[Footnote 182:  Lettere, p. 196.]

The Duke Alfonso died in 1597, and Ferrara reverted to the Holy See.  Upon this occasion, Guarini was free to follow his own inclinations.  He therefore established himself at the Court of the Grand Duke, into whose confidence he entered upon terms of flattering familiarity.  Ferdinando de’Medici ‘fell in love with him as a man may with a fine woman,’ says his son Alessandro in one of his apologetic writings.  This, however, meant but little; for compliments passed freely between princes and their courtiers; which, when affairs of purse or honor were at stake, soon turned to discontent and hatred.  So it fared with Guarini at Florence.  His son, Guarino, made a marriage of which he disapproved, but which the Grand Duke countenanced.  So slight a disagreement snapped the ties of friendship, and the restless poet removed to the Court of Urbino.  There the last duke of the House of Rovere, Francesco Maria II., Tasso’s schoolfellow and patron, was spending his widowed years in gloomy Spanish pride.  The mortmain of the Church was soon to fall upon Urbino, as it had already fallen on Ferrara.  Guarini wrote:  ’The former Court in Italy is a dead thing.  One may see the shadow, but not the substance of it nowadays.  Ours is an age of appearances, and one goes a-masquerading all the year.’  A sad but sincere epitaph, inscribed by one who had gone the round of all the Courts of Italy, and had survived the grand free life of the Renaissance.

These words close Guarini’s career as courtier.  He returned to Ferrara in 1604, and in 1605 carried the compliments of that now Pontifical city to Paul V. in Rome on his election to the Papacy.  Upon this occasion Cardinal Bellarmino told him that he had inflicted as much harm on Christendom by his Pastor Fido as Luther and Calvin by their heresies.  He retorted with a sarcasm which has not been transmitted to us, but which may probably have reflected on the pollution of Christian morals by the Jesuits.  In 1612 Guarini died at Venice, whither he was summoned by one of his innumerable and interminable lawsuits.

Bellarmino’s censure of the Pastor Fido strikes a modern reader as inexplicably severe.  Yet it is certain that the dissolute seventeenth century recognized this drama as one of the most potent agents of corruption.  Not infrequent references in the literature of that age to the ruin of families and reputations by its means, warn us to remember how difficult it is to estimate the ethical sensibilities of society in periods remote from our own.[183] In the course of the analysis which I now propose to make of this play, I shall attempt to show how, coming midway between Tasso’s Aminta and Marino’s Adone, and appealing to the dominant musical enthusiasms of the epoch, Guarini’s Pastor Fido may have merited the condemnation of far-sighted moralists.  Not censurable in itself, it was so related to the sentimental sensuality of its period as to form a link in the chain of enervation which weighed on Italy.