[Footnote 6: 
    “Come quando nei Suizzeri si muove
    Sedizione, e che si grida a l’ arme;
    Se qualche nom grave allor si leva in piede
    E comincia a parlar con dolce lingua,
    Mitiga i petti barbari e feroci;
    E intanto fa portare ondanti vasi
    Pieni di dolci ed odorati vini;
    Ahora ognun le labbra e ’l mento immerge
    Ne’ le spumanti tazze,” etc.
]

Guarini, with all his affectations, has little prettinesses which charm like the chirping of a bird;—­as where he paints (in the very first scene of the “Pastor Fido”) the little sparrow flitting from fir to beech, and from beech to myrtle, and twittering, “How I love! how I love!” And the bird-mate ("il suo dolce desio”) twitters in reply, “How I love, how I love, too!” “Ardo d’ amore anch’ io.”

Messer Pietro Bembo was a different man from Guarini.  I cannot imagine him listening to the sparrows; I cannot imagine him plucking a flower,—­except he have some courtly gallantry in hand, perhaps toward the Borgia.  He was one of those pompous, stiff, scholastic prigs who wrote by rules of syntax; and of syntax he is dead.  He was clever and learned; he wrote in Latin, Italian, Castlian:  but nobody reads him; he has only a little crypt in the “Autori Diversi.”  I think of him as I think of fine women who must always rustle in brocade embossed with hard jewels, and who never win the triumphs that belong to a charming morning deshabille with only the added improvisation of a rose.

In his “Asolani” Bembo gives a very full and minute description of the gardens at Asolo, which relieved the royal retirement of Caterina, the Queen of Cyprus.  Nothing could be more admirable than the situation:  there were skirts of mountain which were covered, and are still covered, with oaks; there were grottos in the sides of cliffs, and water so disposed—­in jets, in pools inclosed by marble, and among rocks—­as to counterfeit all the wildness of Nature; there was the same stately array of cypresses, and of clipped hedges, which had belonged to the villas of Pliny; temples were decorated with blazing frescoes, to which, I dare say, Carpaccio may have lent a hand, if not that wild rake, Giorgione.  Here the pretty Queen, with eight thousand gold ducats a year, (whatever that amount may have been,) and some seventy odd retainers, held her court; and here Bembo, a dashing young fellow at that time of seven or eight and twenty, became a party to those disquisitions on Love, and to those recitations of song, part of which he has recorded in the “Asolani.”  I am sorry to say, the beauty of the place, so far as regards its artificial features, is now all gone.  The hall, which may have served as the presence-chamber of the Queen, was only a few years since doing service as a farmer’s barn; and the traces of a Diana and an Apollo were still coloring the wall under which a few cows were crunching their clover-hay.