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It was held the greatest of all triumphs, if an epigram was mistaken for a genuine copy from some old marble, or if it was so good that all Italy learned it by heart, as happened in the case of some of Bembo's. When the Venetian government paid Sannazaro 600 ducats for a eulogy in three distichs, no one thought it an act of generous prodigality.
It was Perion who spoke first. They had passed the city walls, and had mounted the hill which leads toward the Forest of Sannazaro. Their road lay through a rocky pass above which the leaves of spring were like sparse traceries on a blue cupola, for April had not come as yet. "I meant," said Perion, "to hold you as the ransom of Dame Melicent. I fear that is impossible.
The spirit and range of Roman elegy were best understood and reproduced by Sannazaro, and no other writer of his time offers us so varied a choice of good poems in this style as he. We shall have occasion now and then to speak of some of these elegies in reference to the matter they treat of.
More thanks to Bracciolini's precautions, these two got safely from the confines of San' Alessandro, and afterward from the city of Megaris. They trudged on a familiar road. Perion would have spoken, but Demetrios growled, "Not now, messire." They came by night to that pass in Sannazaro which Perion had held against a score of men-at-arms. Demetrios turned.
But in the old writers there was another and less pleasing picture of the world to come the shadowy realms of Homer and of those poets who had not sweetened and humanized the conception. This made an impression on certain temperaments. Gioviano Pontano somewhere attributes to Sannazaro the story of a vision which he beheld one morning early while half awake.
They, persuaded that it was grief at finding himself vanquished, and the object of his heart, the liberation and disenchantment of Dulcinea, unattained, that kept him in this state, strove by all the means in their power to cheer him up; the bachelor bidding him take heart and get up to begin his pastoral life, for which he himself, he said, had already composed an eclogue that would take the shine out of all Sannazaro had ever written, and had bought with his own money two famous dogs to guard the flock, one called Barcino and the other Butron, which a herdsman of Quintanar had sold him.
What a distance between those memories, even the latest of them, and this room in Villa Sannazaro! Its foreign aspect, its brightness, its comfort, the view from the windows, had from the first worked upon her with subtle influences of which she was unconscious.
Far withdrawn, the craggy promontory of Sorrento darkened to profoundest blue; and Capri veiled itself in mist. Villa Sannazaro had no architectural beauty; it was a building of considerable size, irregular, in need of external repair.
"He gave his enemy a weapon against him," Bracciolini said, and waited. "Oh, but that weapon was never used. Sire Perion found service at once, under King Bernart, you will remember. Therefore Sire Perion hid away these emeralds against future need under an oak in Sannazaro, he told me. I suppose they lie there yet." "Humph!" said Bracciolini. He for a while was silent.
Thus Giovanni was turned into Jovianus or Janus, Pietro to Petreius or Pierius, Antonio to Aoniuss Sannazaro to Syncerus, Luca Grasso to Lucius Crassus. Ariosto, who speaks with such derision of all this, lived to see children called after his own heroes and heroines.
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