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I hope by and by to act Camiola very well, but I am afraid the play itself can never become popular; the size of the theater and the public taste of the present day are both against such pieces; still, the attempt seemed to me worth making, and if it should prove successful we might revive one or two more of Massinger's plays; they are such sterling stuff compared with the Isabellas, the Jane Shores, the everything but Shakespeare.
When I say "bent over," I do not mean at right angles, so as to admit of the possibility of its being broken, but gently and judiciously. I cover with earth all my vines, except the Concords and Isabellas, just before hard freezing weather; and even these two hardy kinds I weight down close to the ground. I have never failed to secure a crop from vines so treated.
The adventure of Fiordispina with Ricciardetto would have branded an English serving-wench as a harlot; the behaviour of Roger towards the lady he has just rescued from the sea-monster would have blushingly been attributed by Spenser to one of his satyrs; but these were escapades quite within Ariosto's notions of what was permitted to a gentil cavaliero and a nobil donzella; and if Fiordispina and Roger are not like Florimell and Sir Calidore, still less do they in the faintest degree resemble Tourneur and Marston's Levidulcias and Isabellas and Lussuriosos.
Also, I resent his admirable rhetorical flourishes about his patrons, his Ercoles, Ippolitos, and Isabellas they ring false, dreadfully false and studied; and Boiardo's quickly despatched friendly greeting of his friends, his courteous knights and gentle ladies, pleases me much better.
A grape-arbor ran the length of this garden, and in August the Isabellas, filmed with soot, had a flavor, Robert Ferguson thought, finer than could be found in any of the vineyards lying in the hot sunshine on the banks of the river, far out of reach of Mercer's smoke.
And so the delight of something "horrid," as the Catherines and Isabellas of the day put it, is given much more plentifully, and even much more excitingly, than it could be by a real horror now and then, with intervals of miscellaneous business.
At the Mermaid with Raleigh and with Sidney, and at a thousand unnamed English firesides, he found the living originals for his Prince Hals, his Orlandos, his Antonios, his Portias, his Isabellas.
The epitaph in the Lateran is as follows: Isabellas Sfortiæ Joannis Pisaurensium P. Feminæ Sui Temporis Prudentia Ac Pietate Insigni Exec. Test. P. Vix. Ann LVII. M. VII. D. III Obiit Ann. MDLXI. XI Kal. Febr. Consensu Nobilium De Mutis De Papazurris. Above is a profile in marble.
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