felt bitterly the disappointment of the hopes excited by Leo X's warm hand-grasp and papal kiss (1513). 'Se Leon non mi diè, che alcun de' suoi Mi dia, non spero,' he writes, ten years later, in refusing the post of ambassador to Clement VII, Leo's cousin. Our third period would extend from his appointment as one of Alfonso's chamberlains or secretaries, on April 23, 1518, till his death on July 6, 1533-a time, on the whole, of better fortune and more satisfaction. Its chief event was his governorship of the Garfagnana (February 1522 to June 1525), a recognised Alsatia for the neighbouring states, where his position with a tiny band of bowmen among a population of brigands and desperadoes has an irresistible air of comic opera. It would be most dangerous, he says, for the forces of order to display their colours, or for the governor to go out. But his letters show that he filled the difficult post with firmness, wisdom, and integrity. After his recall he bought land, and built his house with the charming inscription, and married the woman he had loved for so many years; he wrote and produced comedies for the ducal theatre, and revised the Furioso,' the third edition of which appeared with large additions in 1532, shortly before his death. If we know too much of Ariosto to place him on any pedestal of hero-worship, it is still possible to praise him as having lived, in a time utterly corrupt, a life of honest devotion to duty and high intellectual aim. In his relations with women he was probably above the average standard of self-restraint in that age of bastards'; and there is no indication that he was tainted by that darker form of vice, to the prevalence of which among tho humanists he gives damning testimony. His receipt of ecclesiastical revenues without performing ecclesiastical duties was the commonest of common things; they came to him by way of free gift or payment earned, not by influence used to bolster up unjust claims which he must be bribed to abandon.† Nothing is more marked than his Horatian adherence to the golden mean, his sense of the vanity of ambitions whose fulfilment brings no satisfaction, or of wealth and honours bought at the price of fair fame.§ 'Il vero onore è ch' uom da ben ti tenga Ciascuno, e che tu sia; chè non essendo Forza è che la bugia tosto si spenga.'|| Let the tutor whom Bembo wants for his son be a sound Greek scholar, but also that rarer thing, a good man: 'Dottrina abbia e bontà, ma principale Sia la bontà; chè non vi essendo questa, Nor is it possible to read his advice on marriage,** spite of some hitherto (we think) unnoted dependence on the 'Conjugalia Præcepta' of Plutarch, without recognising behind it the ripe and sober judgment, the good feeling and good taste of a kindly, self-controlled, and honourable man. The point on which blame has chiefly fastened is his flattery, especially of the Estensi. Certainly it is Sat. vii, 25-33. § Ib. 265-313. Vol. 208.-No. 414. + Sat. ii, 181-83. Ib. 259-61. Sat. vii, 16-18. Sat. iv, 202–207. ** Sat. iii. K |