When at last I turned from it, however, I saw that the custodian had another relic of Messer Lodovico, which he was not ashamed to match with the manuscript in my interest.  This was the bone of one of the poet’s fingers, which the pious care of Ferrara had picked up from his dust (when it was removed from the church to the Library), and neatly bottled and labeled.  In like manner, they keep a great deal of sanctity in bottles with the bones of saints in Italy; but I found very little savor of poesy hanging about this literary relic.

As if the melancholy fragment of mortality had marshaled us the way, we went from the Library to the house of Ariosto, which stands at the end of a long, long street, not far from the railway station.  There was not a Christian soul, not a boy, not a cat nor a dog to be seen in all that long street, at high noon, as we looked down its narrowing perspective, and if the poet and his friends have ever a mind for a posthumous meeting in his little reddish brick house, there is nothing to prevent their assembly, in broad daylight, from any part of the neighborhood.  There was no presence, however, more spiritual than a comely country girl to respond to our summons at the door, and nothing but a tub of corn-meal disputed our passage inside.  Directly I found the house inhabited by living people, I began to be sorry that it was not as empty as the Library and the street.  Indeed, it is much better with Petrarch’s house at Arqua, where the grandeur of the past is never molested by the small household joys and troubles of the present.  That house is vacant, and no eyes less tender and fond than the poet’s visitors may look down from its windows over the slope of vines and olives which it crowns; and it seemed hard, here in Ferrara, where the houses are so many and the people are so few, that Ariosto’s house could not be left to him. Parva sed apta mihi, he has contentedly written upon the front; but I doubt if he finds it large enough for another family, though his modern housekeeper reserves him certain rooms for visitors.  To gain these, you go up to the second story—­there are but two floors—­and cross to the rear of the building, where Ariosto’s chamber opens out of an ante-room, and looks down upon a pinched and faded bit of garden. [In this garden the poet spent much of his time—­chiefly in plucking up and transplanting the unlucky shrubbery, which was never suffered to grow three months in the same place,—­such was the poet’s rage for revision.  It was probably never a very large or splendid garden, for the reason that Ariosto gave when reproached that he who knew so well how to describe magnificent palaces should have built such a poor little house:  “It was easier to make verses than houses, and the fine palaces in his poem cost him no money.”] In this chamber they say the poet died.  It is oblong, and not large.  I should think the windows and roof were of the poet’s time, and that every thing else had been restored; I am quite sure the chairs and inkstand are kindly-meant inventions; for the poet’s burly great arm-chair and graceful inkstand are both preserved in the Library.  But the house is otherwise decent and probable; and I do not question but it was in the hall where we encountered the meal-tub that the poet kept a copy of his “Furioso,” subject to the corrections and advice of his visitors.