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You and I must now write to each other as friends, and without the least reserve; there will for the future be a thousand-things in my letters, which I would not have any mortal living but yourself see or know. Those you will easily distinguish, and neither show nor repeat; and I will do the same by you. Do you understand Ariosto, Tasso, Boccaccio and Machiavelli?
Pulci, Boiardo, and Ariosto would cry out, "Make room for the Italian poets, the descendants of Virgil in a right line."
Her attending physician decided upon one occasion that it would be necessary to cut her hair to save her life, but later events proved that he had been over anxious and that this desperate remedy had been entirely uncalled for. Ariosto, as may well be believed, was indignant at the sacrifice, and wrote three sonnets regarding it before he cooled his anger.
The conception of the innocent and hilarious life of shepherds and shepherdesses certainly covered and absorbed the time of Theocritus, of Virgil, of Catullus, of Dante, of Cervantes, of Ariosto, of Shakespeare, and of Pope. We are told that the gods of the heathen were stone and brass, but stone and brass have never endured with the long endurance of the China Shepherdess.
Italy was at this time the acknowledged parent both of the poetry and the general literature of Europe; and the immortal works of Dante, Petrarch, and Ariosto had formed an almost perfect vernacular language in which the creations of genius could find fittest expression. But Tasso was not only born in a poetic region and in a poetic age: he was also the son of a poet.
Even the great Galileo, who was a man of wit, bred up in the pure Tuscan school of Berni and Casa, and who was an idolator of Ariosto, wrote, when he was young, a "review" of the Jerusalem Delivered, which it is painful to read, it is so unjust and contemptuous.
They wandered in gardens like Calypso's; they rambled over a villa which reminded them of Baise; they partook of a banquet which should have been described by Ariosto. All were delighted; they delivered themselves to the charms of an unrestrained gaiety. Even Charles Annesley laughed and romped. This is the only mode in which public eating is essentially agreeable.
This inhuman persecution was caused by Mosti's jealously of Tasso as the rival of his beloved master Ariosto, to whom at his own cost he had erected a monument in the church of the Benedictines at Ferrara. For a whole year Tasso endured all the horrors of the sordid cell in which he was immured.
After reading Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, Boccaccio, with Sanazzaro's Arcadia, in Italian; Rabelais, Froissart, and Comines, in French; Chaucer, Gower, and the Mirror for Magistrates in English, what remained for an ardent young student to devour? When Sidney came home, Montaigne whom he probably saw at the French court was just writing his Essays at his chateau in the Gironde.
She proved a model princess after all, and died at last in childbirth, after having been praised by Ariosto as a second Lucrece, brighter for her virtues than the star of regal Rome. Her dowry was 300,000 ducats, besides wedding presents, and certain important immunities and privileges granted to Ferrara by the Pope.
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