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They listened with the hungriest delight, and when Ariosto's interpreter raised his finger and said, "Disse l'imperatore," or, "Orlando disse, Carlomano mio," they hardly breathed. On the Lunedi dei Giardini, already mentioned, all orders of the people flock thither, and promenade, and banquet on the grass.
It is a very little house, as small as Ariosto's in Ferrara, which he said was so apt for him, but it is not in a long, clean street like that; it is in a bad neighborhood which has not yet outlived the evil repute it bore in the days of Cervantes. It was then the scene of nightly brawls and in one of these a gentleman was stabbed near the author's house.
The circumstance is said to have actually occurred in Ferrara, and in Ariosto's own time. Was Ariosto himself a party? This has been said to be in the true taste of knight-errantry; and in one respect it is so. We may imagine, however, that the ship is wind-bound, and that he meant to return to it on change of weather.
The painter of the scenery of the production of Ariosto's "Suppositi," described by Pauluzo, was no less a personage than the mighty Raphael. The accounts of the writers of the latter part of the fifteenth and all of the sixteenth centuries are prolific in testimony as to the splendor of the pictorial elements in the festal entertainments of courts and pontiffs.
At the beginning of the sixteenth century Ferrara was one of the lights of Europe: now I know not that there is a single scholar in its university; and its library of eighty thousand volumes and nine hundred manuscripts, among which are the Greek palimpsests of Gregory Nazianzen and Chrysostom, and the manuscripts of Ariosto and Tasso, is becoming, equally with Ariosto's dust, which reposes in its halls, the prey of the worm.
Spenser's picture is more subtly wrought and imaginative than Ariosto's; but it removes the man farther from ourselves, except under very special circumstances. Indeed, it might be taken rather for a picture of hypochondria than jealousy, and under that aspect is very appalling.
By its association with his sojourns in Italy it recalled visits to other shrines, and they had to own that it was really no worse than Ariosto's house at Ferrara, or Petrarch's at Arqua, or Michelangelo's at Florence. "But what I admire," he said, "is our futility in going to see it.
Hunt mean by saying that Milton had "learnedly a musical ear"? "Ariosto's fine ear and animal spirits gave a frank and exquisite tone to all he said" what does this mean? a fine ear may, perhaps, be said to give, as it contributes to, an exquisite tone; but what have animal spirits to do here? and what, in the matter of tones and sounds, is the effect of frankness? We shrewdly suspect that Mr.
Panizzi is, as usual, copious and to the purpose; and has, for the first time I believe, critically proved the regularity and connectedness of Ariosto's plots, as well as the hollowness of the pretensions of the house of Este to be considered patrons of literature. It is only a pity that his Life of Ariosto is not better arranged. Satira vi.
It seems as if one of the structures of Ariosto's fairy world had suddenly risen before us. Opposite one side of the castle, the Palazzo del Ragione is still standing, and there are also two old towers, one of which is called the Rigobello. Opposite the façade was the Este palace in which Ercole lived, and which Eugene IV occupied when he held the famous council in Ferrara.