The second edition of the Furioso did not extricate the author from very serious difficulties; for the next year he was compelled to apply to either to relieve him from his necessities, or permit him to look for some employment more profitable than the ducal service.  The answer of this prince, who was now rich, but had always been penurious, and who never laid out a farthing, if he could help it, except in defence of his capital, was an appointment of Ariosto to the government of a district in a state of anarchy, called Garfagnana, which had nominally returned to his rule in consequence of the death of Leo, who had wrested it from him.  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 required a severer governor than he was inclined to be; and Alfonso did not attend to his requisitions for supplies.  The candid and good-natured poet intimates that the duke might have given him the appointment rather for the governor’s sake than the people’s; and the cold, the loneliness and barrenness of the place, and, above all, his absence from the object of his affections, oppressed him.  He did not write a verse for twelve months:  he says he felt like a bird moulting[22].  The best thing got out of it was an anecdote for posterity.  The poet was riding out one day with a few attendants—­some say walking out in a fit of absence of mind—­when he found himself in the midst of a band of outlaws, who, in a suspicious manner, barely suffered him to pass.  A reader of Mrs. Radcliffe might suppose them a band of condottieri, under the command of some profligate desperado; and such perhaps they were.  The governor had scarcely gone by, when the leader of the band, discovering who he was, came riding back with much earnestness, and making his obeisance to the poet, said, that he never should have allowed him to pass in that manner had he known him to be the Signor Ludovico Ariosto, author of the Orlando Furioso; that his own name was Filippo Pacchione (a celebrated personage of his order); and that his men and himself, so far from doing the Signor displeasure, would have the honour of conducting him back to his castle.  “And so they did,” says Baretti, “entertaining him all along the way with the various excellences they had discerned in his poem, and bestowing upon it the most rapturous praises[23].”