The Library Magazine of Select Foreign Literature Part 10

But the Moor's Christmas has come early in October; there is time yet, and plenty of English steamers going backwards and forwards; who knows whether the wanderer may not yet spend the next Christmas by a genial English fireside, and recount to prattling children on his knee (others' children, alas!) the curious sights, sounds, and scenes of "Christmas for Moros?"

But I have not quite done with you yet, kindly reader. I must just briefly tell you how I went out again in the afternoon with Csar and a two-legged friend, and found more shopping going on and more handshaking, and found the more festive spirits getting hilarious over green tea and coffee and _kief_; how we strolled down to the Water-Port and sat on the quay, surrounded by merry young Moors in their "Sunday best;" how my friend essayed to sketch one or two of them, and they did not like it, but thought some evil spell would be put upon them thereby; how they asked us many questions about England, and particularly wanted to know how many dollars we possessed; how my companion won the hearts of some of the younger members of the party by teaching them how to whistle between their thumbs, and how to make a certain very loud and direfully discordant screech; and how J. and I finished the afternoon by partaking of a delightful bottle of English ale in the courtyard of a cool store, leaning our chairs against ma.s.sive stone pillars, and smoking the pipe of peace.

But I fear the stern Editor will not grant me any more s.p.a.ce, and I must leave at present the recital of all that I saw on the ensuing day, which the gentle Hamed, if he were a _little_ more closely acquainted with our inst.i.tutions, would call "Boxing-day for Moros."

C. A. P. ("SARCELLE"), _in London Society_, MOGADOR.

THE HOMES AND HAUNTS OF THE ITALIAN POETS.

GUARINI.

Pastoral poetry had in Italy a tendency to a rapid degeneration from the first. "Decipit exemplum vitiis imitabile." The earliest "pastorals" were far from being without merit, and merit of a high order. But they were eminently "vitiis imitabiles." Two specimens of Italian Arcadian poetry stand out, from the incredibly huge ma.s.s of such productions still extant, superior to all the innumerable imitations to which they gave rise in a more marked degree even than "originals" usually surpa.s.s imitations in value. These are the "Aminta" of Ta.s.so, and the "Pastor Fido" of the poet with whom it is the object of these pages to make the English nineteenth century reader, who never will find the time to read him, in some degree acquainted--Batista Guarini. It would be difficult to say which of these two celebrated pastoral dramas was received with the greater amount of delight and enthusiasm by the world of their contemporaries, or even which of them is the better performance. The almost simultaneous production of these two masterpieces in their kind is a striking instance of the, one may almost say, epidemic nature of the influences which rule the production of the human intellect; influences which certainly did not cease to operate for many generations after that of the authors of the "Aminta" and the "Pastor Fido," although the servile imitation of those greatly admired works unquestionably went for much in causing the overwhelming flood of pastorals which deluged Italy immediately subsequent to their enormous success.

I have said that it would be difficult to a.s.sign a preminence to either of these poems. But it must not be supposed that it is intended thence to insinuate an equality between the authors of them. Ta.s.so would occupy no lower place on the Italian Parna.s.sus if he had never written the "Aminta."

His fame rests upon a very much larger and firmer basis. But Guarini would be nowhere--would not be heard of at all--had he not written the "Pastor Fido." Having, however, produced that work--a work of which forty editions are said to have been printed in his lifetime, and which has been translated into almost every civilised language, including Latin, Greek, and Hebrew--he has always filled a s.p.a.ce in the eyes of his countrymen, and occupied a position in the roll of fame, which render his admission as one of our select band here imperative. He is, besides, a representative poet; the head and captain of the pastoral school, which attained everywhere so considerable a vogue, and in Italy such colossal proportions.

Guarini was born in the year 1537 in Ferrara,--desolate, dreary, shrunken, gra.s.s-grown, tumble-down Ferrara, which in the course of one half-century gave to the world, besides a host of lesser names, three such poets as Ta.s.so, Ariosto and Guarini. Ariosto died four years before Guarini was born; but Ta.s.so was nearly his contemporary, being but seven years his junior.

In very few cases in all the world and in all ages has it happened that intellectual distinction has been the appanage of one family for as many generations as in that of the Guarini. They came originally from Verona, where Guarino, the first of the family on record, who was born in 1370, taught the learned languages, and was one of the most notable of the band of scholars who laboured at the restoration of cla.s.sical literature. He lived to be ninety years old, and is recorded to have had twenty-three sons. It is certain that he had twelve living in 1438. One of them, Giovanni Batista, succeeded his father in his professors.h.i.+p at Ferrara, to which city the old scholar had been invited by Duke Hercules I. It would seem that another of his sons must also have shared the work of teaching in the University of Ferrara: for Batista the poet was educated by his great-uncle Alessandro, and succeeded him in his professors.h.i.+p. Of the poet's father we only learn that he was a mighty hunter, and further, that he and his poet-son were engaged in litigation respecting the inheritance of the poet's grandfather and great-uncle. It is probable that the two old scholars wished to bequeath their property, which included a landed estate, to their grandson and great-nephew, who already was manifesting tastes and capacities quite in accordance with their own, rather than to that exceptional member of the race who cared for nothing but dogs and horses.

Nor was Batista the last of his race who distinguished himself in the same career. His son succeeded him in his chair at the university; and we have thus at least four generations of scholars and professors following the same course in the same university, which was in their day one of the most renowned in Europe.

All this sounds very stable, very prosperous, very full of the element of contentment. And there is every reason to believe that the great-grandfather, the grandfather, the great-uncle, the son, were all as tranquil and contented and happy as well-to-do scholars in a prosperous university city should be. But not so the poet. His life was anything but tranquil, or happy, or contented. The lives of few men, it may be hoped, have been less so.

Yet his morning was brilliant enough. He distinguished himself so remarkably by his success in his early studies that, on the death of his great-uncle Alexander when he was only nineteen, he was appointed to succeed him. This was in 1556, when Hercules II. was Duke of Ferrara, and when that court of the Este princes was at the apogee of its splendour, renown, and magnificence. The young professor remained working at the proper labours of his profession for ten years; and they were in all probability the best and happiest, the only happy ones of his life. Happy is the nation, it has been said, which has no history; and much the same probably may be said of an individual. Respecting these ten years of Guarini's life but little has been recorded. No doubt the chronicle of them would have been monotonous enough. The same quiet duties quietly and successfully discharged; the same morning walk to his school, the same evening return from it, through the same streets, with salutations to the same friends, and leisurely pauses by the way to chat, Italian fas.h.i.+on, with one and another, as they were met in the streets, not then, as now, deserted, gra.s.s-grown, and almost weird in their pale sun-baked desolation, but thronged with bustling citizens, mingled with gay courtiers, and a very unusually large proportion of men whose names were known from one end of Italy to the other. Those school haunts in the Ferrarese University were haunts which the world-weary ex-professor must often throughout the years of his remaining life--some forty-five of them, for he did not die till 1612, when he was seventy-five--have looked back on as the best and happiest of his storm-tossed existence.

There is, however, one record belonging to this happy time which must not be forgotten. It was at Padua, _Padova la dotta_, as she has been in all ages and is still called, Padua the learned, in the year 1565. Guarini was then in his twenty-eighth year, and had been a professor at Ferrara for the last eight years. Probably it was due to the circ.u.mstance that his friend and fellow-townsman, Torquato Ta.s.so, was then pursuing his studies at Padua, that the young Ferrarese professor turned his steps in that direction, bound "on a long vacation ramble." Ta.s.so was only one-and-twenty at the time; but he was already a member of the famous Paduan Academy of the "Etherials," which Guarini was not. And we may readily fancy the pride and pleasure with which the younger man, doing the honours of the place to his learned friend, procured him to be elected a member of the "Etherials." Guarini (so called _nel secolo_--in the world), was _Il Costante_--the "Constant One" among the "Etherials." Scipio Gonzaga, who became subsequently the famous Cardinal, spoke an oration of welcome to him on his election. Then what congratulations, what antic.i.p.ations of fame, what loving protestations of eternal friends.h.i.+p, what nave acceptance of the importance and serious value of their Etherial Academic play, as the two youths strolling at the evening hour among the crowds of gravely clad but in no wise gravely speaking students who thronged the colonnades in deep shadow under their low-browed arches, sally forth from beneath them as the sun nears the west, on to the vast open s.p.a.ce which lies around the great church of St. Antony! Advancing in close talk they come up to Donatello's superb equestrian statue of the Venetian General Gattamelata, and lean awhile against the tall pedestal, finis.h.i.+ng their chat before entering the church for the evening prayer.

The "Etherials" of Padua const.i.tuted one of the innumerable "Academies"

which existed at that day and for a couple of centuries subsequently in every one of the hundred cities of Italy. The "Arcadian" craze was the generating cause of all of them. All the members were "shepherds;" all a.s.sumed a fancy name on becoming a member, by which they were known in literary circles; and every Academy printed all the rhymes its members strung together!

Those must have been pleasant days in old Padua, before the young Professor returned to his work in the neighbouring university of Ferrara.

The two young men were then, and for some time afterwards, loving friends; for they had not yet become rival poets.

At the end of those ten years of university life he may be said to have entered on a new existence--to have begun life afresh--so entirely dis-severed was his old life from the new that then opened on him.

Alphonso II., who had succeeded his father, Hercules II., as Duke of Ferrara in 1559, "called him to the court" in 1567, and he began life as a courtier, or a "servant" of the Duke, in the language of the country and time.

Well, in 1567 he entered into the service of the Duke, his sovereign, and never had another happy or contented hour!

The first service on which the Duke employed him, and for the performance of which he seems specially to have taken him from his professional chair, was an emba.s.sy to Venice, to congratulate the new Doge, Pietro Loredano, on his elevation to the ducal throne, to which he had been elected on the previous 19th of June. On this occasion the Professor was created Cavaliere, a t.i.tle to which his landed estate of Guarina, so called from the ancestor on whom it had been originally bestowed by a former duke, fairly ent.i.tled him.

Shortly afterwards he was sent as amba.s.sador to the court of Turin; and then to that of the Emperor Maximilian at Innspruck. Then he was twice sent to Poland; the first time on the occasion of the election of Henry the Third of France to the throne of that kingdom; and the second time when Henry quitted it to ascend that of France on the death of his brother Charles IX. The object of this second emba.s.sy was to intrigue for the election to the Polish crown of Alphonso. But, as it is hardly necessary to say, his mission was unsuccessful.

It seems, too, to have been well-nigh fatal to the amba.s.sador. There is extant a letter written from Warsaw to his wife, which gives a curious and interesting account of the sufferings he endured on the journey and at the place of his destination. He tells his wife not to be discontented that his silence has been so long, but to be thankful that it was not eternal, as it was very near being! "I started, as you know, more in the fas.h.i.+on of a courier than of an amba.s.sador. And that would have been more tolerable if bodily fatigue had been all. But the same hand that had to flog the horses by day, had to hold the pen by night. Nature could not bear up against this double labour of body and mind; especially after I had travelled by Serravelles and Ampez,[48] which is more disagreeable and difficult than I can tell you, from the ruggedness no less of the country than of the people, from the scarcity of horses, the miserable mode of living, and the want of every necessary. So much so that on reaching Hala[49] I had a violent fever. I embarked, however, for Vienna notwithstanding. What with fever, discouragement, an intense thirst, scarcity of remedies and of medical a.s.sistance, bad lodging, generally far to seek,[50] and often infected with disease, food disgusting, even to persons in health, bed where you are smothered in feathers, in a word, none of the necessaries or comforts of life! I leave you to imagine what I have suffered. The evil increased; my strength grew less. I lost my appet.i.te for everything save wine. In a word, little hope remained to me of life, and that little was odious to me. There is on the Danube, which I was navigating, a vast whirlpool, so rapid that if the boatmen did not avail themselves of the a.s.sistance of a great number of men belonging to the locality, strong and powerful and well acquainted with the danger, who are there constantly for the purpose, and who struggle with their oars against the rapacious gulf, there is not a vessel in that great river which would not be engulfed! The place is worthy of the name of "the Door of Death," which with a notoriety of evil fame it has gained for itself.

There is no pa.s.senger so bold as not to pa.s.s that bit of the course of the river on foot; for the thing is truly formidable and terrible. But I was so overcome by illness, that having lost all sense of danger or desire to live, I did not care to leave the boat, but remained in it, with those strong men, I hardly know whether to say stupidly or intrepidly--but I will say intrepidly, since at one point, where I was within an ace of destruction, I felt no fear."

He goes on to tell how at Vienna a physician treated him amiss, and made him worse; how every kind of consideration, and his own desire to save his life, counselled him to delay there; but how the honour, the responsibility of the emba.s.sy wholly on his shoulders, his duty to his sovereign prevailed to drive him onwards. He feared, too, lest it should be supposed at Warsaw that he preferred his life to the business on which he came, an accusation which might have been made use of by suspicious and malignant adversaries to deprive him of all the credit of his labours, and "to s.n.a.t.c.h from my Prince the crown which we are striving to place on his head. It is impossible to imagine," he continues, "what I suffered in that journey of more than six hundred miles from Vienna to Warsaw, dragged rather than carried in carts, broken and knocked to pieces. I wonder that I am still alive! The obstinate fever, the want of rest, of food, and of medicine, the excessive cold, the infinite hards.h.i.+ps, the uninhabited deserts, were killing me. More often than not it was a much lesser evil to crouch by night in the cart, which dislocated my bones by day, rather than to be suffocated in the foulness of those dens, or stables rather, where the dogs and cats, the c.o.c.ks and hens, and the geese, the pigs and the calves, and sometimes the children, kept me waiting."

He proceeds to tell how the country was overrun, in that time of interregnum, by lawless bands of Cossacks; how he was obliged to travel with a strong escort, but nevertheless was obliged several times to deviate from the direct road to avoid the Cossacks, but on two occasions had very narrow escapes from falling into their hands. When he reached Warsaw at last, more dead than alive, the only improvement of his position was that he was stationary instead of in motion. "The cart no more lacerates my limbs!" But there was no rest to be got. "The place, the season, the food, the drink, the water, the servants, the medicines, the doctors, mental trouble, and a thousand other ills make up my torment.

Figure to yourself all the kingdom lodged in one little town, and my room in the midst of it! There is no place from the top to the bottom, on the right or on the left, by day or by night, that is not full of tumult and noise. There is no special time here destined for business. Negotiation is going on always, because drinking is going on always; and business is dry work without wine. When business is over, visits begin; and when these are at an end, drums, trumpets, bombs, uproar, cries, quarrels, fighting, split one's head in a manner piteous to think of. Ah! if I suffered all this labour and this torment for the love and the glory of G.o.d, I should be a martyr!" (one thinks of Wolsey!) "But is he not worthy of the name who serves without hope of recompense?"

He concludes his letter, bidding his wife not to weep for him, but to live and care for her children, in a manner which indicates that he had even then but little hope of returning alive.

We are nevertheless a.s.sured by his biographers that he acquitted himself upon all these occasions in such sort as to give satisfaction to his sovereign and to acquire for himself the reputation of an upright and able minister. The Italian practice of entrusting emba.s.sies especially to men of letters, which we first had occasion to note when tracing the vicissitudes of the life of Dante in the thirteenth century, which we saw subsequently exemplified in the cases of Petrarch, Boccaccio, and Ariosto, and which might be further exemplified in the persons of many other Italian scholars and men of letters, still, as we see, prevailed in the sixteenth century, and continued to do so for some little time longer.

But in no one instance, of all those I have mentioned, does the poet thus employed in functions which in other lands and other times have usually led to honours and abundant recognition of a more solid kind, appear to have reaped any advantage in return for the service performed, or to have been otherwise than dissatisfied and discontented with the treatment accorded to him.

It would have been very interesting to learn somewhat of the impression made upon an Italian scholar of the sixteenth century by the places visited, and persons with whom he must have come in contact in those transalpine lands, which were then so far off, so contrasted in all respects with the home scenes among which his life had been pa.s.sed in the low-lying, fat, and fertile valley of the Po. Of all this his various biographers and contemporaries tell us no word! But there is a volume of his letters, a little square quarto volume, now somewhat rare, printed at Venice in the year 1595.[51] These letters have somewhat unaccountably not been included in any of the editions of his works, and they are but little known. But turning to this little volume, and looking over the dates of the letters (many of them, however, are undated), I found three written "Di Spruch," and eagerly turned to them, thinking that I should certainly find there what I was seeking. The letters belong to a later period of Guarini's life, having been written in 1592, when he was again sent on an emba.s.sy to the German Emperor. This circ.u.mstance, however, is of no importance as regards the purpose for which I wanted the letters. I was disappointed. But I must nevertheless give one of these letters, not wantonly to compel my reader to share my disappointment, but because it is a curiosity in its way. The person to whom he writes is a lady, the Contessa Pia di Sala, with whom he was evidently intimate. He is at Innspruck at the Court of the Emperor Maximilian. The lady is at Mantua, and this is what he writes to her:

"Di Spruch, Nov. 29, 1592.

"The letter of your Ill.u.s.trious Ladys.h.i.+p, together with which you send me that of your most excellent brother, written at the end of August, reached me yesterday, at first to my very great anger at having been for so long a time deprived of so precious a thing, while I appeared in fault towards so distinguished a lady; but finally to my very great good fortune. For if a letter written by the most lovely flame[52] in the world had arrived, while the skies were burning, what would have become of me, when, now that winter is beginning, I can scarcely prevent myself from falling into ashes? And in truth, when I think that those so courteous thoughts come from the mind which informs so lovely a person, that those characters have been traced by a hand of such excellent beauty, I am all ablaze, no less than if the paper were fire, the words flames, and all the syllables sparks. But G.o.d grant that, while I am set on fire by the letter of your Ill.u.s.trious Ladys.h.i.+p, you may not be inflamed by anger against me, from thinking that the terms in which I write are too bold. Have no such doubt, my honoured mistress! I want nothing from the flaming of my letter, but to have made by the light of it more vivid and more brilliant in you, the natural purity of your beautiful face, even as it seems to me that I can see it at this distance. My love is nothing else save honour; my flame is reverence; my fire is ardent desire to serve you. And only so long will the appointment in his service, which it has pleased my Lord His Serene Highness the Duke of Mantua to give me, and on which your Ill.u.s.trious Ladys.h.i.+p has been kind enough to congratulate me so cordially, be dear to me, as you shall know that I am fit for it, and more worthy and more ready to receive the favour of your commands, which will always be to me a most sure testimony that you esteem me, not for my own worth, as you too courteously say, but for the worth which you confer on me, since I am not worthy of such esteem for any other merit than that which comes to me from being honoured by so n.o.ble and beautiful a lady. I kiss the hand of your Ill.u.s.trious Ladys.h.i.+p, wis.h.i.+ng the culmination of every felicity."

Now, this letter I consider to be a very great curiosity! The other two written from the same place, one to a Signor Bulgarini at Siena, the other to a lady, the Marchesa di Grana, at Mantua, are of an entirely similar description. I turned to them in the hope of finding how Innspruck, its stupendous scenery, its court, its manners so widely different from those to which the writer and his correspondents were used, its streets, its people, impressed a sixteenth century Italian from the valley of the Po. I find instead a psychological phenomenon! The writer is a grave, austere man (Guarini was notably such), celebrated throughout Italy for his intellectual attainments, in the fifty-seventh year of his age, with a wife and family; he is amidst scenes which must, one would have thought, have impressed in the very highest degree the imagination of a poet, and must, it might have been supposed, have interested those he was writing to in an only somewhat less degree, and he writes the stuff the reader has just waded through. It is clear that this Italian sixteenth century scholar, poet and of cultivated intellect as he was, saw nothing amid the strange scenes to which a hard and irksome duty called him, which he thought worthy of being mentioned even by a pa.s.sing word to his friends!

Surely this is a curious trait of national character.

He remained in the service of the court for fourteen years, employed mainly, as it should seem, in a variety of emba.s.sies; an employment which seems to have left him a disappointed, soured, and embittered man. He considered that he had not been remunerated as his labour deserved, that the heavy expenses to which he had been put in his long journeys had not been satisfactorily made up to him, and that he had not been treated in any of the foreign countries to which his emba.s.sies had carried him with the respect due to his own character and to his office.

He determined therefore to leave the court and retire to Padua, a residence in which city, it being not far distant from his estate of Guarina, would offer him, he thought, a convenient opportunity of overlooking his property and restoring order to his finances, which had suffered much during his travels. This was in the year 1582, when Guarini was in the forty-fifth year of his age. It is not clear, however, that this retirement was wholly spontaneous; and the probability is that the Duke and his amba.s.sador were equally out of humour with each other. And it is probable that the faults were not all on the side of the Duke. There is sufficient evidence that the author of the "Pastor Fido" must have been a difficult man to live with.

The old friends.h.i.+p of happier days with Ta.s.so had not survived the wear and tear of life at court. It was known that they no longer saw or spoke with each other. And everybody--if not of their contemporaries, at least of subsequent writers--jumped to the conclusion that the writer of the "Aminta" and the writer of the "Pastor Fido" must be jealous of each other. Jealousy there certainly was. But some frailer and more mortal female than the Muse was the cause of it. The Abate Sera.s.si in his life of Ta.s.so admits that Ta.s.so first gave offence to Guarini by a sonnet in which he endeavoured to alienate the affections of a lady from him, by representing him as a faithless and fickle lover. The lines in which Ta.s.so attacked his brother poet are, it must be admitted, sharp enough!

Si muove e si raggira Instabil pi che arida fronde ai venti; Nulla f, null' amor, falsi i tormenti Sono, e falso l'affeto ond' ei sospira.

Insidioso amante, ama e disprezza Quasi in un punto, e trionfando spiega Di femminile spoglie empi trofei.[53]...

The attack was savage enough, it must be admitted, and well calculated to leave a lasting wound. Guarini immediately answered the cruel sonnet by another, the comparative weakness of which is undeniable.

Questi che indarno ad alta mira aspira Con altrui biasmi, e con bugiardi accenti, Vedi come in se stesso arruota i denti, Mentre contra ragion meco s'adira.

Di due fiamme si vanta, e stringe e spezza Pi volte un nodo; e con quest' arti piega (Chi 'l crederebbe!) a suo favore i Dei.[54]...

There is reason to think that the accusation of many times binding and loosing the same knot, may have hit home. The sneer about bending the G.o.ds to favour him, alludes to Ta.s.so's favour at court, then in the ascendant, and may well have been as offensive to the Duke and the ladies of his court as to the object of his satire. Both angry poets show themselves somewhat earth-stained members of the Paduan "Etherials." But the sequel of the estrangement was all in favour of the greater bard. Ta.s.so, in desiring a friend to show his poems in ma.n.u.script to certain friends, two or three in number, on whose opinion he set a high value, named Guarini among the number. And upon another occasion wis.h.i.+ng to have Guarini's opinion as to the best of two proposed, methods of terminating a sonnet, and not venturing to communicate directly with him, he employed a common friend to obtain his brother-poet's criticism. Ta.s.so had also in his dialogue ent.i.tled the "Messagero" given public testimony to Guarini's high intellectual and civil merits. But Guarini appears never to have forgiven the offence. He never once went to see Ta.s.so in his miserable confinement in the hospital of St. Anne; nor, as has been seen, would hold any communication with him.

He must have been a stern and unforgiving man. And indeed all the available testimony represents him as having been so,--upright, honest, and honourable, but haughty, punctilious, litigious, quick to take offence, slow to forget or forgive it, and cursed with a thin-skinned _amour propre_ easily wounded and propense to credit others with the intention of wounding where no such intention existed. The remainder of the story of his life offers an almost unbroken series of testimonies to the truth of such an estimate of his character.

It was after fourteen years' service in the court of Duke Alphonso, as has been said, that he retired disgusted and weary to live in independence and nurse his estate in the neighbourhood of Padua. But the part of Cincinnatus is not for every man! It was in 1582 that he retired from the court intending to bid it and its splendours, its disappointments and its jealousies, an eternal adieu. In 1585, on an offer from the Duke to make him his secretary, he returned and put himself into harness again!

But this second attempt to submit himself to the service, to the caprices and exigencies of a master and of a court ended in a quicker and more damaging catastrophe than the first. In a diary kept by the poet's nephew, Marcantonio Guarini, under the date of July 13, 1587, we find it written that "the Cavalier Batista Guarini, Secretary of the Duke, considering that his services did not meet with sufficient consideration in proportion to his worth, released himself from that servitude." The phrase here translated "released himself" is a peculiar one--_si licenzio_--"dismissed himself." To receive _licenza_, or to be _licenziato_, is to be dismissed, or at least parted with in accordance with the will of the employer. But the phrase used by the diarist seems intended to express exactly what happened when the poet, once more discontented, took himself off from Ferrara and its Duke. He seems to have done so in a manner which gave deep and lasting offence. In a subsequent pa.s.sage of the above-quoted diary we read, "the Cavaliere Batista Guarini having absented himself from Ferrara, disgusted with the Duke, betook himself to Florence, and then, by the intermedium of Guido Coccapani the agent, asked for his dismissal in form and obtained it." We happen, however, to have a letter written by this Coccapani, who seems to have been the Duke's private secretary and managing man, in which he gives his version of the matter. He was "stupefied," he says, "when he received the extravagant letter of the Cavaliere Guarini, and began to think that it would be with him as it had been with Ta.s.so," who by that time had fallen into disgrace. There is reason to think that he left Ferrara secretly, without taking leave of the Duke, or letting anybody at court know where he had gone. He did, however, obtain his formal dismissal, as has been said, but the Duke by no means forgave him.

Though it would appear that on leaving Ferrara in this irregular manner he went in the first instance to Florence, it seems that he had had hopes given him of a comfortable position and honourable provision at Turin. He was to have been made a Counsellor of State, and entrusted with the task of remodelling the course of study at the university, with a stipend of six hundred crowns annually. But on arriving at Turin he found difficulties in the way. In fact, the angry Duke of Ferrara had used his influence with the Duke of Savoy to prevent anything being done for his contumacious Secretary of State. Guarini, extremely mortified, had to leave Turin, and betook himself to Venice.

His adventure, however, was of a nature to cause great scandal in that clime and time. As usual, the Italians were offended at the "imprudence"

of which Guarini's temper had led him to be guilty, more than they would have been by many a fault which among ourselves would be deemed a very much worse one. A violence of temper or indignation shown in such a manner as to injure _one's own_ interests is, and in a yet greater degree was, a spectacle extremely disgusting to Italian moral sentiment.

The outcry against Guarini on this occasion was so great that he found himself obliged to put forth an exculpatory statement.