Chapter 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 mass 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 surpass imitations in value. These are the "Aminta" of Tasso, 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 assign a preeminence 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. Tasso would occupy no lower place on the Italian Parnassus 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 space 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, grass-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 Tasso, Ariosto and Guarini. Ariosto died four years before Guarini was born; but Tasso 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 classical 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 professorship 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 professorship. 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 fashion, with one and another, as they were met in the streets, not then, as now, deserted, grass-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 circumstance that his friend and fellow-townsman, Torquato Tasso, was then pursuing his studies at Padua, that the young Ferrarese professor turned his steps in that direction, bound "on a long vacation ramble." Tasso 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 anticipations of fame, what loving protestations of eternal friendship, what naive 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 space 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, finishing their chat before entering the church for the evening prayer.

The "Etherials" of Padua constituted 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 assumed 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 embassy 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 title to which his landed estate of Guarina, so called from the ancestor on whom it had been originally bestowed by a former duke, fairly entitled him.

Shortly afterwards he was sent as ambassador 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 embassy 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 ambassador. 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 fashion of a courier than of an ambassador. 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 assistance, 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 appetite 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 assistance 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 passenger so bold as not to pass 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 embassy 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 snatch 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 hardships, 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 cocks 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 God, 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 assured 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 embassies 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 passed 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 embassy to the German Emperor. This circumstance, 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 Illustrious Ladyship, 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 God grant that, while I am set on fire
by the letter of your Illustrious Ladyship, 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 Illustrious Ladyship 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 noble and beautiful a lady. I
kiss the hand of your Illustrious Ladyship, wishing 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 passing 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 embassies; 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 embassies 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 ambassador 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 friendship of happier days with Tasso 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 Serassi in his life of Tasso admits that Tasso 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 Tasso attacked his brother poet are, it must be admitted, sharp enough!

Si muove e si raggira
Instabil piu che arida fronde ai venti;
Nulla fe, 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
Piu 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 gods to favour him, alludes to Tasso'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. Tasso, in desiring a friend to show his poems in manuscript 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 wishing 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. Tasso had also in his dialogue entitled 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 Tasso 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 passage 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 Tasso," 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.

"If human actions, my most kind readers," he begins, "always bore marked on the front of them the aims and motives which have produced them, or if those who talk about them were always well informed enough to be able to judge of them without injury to the persons of whom they speak, I should not be compelled, at my age, and after so many years of a life led in the eyes of the world, and often busied in defending the honour of others, to defend this day my own, which has always been dearer to me than my life. Having heard, then, that my having left the service of His Serene Highness the Duke of Ferrara and entered that of the Duke of Savoy has given occasion to some persons, ignorant probably of the real state of the case, to make various remarks, and form various opinions, I have determined to publish the truth, and at the same time to declare my own sentiments in the matter.

"I declare, then, that previously to my said departure I consigned to the proper person everything, small as it was, which was in my hands regarding my office, which had always been exercised by me uprightly and without any other object in view than the service of my sovereign and the public welfare. Further, that I, by a written paper under my own hand (as the press of time and my need rendered necessary), requested a free and decorous dismissal from the Duke in question, and also, that I set forth in all humility the causes which led me to that determination; and I added (some of the circumstances in which I was compelling me to do so) that if His Serene Highness did not please to give me any other answer, I would take his silence as a consent to my request of dismissal. I declare further that the paper was delivered to the principal Minister of his Serene Highness, and lastly, that my salary was, without any further communication with me, stopped, and cancelled from the roll of payments. And as this is the truth, so it is equally true that my appointment as reformer of the University of Turin, and Counsellor of State with six hundred crowns yearly, was settled and concluded with His Serene Highness the Duke of Savoy, and that I declined to bind myself, and did not bind myself, to ask any other dismissal from His Serene Highness the Duke of Ferrara than that which I have already spoken. And, finally, it is true that, as I should not have gone to Turin if I had not been engaged for that service and invited thither, so I should not have left, or wished to leave this place,[55] had I not known that I received my dismissal in the manner above related. Now, as to the cause which may have retarded and may still retard the fulfillment of the engagement above mentioned, I have neither object, nor obligation, nor need to declare it. Suffice it that it is not retarded by any fault of mine, or difficulty on my side. In justification of which I offered myself, and by these presents now again offer myself, to present myself wheresoever, whensoever, and in whatsoever manner, and under whatsoever conditions and penalties, as may be seen more clearly set forth in the instrument of agreement sent by me to His Highness. From all which, I would have the world to know, while these affairs of mine are still in suspension, that I am a man of honour, and am always ready to maintain the same in whatsoever manner may be fitting to my condition and duty. And as I do not at all doubt that some decision of some kind not unworthy of so just and so magnanimous a prince will be forthcoming; so, let it be what it may, it will be received by me with composure and contentment; since, by God's grace, and that of the serene and exalted power under the most just and happy dominion of which I am now living, and whose subject, if not by birth, yet by origin and family, I am,[56] I have a comfortable and honoured existence. And may you, my honoured readers, live in happiness and contentment. Venice, February 1, 1589."

We must, I think, nevertheless be permitted to doubt the contentment and happiness of the life he led, as it should seem, for the next four years, at Venice. No such decision of any kind, as he hoped from the Duke of Savoy, was forthcoming. He was shunted! He had quarrelled with his own sovereign, and evidently the other would have none of him. The Italians of one city were in those days to a wonderful degree foreigners in another ruled by a different government; and there can be little doubt that Guarini wandered among the quays and "calle" of Venice, or paced the great piazza at the evening hour, a moody and discontented man!

At last, after nearly four years of this sad life, there came an invitation from the Duke of Mantua proposing that Guarini should come to Mantua together with his son Alessandro, to occupy honourable positions in that court. The poet, heartily sick of "retirement," accepted at once, and went to Mantua. But there, too, another disappointment awaited him. The "magnanimous" Duke Alphonso would not tolerate that the man who had so cavalierly left his service should find employment elsewhere. It is probable that this position was obtained for him by the influence of his old friend and fellow-member of the "Etherials" at Padua, Scipione Gonzaga; and it would seem that he occupied it for a while, and went on behalf of the Duke of Mantua to Innspruck, whence he wrote the wonderful letters which have been quoted.

The Cardinal's influence, however, was not strong enough to prevail against the spite of a neighbouring sovereign. There are two letters extant from the Duke, or his private secretary, to that same Coccapani whom we saw so scandalized at Guarini's hurried and informal departure from Ferrara, and who was residing as Alphonso's representative at Mantua, in which the Minister is instructed to represent to the Duke of Mantua that his brother of Ferrara "did not think it well that the former should take any of the Guarini family into his service, and when they should see each other he would tell him his reasons. For the present he would only say that he wished the Duke to know that it would be excessively pleasing to him if the Duke would have nothing to say to any of them."

This was in 1593; and the world-weary poet found himself at fifty-six once again cast adrift upon the world. The extremity of his disgust and weariness of all things may be measured by the nature of the next step he took. He conceived, says his biographer Barotti, that "God called him by internal voices, and by promise of a more tranquil life, to accept the tonsure." His wife had died some little time before; and it was therefore open to him to do so. He went to Rome accordingly for the purpose of there taking orders. But during the short delay which intervened between the manifestation of his purpose and the fulfilment of it, news reached him that his friend and protectress the Duchess of Urbino, Alphonso's sister, had interceded for him with the Duke, and that he was forgiven! It was open to him to return to his former employment! And no sooner did the news reach him than he perceived that "the internal voices" were altogether a mistake. God had never called him at all, and Alphonso had! All thoughts of the Church were abandoned on the instant, and he hastened to Ferrara, arriving there on the 15th of April, 1595.

But neither on this occasion was he destined to find the tranquillity which he seemed fated never to attain! And this time the break-up was a greater and more final one than the last. Duke Alphonso died in 1597; and the Pontificial Court, which had long had its eye on the possibility of enforcing certain pretended claims to the Duchy of Ferrara, found the means at Alphonso's death of ousting his successor the Duke Cesare, who remained thenceforward Duke of Modena only, but no longer of Ferrara.

Guarini was once more adrift! Nor were the political changes in Ferrara the only thing which rendered the place no longer a home for him. Other misfortunes combined to render a residence in the city odious to him. His daughter Anna had married a noble gentleman of Ferrara, the Count Ercole Trotti, by whom she was on the 3rd of May, 1598, murdered at his villa of Zanzalino near Ferrara. Some attempt was made to assert that the husband had reason to suspect that his wife was plotting against his life. But there seems to have been no foundation for any accusation of the sort; and the crime was prompted probably by jealousy. Guarini, always on bad terms with his sons, and constantly involved in litigation with them, as he had been with his father, was exceedingly attached to this unfortunate daughter.

But even this terrible loss was not the only bitterness which resulted from this crime. Guarini composed a long Latin epitaph, in which he strongly affirms her absolute innocence of everything that had been laid to her charge, and speaks with reprobation of the husband's[57] crime. But scarcely had the stone bearing the inscription been erected than the indignant father was required by the authorities of the city to remove it. A declaration, which he published on the subject, dated June 15, 1598, is still extant. "On that day," he writes, "the Vice-legate of Ferrara spoke with me, in the name of the Holy Father, as to the removing of the epitaph written by me on Anna my daughter in the church of Sta. Catherina. He said that there were things in it that might provoke other persons to resentment, and occasion much scandal; and that, besides that, there were in the inscription words of Sacred Scripture, which ought not to be used in such a place. I defended my cause, and transmitted a memorial to his Holiness, having good reason to know that these objections were the mere malignity of those who favour the opposite party, and of those who caused the death of my innocent child. But at last, on the 22nd, I caused the epitaph to be removed, intimating that it was my intention to take up the body, and inter it elsewhere. On which it is worthy of remark, that having made my demand to that effect, I was forbidden to do so." He further adds: "Note! news was brought to me here that my son Girolamo, who was evidently discovered to be the accomplice, and principal atrocious author of the death of his sister Anna, received from the Potesta of Rovigo licence to come into the Polisina with twelve men armed with arquebuses."

All this is very sad; and whether these terrible suspicions may or may not have had any foundation other than the envenomed temper generated by the family litigations, it must equally have had the effect of making the life of Guarini a very miserable one, and contributing to his determination to abandon finally his native city.

More surprising is it that, after so many disgusts and disappointments, he should once again have been tempted to seek, what he had never yet been able to find there, in a court. In a letter written in November, 1598, he informs the Duke Cesare (Duke of Modena, though no longer of Ferrara) that the Grand Duke of Florence had offered him a position at Florence. And his Serene Highness, more kindly and forgiving than the late Duke, wrote him an obliging and congratulatory letter in the following month.

At Florence everything at first seemed to be going well with him, and he seemed to stand high in favour with the Grand Duke Ferdinand. But very shortly he quitted Florence in anger and disgust on the discovery of the secret marriage of his third son, Guarini, with a woman of low condition at Pisa, with at least the connivance, as the poet thought, whether justly or not there is nothing to show, of the Grand Duke.

After that his old friend the Duchess of Urbino once again stood his friend, and he obtained a position in the court of Urbino, then one of the most widely famed centres of cultivation and letters in Italy. And for a while everything seemed at last to be well with him there. On the 23rd of February, 1603, he writes to his sister, who apparently had been pressing him to come home to Ferrara:--"I should like to come home, my sister. I have great need and a great desire for home; but I am treated so well here, and with so much distinction and so much kindness, that I cannot come. I must tell you that all expenses for myself and my servants are supplied, so that I have not to spend a farthing for anything in the world that I need. The orders are that anything I ask for should be furnished to me. Besides all which, they give me three hundred crowns a year; so that, what with money and expenses, the position is worth six hundred crowns a year to me. You may judge, then, if I can throw it up. May God grant you every happiness!

Your brother,
B. GUARINI."

But all would not do. He had been but a very little time in this little Umbrian Athens among the Apennines before he once again threw up his position in anger and disgust, because he did not obtain all the marks of distinction to which he thought that he was entitled. This was in 1603. He was now sixty-six, and seems at length to have made no further attempt to haunt at court. Once again he was at Rome in 1605, having undertaken, at the request of the citizens of Ferrara, to carry their felicitations to the new Pope, Paul the Fifth. And with the exception of that short expedition his last years were spent in the retirement of his ancestral estate of Guarina.

The property is situated in the district of Lendinara, on the fat and fertile low-lying region between Rovigo and Padua, and belongs to the commune--parish, as we should say--of St. Bellino. The house, dating probably from the latter part of the fifteenth century, is not much more than a hundred yards or so from the _piazza_ of the village, which boasts two thousand inhabitants. The road between the two is bordered with trees. The whole district is as flat as a billiard table, and as prosaical in its well-to-do fertility as can be imagined. It is intersected by a variety of streams, natural and artificial. About a couple of miles from the house to the south is the Canalbianco; and a little farther to the north the Adigetto. To the east runs the Scortico. St. Bellino, from whom the village is named, was, it seems, enrolled among the martyrs by Pope Eugenius the Third in 1152. He has a great specialty for curing the bite of mad dogs. There is a grand cenotaph in his honour in the village church, which was raised by some of the Guarini family. But this, too, like all else, became a subject of trouble and litigation to our poet. A certain Baldassare Bonifaccio of Rovigo wanted to transport the saint to that city. Guarini would not hear of this; litigated the matter before the tribunals of Venice, and prevailed. So the saint still resides at St. Bellino to the comfort of all those bitten by mad dogs in those parts. The house and estate have passed through several hands since that time; but a number of old family portraits may still be seen on the walls, together with the family arms, and the motto, "Fortis est in asperis non turbari." The armchair and writing table of the poet are also still preserved in the house, and a fig-tree is pointed out close by it, under the shade of which the poet, as tradition tells, wrote on that table and in that chair his "Pastor Fido." There is an inscription on the chair as follows: "Guarin sedendo qui canto, che vale al paragon seggio reale."[58]

It was not, however, during this his last residence here that the "Pastor Fido" was written, but long previously. It was doubtless his habit to escape from the cares of official life in Ferrara from time to time as he could; and it must have been in such moments that the celebrated pastoral was written.[59]

The idea of a scholar and a poet, full of years and honours, passing the quiet evening of his life in a tranquil retirement in his own house on his own land, is a pleasing one. But it is to be feared that in the case of the author of the "Pastor Fido" it would be a fallacious one. Guarini would not have come to live on his estate if he could have lived contentedly in any city. We may picture him to ourselves sitting under his fig-tree, or pacing at evening under the trees of the straight avenue between his house and the village, or on the banks of one of the sluggish streams slowly finding their way through the flat fields towards the Po; but I am afraid the picture must be of one "Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow," with eyes bent earthwards, and discontented mind: "remote," because to the Italian mind all places beyond the easy reach of a city are so; "unfriended," because he had quarrelled with everybody; "melancholy," because all had gone amiss with him, and his life had been a failure; "slow," because no spring of hope in the mind gave any elasticity to his step.

One other "haunt" of the aged poet must, however, be mentioned, because it is a very characteristic one. During this last residence at Guarina, he hired an apartment at Ferrara, selecting it in a crowded part of the centre of the city, especially frequented by the lawyers, that he might be in the midst of them, when he went into the city on the various business connected with his interminable lawsuits. The most crowded part of the heart of the city of Ferrara! It would be difficult to find any such part now. But the picture offered to the imagination, of the aged poet, professor, courtier, haunting the courts, the lawyers' chambers, leaving his, at least, tranquil retreat at St. Bellino, to drag weary feet through the lanes of the city in which he had in earlier days played so different a part, is a sad one. But there are people who like contention so much that such work is a labour of love to them. And certainly, if the inference may be drawn from the fact of his never having been free from lawsuits in one quarrel or another, Guarini must have been one of these. But it is passing strange that the same man should have been the author of the "Pastor Fido."

They pursued him to the end, these litigations; or he pursued them! And at last he died, not at Guarina, but at Venice, on the 7th of October, 1612, where, characteristically enough, he chanced to be on business connected with some lawsuit.

And now a few words must be said about his great work, the "Pastor Fido." It is one of the strangest things in the range of literary history that such a man should have written such a poem. He was, one would have said, the last man in the world to produce such a work. The first ten years of his working life were spent in the labour of a pedagogue; the rest of it in the inexpressibly dry, frivolous, and ungenial routine of a small Italian court, or in wandering from one to the other of them in the vain and always disappointed search for such employment. We are told that he was a punctilious, stiff, unbending, angular man; upright and honourable, but unforgiving and wont to nurse his enmities. He was soured, disappointed, discontented with everybody and everything, involved in litigation first with his father, and then with his own children. And this was the man who wrote the "Pastor Fido," of all poems comparable to it in reputation the lightest, the airiest, and the most fantastic! The argument of it is as follows:

The Arcadians, suffering in various ways from the anger of Diana, were at last informed by the oracle that the evils which afflicted them would cease when a youth and a maiden, both descended from the Immortals, as it should seem the _creme de la creme_ of Arcadian society mostly was, should be joined together in faithful love. Thereupon Montano, a priest of the goddess who was descended from Hercules, arranged that his only son Silvio should be betrothed to Amaryllis, the only daughter of Tytirus, who was descended from Pan. The arrangement seemed all that could be desired, only that a difficulty arose from the fact that Silvio, whose sole passion was the chase, could not be brought to care the least in the world for Amaryllis. Meantime Mirtillo, the son, as was supposed, of the shepherd Carino, fell desperately in love with Amaryllis. She was equally attached to him, but dared not in the smallest degree confess her love, because the law of Arcadia would have punished with death her infidelity to her betrothed vows. A certain Corisca, however, who had conceived a violent but unrequited passion for Mirtillo, perceiving or guessing the love of Amaryllis for him, hating her accordingly, and hoping that, if she could be got out of the way, she might win Mirtillo's love, schemes by deceit and lies to induce Mirtillo and Amaryllis to enter together a cave, which they do in perfect innocence, and without any thought of harm. Then he contrives that they should be caught there, and denounced by a satyr; and Amaryllis is condemned to die. The law, however, permits that her life may be saved by any Arcadian who will voluntarily die in her stead; and this Mirtillo determines to do, although he believes that Amaryllis cares nothing for him, and also is led by the false Corisca to believe that she had gone into the cave for the purpose of meeting with another lover. The duty of sacrificing him devolves on Montano the priest; and he is about to carry out the law, when Carino, who has been seeking his reputed son Mirtillo, comes in, and while attempting to make out that he is a foreigner, and therefore not capable of satisfying the law by his death, brings unwittingly to light circumstances that prove that he is in truth a son of Montano, and therefore a descendant of the god Hercules. It thus appears that a marriage between Mirtillo and Amaryllis will exactly satisfy the conditions demanded by the oracle. There is an under-plot, which consists in providing a lover and a marriage for the woman-hater Silvio. He is loved in vain by the nymph Dorinda, whom he unintentionally wounds with an arrow while out hunting. The pity he feels for her wound softens his heart towards her, and all parties are made happy by this second marriage.

Such is a skeleton of the story of the "Pastor Fido." It will be observed that there is more approach to a plot and to human interest than in any previous production of this kind, and some of the situations are well conceived for dramatic effect. And accordingly the success which it achieved was immediate and immense. Nor, much as the taste of the world has been changed since that day, has it ever lost its place in the estimation of cultivated Italians.

It would be wholly uninteresting to attempt any account of the wide-spreading literary controversies to which the publication of the "Pastor Fido" gave rise. The author terms it a tragi-comedy; and this title was violently attacked. The poet himself, as may well be imagined from the idiosyncrasy of the man, was not slow to reply to his critics, and did so in two lengthy treatises entitled from the name of a contemporary celebrated actor, "Verato primo," and "Verato secondo," which are printed in the four-quarto-volume edition of his works, but which probably no mortal eye has read for the last two hundred years!

The question of the rivalry between the "Aminta" of Tasso and the "Pastor Fido" has an element of greater interest in it. It is certain that the former preceded the latter, and doubtless suggested it. It seems probable that Ginguene is right in his suggestion, that Guarini, fully conscious that no hope was open to him of rivalling his greater contemporary and townsman in epic poetry, strove to surpass him in pastoral. It must be admitted that he has at least equalled him. Yet, while it is impossible to deny that almost every page of the "Pastor Fido" indicates not so much plagiarism as an open and avowed purpose of doing the same thing better, if possible, than his rival has done it, the very diverse natural character of the two poets is also, at every page, curiously indicated. Specially the reader may be recommended to compare the passages in the two poems where Tasso under the name of Thyrsis, and Guarini under the name of Carino (Act 5, scene 1), represent the sufferings both underwent at the court of Alphonso II. The lines of Guarini are perhaps the most vigorous in their biting satire. But the gentler and nobler nature of Tasso is unmistakable.

It is strange that the Italian critics, who are for the most part so lenient to the licentiousness of most of the authors of this period, blame Guarini for the too great warmth, amounting to indecency, of his poem. The writer of his life in the French "Biographie Universelle" refers to certain scenes as highly indecent. I can only say that, on examining the passages indicated carefully, I could find no indecency at all. It is probable that the writer referred to had never read the pages in question. But it is odd that those whose criticism he is no doubt reflecting should have said so. No doubt there are passages, not those mentioned by the writer in the "Biographie," but for instance the first scene of the second act, when a young man in a female disguise is one among a party of girls, who propose a prize for her who can give to one of them, the judge, the sweetest kiss, which prize he wins, which might be deemed somewhat on the sunny side of the hedge that divides the permissible from the unpermissible. But in comparison with others of that age Guarini is pure as snow.

It has been said in speaking of the sad story of his daughter Anna, that she was accused of having given her husband cause for jealousy. It would seem very clear that there was no ground for any such accusation. But it was said that the misconduct on her part had been due to the corruption of her mind by the reading of her father's verses. The utter groundlessness of such an assertion might be shown in many ways. But the savage and malignant cruelty of it points with considerable evidence to the sources of the current talk about the courtier poet's licentiousness.

It is impossible to find room here for a detailed comparison between these two celebrated pastorals; and it is the less needed inasmuch as Ginguene has done it very completely and at great length in the twenty-fifth chapter of the second part of his work.

Guarini also produced a comedy, the "Idropica," which was acted with much success at the court of Mantua, and is printed among his works, as well as some prose pieces of small importance, the principal of which is "Il Secretario," a treatise on the duties of a secretary, not printed among his works, but of which an edition exists in pot quarto (186 pages) printed at Venice in 1594. Neither have his letters been printed among his works. They exist, printed without index or order of any kind, in a volume of the same size as the "Secretario," printed at Venice also in 1595, but by a different printer.

The name, however, of Batista Guarini would have long since been forgotten, had he not written the "Pastor Fido."

T. ADOLPHUS TROLLOPE, in Belgravia.

FOOTNOTES:

[48] The now celebrated pass of the Ampezzo between Venice and Innspruck.

[49] This must probably be Hall on the Inn, a little below Innspruck. Certainly any boat which he got there for the descent of the river must have been a sufficiently miserable mode of travelling.

[50] Far, that is, from the bank of the river, where he left his boat at night.

[51] Lettere del Signor Cavaliere Battista Guarini, Nobile Ferrarese, di nuovo in questa seconda impressione di alcune altre accrescinte, e dall' Autore stesso corrette, di Agostino Michele raccolte, et al Sereniss. Signore il Duca d'Urbino dedicate. Con Privilegio. In Venetia, MDXCV. Appresso Gio. Battista Ciotti Senese al segno della Minerva.

[52] I translate literally. Old-fashioned people will remember a somewhat similar use of the word "Flame" in English.

[53] I subjoin a literal prose translation in preference to borrowing a rhymed one from any of Tasso's translators. This fellow "flits and circles around more unstable than dry leaves in the wind. Without faith, without love, false are his pretended torments, and false the affection which prompts his sighs. A traitorous lover, he loves and despises almost at the same moment, and in triumph displays the spoils of women as impious trophies."

[54] "See how this fellow, who in vain aims at a lofty goal, by blaming others, and by lying accents, sharpens against himself his teeth, while without reason he is enraged with me.... Of two flames he boasts, and ties and breaks over and over again the same knot; and by these arts (who would believe it!) bends in his favour the Gods!" ...

[55] It is odd that he should so write in a paper dated, as the present is, from Venice. I suppose the expression came from his feeling that he was addressing parsons at Ferrara.

[56] Seeing that, as has been said, his ancestors were of Verona, which belonged to Venice.

[57] Barotti gives it at length; but it is hardly worth while to occupy space by reproducing it here.

[58] "Guarini sitting here, sang, that which renders the seat the equal of a royal throne."

[59] It is very doubtful and very difficult to determine at what period of his life the "Pastor Fido" was written. Ginguene (Hist. Ital. Lit. Part II. ch. xxv.) has sufficiently shown that the statements of the Italian biographers on this point are inaccurate. Probably it was planned and, in part, written many years before it was finished. It was first printed in 1590.

THE VAQUERO.[60]

Oh, who is so free as a gallant _vaquero_?
With his beauty of bronze 'neath his shady _sombrero_:
He smiles at his love, and he laughs at his fate,
For he knows he is lord of a noble estate:
The prairie's his own, and he mocks at the great.
"Ho-ho! Hai! Ho-ho!
Head 'em off! Turn 'em back!
Keep 'em up to the track!
Ho-hillo! Ho-hillo!
Cric--crac!"

Oh, Donna Luisa is proud as she's fair;
But she parted last night with a lock of her hair.
And under the stars she roams, seeking for rest,
While she thinks of the stranger that came from the West;
And Juan bears something wrapped up in his breast--
"Ho-ho! Hai! Ho-ho!
Head 'em off! Turn 'em back!
Keep 'em up to the track!
Ho-hillo! Ho-hillo!
Cric--crac!'"

His proudest possessions are prettily placed,
His love at his heart, and his life at his waist.
And if in a quarrel he happen to fall,
Why, the prairie's his grave, and his _poncho's_[61] his pall,
And Donna Luisa--gets over it all!
"Ho-ho! Hai! Ho-ho!
Head 'em off! Turn 'em back!
Keep 'em up to the track!
Ho-hillo! Ho-hillo!
Cric--crac!"

The Padre may preach, and the Notary frown,
But the _poblanas_[62] smile as he rides through the town:
And the Padre, he knows, likes a kiss on the sly,
And the Notary oft has a "drop in his eye,"
But all that he does is to love and to die--
"Ho-ho! Hai! Ho-ho!
Head 'em off! Turn 'em back!
Keep 'em up to the track!
Ho-hillo! Ho-hillo!
Cric--crac!"

FRANK DESPREZ, _in Temple Bar_.

FOOTNOTES:

[60] A California cattle-driver. Furnished with revolver, lasso, and long-lashed whip, these adventurous gentry conduct the half-wild cattle of the plains over miles of their surface; and, with their gay sashes, high boots, gilded and belled spurs, and dark, broad hats (_sombreros_), present a very picturesque appearance.

[61] Cloak.

[62] Peasant girls.

TWO MODERN JAPANESE STORIES.

The two stories which follow were circulated in the city of Yedo some years back, and show that the better educated classes of Japanese are keenly alive to the absurdity of the figure cut by their countrymen when they attempt to jump over five hundred years in five hundred days.