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It was a wild spot in the Apennines, on the borders of the Ferrarese and papal territories. Ariosto was there three years, and is said to have reduced it to order; but, according to his own account, he had very doubtful work of it. The place was overrun with banditti, including the troops commissioned to suppress them.
It is only Horace that I know throughout, in spite of the often prosaic style of his epistles, which are certainly far from equalling Boileau's." "Boileau is often too lengthy; I admire Horace, but as for Ariosto, with his forty long cantos, there is too much of him." "It is fifty-one cantos, M. de Voltaire." The great man was silent, but Madame Denis was equal to the occasion.
The house distinguished by the poet's birth was restored from a dilapidated condition by order of Joseph Bonaparte when King of Naples, and is now an hotel. Torquato Tasso was born March the 11th, 1544, nine years after the death of Ariosto, who was intimate with his father.
The wild beauty of the retreat, bursting upon him as if by magic, augmented the mingled feeling of delight and awe with which he approached her, like a fair enchantress of Boiardo or Ariosto, by whose nod the scenery around seemed to have been created, an Eden in the wilderness.
Lucretia was very friendly with the noble Venetian, Trissino, Ariosto's not altogether successful rival in epic poetry. There are in existence five letters written by Trissino to Lucretia in her last years. Ferrara's pride, however, was Ariosto, and Lucretia knew him when he was at the zenith of his fame.
In my daily work I incline to repeat my old steps, and do not believe in remedial force, in the power of change and reform. But some Petrarch or Ariosto, filled with the new wine of his imagination, writes me an ode or a brisk romance, full of daring thought and action. He smites and arouses me with his shrill tones, breaks up my whole chain of habits, and I open my eye on my own possibilities.
Shelley says, he has too much fighting and "revenge," which is true; but the revenge was only among his knights. Ariosto certainly did not anticipate, any more than Shakspeare did, that spirit of human amelioration which has ennobled the present age. He thought only of reflecting nature as he found it.
She knew French and Italian with an elegance so lady-like that, without having read more than selected extracts from authors in those languages, she spoke them both with an accent more correct than we have any reason to attribute to Rousseau or Ariosto.
Italian Literature and its Divisions. 2. The Dialects. 3. The Italian Language. Latin Influence. 2. Early Italian Poetry and Prose. 3. Dante. 4. Petrarch. 5. Boccaccio and other Prose Writers. 6. First Decline of Italian Literature. The Close of the Fifteenth Century; Lorenzo de' Medici. 2. The Origin of the Drama and Romantic Epic; Poliziano, Pulci, Boiardo. 3. Romantic Epic Poetry; Ariosto. 4.
These stories are interwoven with so many incidents and episodes, and there is in the poem such a prodigious quantity of action, that it is difficult to assign it a central point. Indeed, Ariosto, playing with his readers, seems to delight in continually misleading them, and allows them no opportunity of viewing the general subject of the poem.
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