"My Dear George,—I can but write ill, yet shall not your letter remain without my saying something. You know how Urbino has died. Great was the grace of God when he bestowed on me this man, though now heavy be the grievance and infinite the grief. The grace was that when he lived he kept me living; and in dying he has taught me to die, not in sorrow and with regret, but with a fervent desire of death. Twenty and six years had he served me, and I found him a most rare and faithful man; and now that I had made him rich, and expected to lean on him as the staff and the repose of my old age, he is taken from me, and no other hope remains than that of seeing him again in Paradise. A sign of God was this happy death to him; yet, even more than this death, were his regrets increased to leave me in this world the wretch of many anxieties, since the better half of myself has departed with him, and nothing is left for me than this loneliness of life."
Even the throne has not been too far removed from this sphere of humble humanity, for we discover in St. George's Chapel a mural monument erected by order of one of our late sovereigns as the memorial of a female servant of a favourite daughter. The inscription is a tribute of domestic affection in a royal bosom, where an attached servant became a cherished inmate.
King George III.
Caused to be interred near this place the body of
MARY GASCOIGNE,
Servant to the Princess Amelia;
and this stone
to be inscribed in testimony of his grateful sense
of the faithful services and attachment
of an amiable young woman to
his beloved Daughter.
This deep emotion for the tender offices of servitude is not peculiar to the refinement of our manners, or to modern Europe; it is not the charity of Christianity alone which has hallowed this sensibility, and confessed this equality of affection, which the domestic may participate: monumental inscriptions, raised by grateful masters to the merits of their slaves, have been preserved in the great collections of Graevius and Gruter.[A]
[Footnote A: There are several instances of Roman heads of houses who consecrate "to themselves and their servants" the sepulchres they erect in their own lifetime, as if in death they had no desire to be divided from those who had served them faithfully. An instance of affectionate regard to the memory of a deceased servant occurs in the collection at Nismes; it is an inscription by one Sextus Arius Varcis, to Hermes, "his best servant" (servo optimo). Fabretti has preserved an inscription which records the death of a child, T. Alfacius Scantianius, by one Alfacius Severus, his master, by which it appears he was the child of an old servant, who was honoured by bearing the prenomen of the master, and who is also styled in the epitaph "his sweetest freedman" (liberto dulcissimo).—ED.]
* * * * *
PRINTED LETTERS IN THE VERNACULAR IDIOM.
Printed Letters, without any attention to the selection, is so great a literary evil, that it has excited my curiosity to detect the first modern who obtruded such formless things on public attention. I conjectured that, whoever he might be, he would be distinguished for his egotism and his knavery. My hypothetical criticism turned out to be correct. Nothing less than the audacity of the unblushing Pietro Aretino could have adventured on this project; he claims the honour, and the critics do not deny it, of being the first who published Italian letters. Aretino had the hardihood to dedicate one volume of his letters to the King of England, another to the Duke of Florence; a third to Hercules of Este, a relative of Pope Julius Third—evidently insinuating that his letters were worthy to be read by the royal and the noble.
Among these letters there is one addressed to Mary, Queen of England, on her resuscitation of the ancient faith, which offers a very extraordinary catalogue of the ritual and ceremonies of the Romish church. It is indeed impossible to translate into Protestant English the multiplied nomenclature of offices which involve human life in never-ceasing service. As I know not where we can find so clear a perspective of this amazing contrivance to fetter with religious ceremonies the freedom of the human mind, I present the reader with an accurate translation of it:—
"Pietro Aretino to the Queen of England.