he had known in Ferrara, and he had long admired her.  The poet, who, like Petrarch and Boccaccio, has recorded the day on which he fell in love, which was that of St. John the Baptist (the showy saint-days of the south offer special temptations to that effect), dwells with minute fondness on the particulars of the lady’s appearance.  Her dress was black silk, embroidered with two grape-bearing vines intertwisted; and “between her serene forehead and the path that went dividing in two her rich and golden tresses,” was a sprig of laurel in bud.  Her observer, probably her welcome if not yet accepted lover, beheld something very significant in this attire; and a mysterious poem, in which he records a device of a black pen feathered with gold, which he wore embroidered on a gown of his own, has been supposed to allude to it.  As every body is tempted to make his guess on such occasions, I take the pen to have been the black-haired poet himself, and the golden feather the tresses of the lady.  Beautiful as he describes her, with a face full of sweetness, and manners noble and engaging, he speaks most of the charms of her golden locks.  The black gown could hardly have implied her widowhood:  the allusion would not have been delicate.  The vine belongs to dramatic poets, among whom the lover was at that time to be classed, the Orlando not having appeared.  Its duplification intimated another self; and the crowning laurel was the success that awaited the heroic poet and the conqueror of the lady’s heart.[14]

The marriage was never acknowledged.  The husband was in the receipt of profits arising from church-offices, which put him into the condition of the fellow of a college with us, who cannot marry so long as he retains his fellowship:  but it is proved to have taken place, though the date of it is uncertain.  Ariosto, in a satire written three or four years after his falling in love, says he never intends either to marry or to take orders; because, if he takes orders, he cannot marry; and if he marries, he cannot take orders—­that is to say, must give up his semi-priestly emoluments.  This is one of the falsehoods which the Roman Catholic religion thinks itself warranted in tempting honest men to fall into; thus perplexing their faith as to the very roots of all faith, and tending to maintain a sensual hypocrisy, which can do no good to the strongest minds, and must terribly injure the weak.

Ariosto’s love for this lady I take to have been one of the causes of dissatisfaction between him and the cardinal.  “Fortunately for the poet,” as Panizzi observes, Ippolito was not always in Ferrara.  He travelled in Italy, and he had an archbishopric in Hungary, the tenure of which compelled occasional residence.  His company was not desired in Rome, so that he was seldom there.  Ariosto, however, was an amusing companion; and the cardinal seems not to have liked to go anywhere without him.  In the year 1515 he was attended by the