I think it probable that neither the poet’s device nor the cardinal’s speech were forgotten, when, in the course of the next year, the parties came to a rupture in consequence of the servant’s refusing to attend his master into Hungary.  Ariosto excused himself on account of the state of his health and of his family.  He said that a cold climate did not agree with him; that his chest was affected, and could not bear even the stoves of Hungary; and that he could not, in common decency and humanity, leave his mother in her old age, especially as all the rest of the family were away but his youngest sister, whose interests he had also to take care of.  But Ippolito was not to be appeased.  The public have seen, in a late female biography, a deplorable instance of the unfeelingness with which even a princess with a reputation for religion could treat the declining health and unwilling retirement of a poor slave in her service, fifty times her superior in every thing but servility.  Greater delicacy was not to be expected of the military priest.  The nobler the servant, the greater the desire to trample upon him and keep him at a disadvantage.  It is a grudge which rank owes to genius, and which it can only wave when its possessor is himself “one of God Almighty’s gentlemen.”  I do not mean in point of genius, which is by no means the highest thing in the world, whatever its owners may think of it; but in point of the highest of all things, which is nobleness of heart.  I confess I think Ariosto was wrong in expecting what he did of a man he must have known so well, and in complaining so much of courts, however good-humouredly.  A prince occupies the station he does, to avert the perils of disputed successions, and not to be what his birth cannot make him—­if nature has not supplied the materials.  Besides, the cardinal, in his quality of a mechanical-minded man with no taste, might with reason have complained of his servant’s attending to poetry when it was “not in his bond;” when it diverted him from the only attentions which his employer understood or desired.  Ippolito candidly confessed, as Ariosto himself tells us, that he not only did not care for poetry, but never gave his attendant one stiver in patronage of it, or for any thing whatsoever but going his journeys and doing as he was bidden.[17] On the other hand, the cardinal’s payments were sorry ones; and the poet might with justice have thought, that he was not bound to consider them an equivalent for the time be was expected to give up.  The only thing to have been desired in this case was, that he should have said so; and, in truth, at the close of the explanation which he gave on the subject to his friends at court, he did—­boldly desiring them, as became him, to tell the cardinal, that if his eminence expected him to be a “serf” for what he received, he should decline the bargain; and that he preferred the humblest freedom and his studies to a slavery so preposterous.[18] The truth is, the poet should have attached himself wholly to the Medici.  Had he not adhered to the duller house, he might have led as happy a life with the pope as Pulci did with the pope’s father; perhaps have been made a cardinal, like his friends Bembo and Sadolet.  But then we might have lost the Orlando.