posture of adoration and fear; the infamous Aretino extorted a fulsome letter of praises from the great and the learned[56].”  He might have added, that the writer most in request “in the circles” was a gentleman of the name of Bernardo Accolti, then called the Unique, now never heard of.  Ariosto himself eulogised him among a shoal of writers, half of whose names have perished; and who most likely included in that half the men who thought he did not praise them enough.  For such was the fact!  I allude to the charming invention in his last canto, in which he supposes himself welcomed home after a long voyage.  Gay imitated it very pleasantly in an address to Pope on the conclusion of his Homer.  Some of the persons thus honoured by Ariosto were vexed, it is said, at not being praised highly enough; others at seeing so many praised in their company; some at being left out of the list; and some others at being mentioned at all!  These silly people thought it taking too great a liberty!  The poor flies of a day did not know that a god had taken them in hand to give them wings for eternity.  Happily for them the names of most of these mighty personages are not known.  One or two, however, took care to make posterity laugh.  Trissino, a very great man in his day, and the would-be restorer of the ancient epic, had the face, in return for the poet’s too honourable mention of him, to speak, in his own absurd verses, of “Ariosto, with that Furioso of his, which pleases the vulgar:” 

  “L’ Ariosto
  Con quel Furioso suo the piace al volgo.”

“His poem,” adds Panizzi, “has the merit of not having pleased any body[57].”  A sullen critic, Sperone (the same that afterwards plagued Tasso), was so disappointed at being left out, that he became the poet’s bitter enemy.  He talked of Ariosto taking himself for a swan and “dying like a goose” (the allusion was to the fragment he left called the Five Cantos).  What has become of the swan Sperone?  Bernardo Tasso, Torquato’s father, made a more reasonable (but which turned out to be an unfounded) complaint, that Ariosto had established a precedent which poets would find inconvenient.  And Macchiavelli, like the true genius he was, expressed a good-natured and flattering regret that his friend Ariosto had left him out of his list of congratulators, in a work which was “fine throughout,” and in some places “wonderful[58].”

The great Galileo knew Ariosto nearly by heart[59].

He is a poet whom it may require a certain amount of animal spirits to relish thoroughly.  The air of his verse must agree with you before you can perceive all its freshness and vitality.  But if read with any thing like Italian sympathy, with allowance for times and manners, and with a sense as well as admittance of the different kinds of the beautiful in poetry (two very different things), you will be almost as much charmed with the “divine Ariosto” as his countrymen have been for ages.