ords lavished on
him and his house. If so, and supposing Ariosto to have presented the
dedication-copy in person, it would have been curious to see the faces of
the two men while his Eminence was looking at it. Some will think that
the good-natured poet could hardly have taken such an occasion of
displaying his resentment. But the device did not express at whom it was
aimed: the cardinal need not have applied it to himself if he did not
choose, especially as the book was full of his praises; and good-natured
people will not always miss an opportunity of covertly inflicting a
sting. The device, at all events, shewed that the honey-maker had got
worse than nothing by his honey; and the house of Este could not say they
had done any thing to contradict it.

I think it probable that neither the poet's device nor the cardinal's
speech were forgotten, when, in the course of the next year, the parties
came to a rupture in consequence of the servant's refusing to attend his
master into Hungary. Ariosto excused himself on account of the state of
his health and of his family. He said that a cold climate did not agree
with him; that his chest was affected, and could not bear even the stoves
of Hungary; and that he could not, in common decency and humanity, leave
his mother in her old age, especially as all the rest of the family were
away but his youngest sister, whose interests he had also to take care
of. But Ippolito was not to be appeased. The public have seen, in a late
female biography, a deplorable instance of the unfeelingness with which
even a princess with a reputation for religion could treat the declining
health and unwilling retirement of a poor slave in her service, fifty
times her superior in every thing but servility. Greater delicacy was
not to be expected of the military priest. The nobler the servant, the
greater the desire to trample upon him and keep him at a disadvantage. It
is a grudge which rank owes to genius, and which it can only wave when
its possessor is himself "one of God Almighty's gentlemen." I do not mean
in point of genius, which is by no means the highest thing in the world,
whatever its owners may think of it; but in point of the highest of all
things, which is nobleness of heart. I confess I think Ariosto was wrong
in expecting what he did of a man he must have known so well, and in
complaining so much of courts, however good-humouredly. A prince occupies
the station he does, to avert the perils