The first three years after his father's death were spent by Ariosto in the neighborhood of Reggio, and to this period of his life we may perhaps refer some of the love-affairs celebrated in his Latin poems. He held the Captaincy of Canossa, a small sinecure involving no important duties, since the Castle of Canossa was even in those days a ruin. In 1503 he entered the service of Cardinal Ippolito d'Este, with whom he remained until 1517. He was placed upon the list of the Cardinal's extraordinary servants, to be employed in matters of confidence and delicacy, involving frequent journeys to all parts of Italy and ceremonial embassies. His pay seems to have been fixed at 240 lire marchesane, corresponding to about 1200 francs, charged upon the Archiepiscopal Chancery of Milan.[597] This salary, had it been regularly paid, would have suffered to maintain the poet in decent comfort; but he had considerable difficulty from time to time in realizing the sums due to him. Ippolito urged him to take orders, no doubt with a view of securing better emoluments from benefices that could only be conferred upon a member of the priesthood. But Ariosto refused to enter a state of life for which he felt no vocation.[598] The Cardinal Deacon of S. Lucia in Silice was one of those secular princes of the Church, addicted to worldly pleasures, profuse in personal expenditure, with more inclination for the camp and the hunting-field than for the duties of his station, who since the days of Sixtus IV. had played a prominent part in the society of the Italian Courts. He was of distinguished beauty; and his military courage, like that of the Cardinal Ippolito de' Medici, was displayed in the Hungarian campaign against the Turks. With regard to his character and temper, it may suffice to remind the reader how, in a fit of jealous passion, he hired assassins to put out his natural brother Giulio's eyes. That Ippolito d'Este did not share the prevailing enthusiasm of his age for literary culture, seems pretty clear; and he failed to discern the unique genius of the man whom he had chosen for his confidential agent. Ariosto complains that he was turned into a common courier and forced to spend his days and nights upon the road by the master upon whom, at the expense of truth and reason, he conferred an immortality of fame in his great poem. Yet it would not be fair to echo the commonplace invectives against the Cardinal for illiberality and ingratitude. Ariosto knew the nature of his patron when he entered his service, and Ippolito did not hire a student but an active man of business for his work. It was an arrangement of convenience on both sides, to which the poet would never have stooped had his private means sufficed, or had the conditions of Italian society offered any decent career for a gentleman outside the circle of the Court. Moreover, it was not until after their final rupture, caused by Ariosto's refusal to undertake the Hungarian expedition in his master's train, that the true greatness of the author of the Furioso was revealed. How should a dissolute and ill-conditioned Cardinal have discerned that a dreamy poem in MS. on the madness of Orlando would live as long as the Æneid, or that the flattering lies invented by his courier would in after ages turn the fierce glare of criticism and celebrity upon the darkest corners of his own history? The old legend about his brutal reception of the Orlando Furioso has been now in part disproved.[599] We know that he defrayed the expenses of its publication, and secured the right and profits of its sale to Ariosto.[600] There is even an entry in his memoranda of expenditure proving that he bought a copy for the sum of one lira marchesana.[601] While deploring the waste of Ariosto's time and strength in the uncongenial service of this patron, we must acknowledge that his choice of Ippolito was a mistake for which he alone was responsible, and that the panegyrics showered on such a man are wholly inexcusable.[602] When all the circumstances of their connection are taken into account, there is nothing but the extreme irritation caused by incompatibility of temper, and divergence of aims and interests, to condone the poet's private censure of the master whom publicly he loaded with praises.[603] The whole unhappy story illustrates the real conditions of that Court-life, so glowingly described by Castiglione, which proved the ruin of Tasso and the disgrace of Guarini. Could anything justify the brigandlike brutalities of Pietro Aretino, il flagello de' Principi, we might base his apology upon the dreary histories of these Italian poets, soured, impoverished, and broken because they had been forced to put their trust in princes. When there lay no choice between levying blackmail by menaces and coaxing crumbs by flatteries, it accorded better with the Italian ideal virtù to fatten upon the former kind of infamy than to starve upon the latter.

The Orlando Furioso was conceived and begun in the year 1505. It was sent to press in 1515. Giovanni Mazzocchi del Bondeno published it in April, 1516. A large portion of the poet's life was subsequently spent in correcting and improving it. In 1518, having freed himself from Ippolito's bondage, Ariosto entered the service of Duke Alfonso I. He was termed cameriere or famigliare, and his stipend was fixed at eighty-four golden crowns per annum, with maintenance for three servants and two horses, paid in kind.[604] He occupied his own house in Ferrara; and the Duke, who recognized his great literary qualities and appreciated the new luster conferred upon his family by the publication of the Furioso, left him in the undisturbed possession of his leisure.[605] The next four years were probably the happiest of Ariosto's life; for he had now at last secured independence and had entered upon the enjoyment of his fame. The Medici of Florence and Rome, and the ducal families of Urbino and Mantua, were pleased to number him among their intimate friends, and he received flattering acknowledgments of his poem from the most illustrious men of Italy. The few journeys he made at the request of Alfonso carried him to Florence, the head-quarters of literary and artistic activity. At home the time he spared from the revision of the Furioso, was partly devoted to the love-affairs he carried on with jealous secrecy, and partly to the superintendence of the ducal theater. The criticism of Ariosto's comedies must be reserved for another chapter. It is enough to remark here that their composition amused him from his boyhood to his latest years. So early as 1493 he had accompanied Ercole I. to Pavia in order to play before Lodovico Sforza, and in the same year he witnessed the famous representation of the Menæchmi at Ferrara. Some of his earliest essays in literature were translations of Latin comedies, now unfortunately lost. They were intended for representation; and, as exercises in the playwright's art, they strongly influenced his style. His own Cassaria appeared for the first time at Ferrara in 1508; the Suppositi followed in 1509, and was reproduced at the Vatican in 1519. It took Leo's fancy so much that he besought the author for another comedy. Ariosto, in compliance with this request, completed the Negromante, which he had already had in hand during the previous ten years. The Lena was first represented at Ferrara in 1528, and the Scolastica was left unfinished at the poet's death. What part Ariosto took in the presentation of his comedies, is uncertain; but it is probable that he helped in their performance, besides directing the stage and reciting the prologue. He thus acquired a practical acquaintance with theatrical management, and it was by his advice, and on plans furnished by him, that Alfonso built the first permanent stage at Ferrara in 1532. On the last day of that year, not long after its erection, the theater was burned down. These dates are important; since they prove that Ariosto's connection with the stage, as actor, playwright, and manager, was continuous throughout his lifetime.

Ariosto's peaceful occupations at Ferrara were interrupted early in 1522 by what must be reckoned the strangest episode of his career. On February 7 in that year, he was nominated Ducal Commissary for the government of Garfagnana, a wild upland district stretching under Monte Pellegrino almost across the Apennines from the Lucchese to the Modenese frontiers. We find that the salary allowed him by Alfonso had never been very regularly paid, and that in 1521 the Duke, straitened in means by his warfare with the Papacy, was compelled to suspend it altogether.[606] At the same period the Communes forming what is known as Garfagnana (who had placed themselves beneath the Marquises of Ferrara in the first half of the fifteenth century, but had lately suffered from Florentine and Papal incursions) besought Alfonso to assert his suzerainty of their district and to take measures for securing its internal quiet. The emoluments of the Commissary amounted to about 930 lire marchesane, estimated at something like 2,300 francs of present value; and it was undoubtedly the pecuniary profits of the office which induced the Duke to offer it, and the poet to accept it.

We may think it strange that so acute a judge of men as Alfonso should have selected the author of the Furioso, a confirmed student, almost a recluse in his habits, and already broken in health, for the governorship of a district half-ruined by foreign raids and domestic feuds, which had become the haunt of brigands and the asylum of bandits from surrounding provinces. Yet we must remember that Ariosto had already given ample proof of his good sense and business-like qualities, not only in the administration of his own affairs, but in numerous embassies undertaken for the Cardinal and Duke, his masters. At that epoch of Italian history the name and fame of an illustrious writer were themselves a power in politics: and it is said that during Ariosto's first journey into Garfagnana, he owed his liberation from the hands of brigands to the celebrity of the Orlando Furioso.[607] Alfonso knew, moreover, that the poet was well qualified for negotiating with princes; and what was of grave practical importance, he stood in excellent personal relations to the Medici, from whom as the rulers of Florence the Garfagnana was menaced with invasion. These considerations are sufficient to explain Alfonso's choice. Nothing but necessity would probably have induced Ariosto to quit Ferrara for the intolerable seclusion of those barbarous mountains; where it was his duty to issue edicts against brigands, to hunt outlaws, to punish murderers and robbers, to exact fines for rape and infamous offenses, to see that the hangman did his duty, and to sit in judgment daily upon suits that proved the savage immorality of the entire population. The hopelessness of the task might have been enough to break a sterner heart than Ariosto's, and his loathing of his life at Castelnovo found vent in the most powerful of his satires. He managed to endure this uncongenial existence for three years, from February 20, 1522, till June, 1525, sustaining his spirits with correspondence and composition, and varying the monotony of his life by visits to Ferrara. It was during his Garfagnana residence in all probability that he composed the Cinque Canti. The society of his dearly-loved son, Virginio—whose education he superintended and for whom he wrote the charming seventh Satire to Pietro Bembo—also served to diminish the dreariness of his exile from love, leisure, and the society of friends.

Virginio was Ariosto's natural son by a woman of Reggio. He collected the Latin poems after his father's death, and prepared the Cinque Canti for Manuzio's press in 1545. He also helped his uncle Gabriele to finish La Scolastica, and wrote a few brief recollections of his father. Ariosto had a second illegitimate son, named Giovanni Battista, who distinguished himself in a military career.

The last eight years of Ariosto's life were spent in great tranquillity at Ferrara. Soon after his return from Garfagnana he built his house in the Contrada Mirasol, and placed upon it the following characteristic inscription[608]:

Parva sed apta mihi sed nulli obnoxia sed non
Sordida parta meo sed tamen ære domus.

About this time, too, he married the lady to whom for many years he had been tenderly attached.[609] She was the Florentine Alessandra Benucci, widow of Tito Strozzi, whom he first saw at Florence in the year 1513. The marriage was kept strictly secret, probably because the poet did not choose to relinquish the income he derived from certain minor benefices. Nor did it prove fruitful of offspring, for Ariosto left no legitimate heirs. His life of tranquil study was varied only by short journeys to Venice, Abano, and Mantua. In 1531 he was sent to negotiate certain matters for his master in the camp of the Marquis del Vasto at Correggio. On this occasion he received from Alfonso Davalos a pension of one hundred golden ducats, by a deed which sets forth in its preamble the duty of princes to recompense poets who immortalize the acts of heroes. This is the only instance of reward bestowed on Ariosto for his purely literary merits. The poet repaid his benefactor by magnificent eulogies inserted in the last edition of the Furioso.[610] Between the year 1525, when he left Garfagnana, and 1532, when his poem issued from the press, he devoted himself with unceasing labor to its revision and improvement. The edition of 1516 consisted of forty cantos. That of 1532 contained forty-six, and the whole text had been subjected in the interval to minute alterations.[611] Not long after the publication of the revised edition Ariosto's health gave way. His constitution had never been robust, for he suffered habitually from a catarrh of the lungs which made his old life as Ippolito d'Este's courier not only distasteful but dangerous.[612] Toward the close of 1532 this complaint took the form of a consumption, which ended his days on the sixth of June, 1533. Great pains have been bestowed by his biographers on proving that he died a good Catholic; nor is there any reason to suppose that he neglected the consolations of the Church in his last hours. He was by no means a man to break abruptly with tradition or to make an indecorous display of doubts that may have haunted him. Yet the best Latin verses he ever penned were a half-humorous copy of hendecasyllables for his own epitaph, which seem to prove that he applied Montaigne's peut-être even to the grave.[613]

Of Ariosto's personal habits and opinions we know unfortunately but little, beyond what may be gathered from the incomparably transparent self-revelation of his satires. His son, Virginio, who might have amply satisfied our curiosity, confined himself to the fewest and briefest details in the notes transcribed and published by Barotti. Some of these, however, are so characteristic that it may not be inopportune to translate them. With regard to his method of composition, Virginio writes: "He was never satisfied with his verses, but altered them again and again, so that he could not keep his lines in his memory, and consequently lost many of his compositions.... In horticulture he followed the same system as in composition, for he would not leave anything he planted for more than three months in one place; and if he sowed peaches or any kind of seed, he went so often to see if they were sprouting, that at last he broke the shoots. He had but small knowledge of herbs, and used to think that whatever grew near the things he had sown, were the plants themselves, and watched them diligently till his mistake was proved beyond all doubt. I remember once, when he had planted capers, he went every day to see them and was greatly delighted at their luxuriance. At last he discerned that they were but elders, and that the capers had not come up at all.... He was not much given to study, and cared to see but few books. Virgil gave him pleasure, and Tibullus for his diction; but he greatly commended Horace and Catullus, Propertius not much.... He ate fast and much, and made no distinction of food. So soon as he came home, if he found the bread set out, he would eat one piece walking, while the meats were being brought to table. When he saw them spread, he had water poured upon his hands and then began to eat whatever was nearest to him.... He was fond of turnips."

From the bare details of Ariosto's biography it is satisfactory to turn to the living picture of the man himself revealed in his Satires. These compositions rank next to the Orlando Furioso in the literary canon of his works, and have the highest value for the light they cast upon his temperament and mode of feeling. Though they are commonly called Satires, they rather deserve the name of Epistles; for while a satiric element gives distinct flavor to each of the seven poems, this is subordinated to personal and familiar topics of correspondence. We learn from them what the great artist of the golden age thought and felt about the times in which he lived; what moved his indignation or aroused his sympathy; how he strove to meet the troubles of his checkered life; and where, amid the carnival of that mad century, he laid his finger upon hidden social maladies. Reading them, we come to know the man himself, and are better able to understand how, while Italy was distracted with wars and trampled on by foreign armies, he could withdraw himself from the tumult, and spend his years in polishing the stanzas of Orlando. The Satires do not reveal a hero or a sage, a poet passionate like Dante with the sense of wrong, or like Petrarch aspiring after an impossible ideal. It is rather the type of Boccaccio's character, refined and purged of sensuality, with delicate touches of irony and a more fastidious taste, that meets us in this portrait of Ariosto painted by himself. His mental vision is more lucid, his judgment more acute, his philosophy less indulgent, and his ideal of art more exacting; yet he, too, might be nicknamed Lodovico della Tranquillità. With his head in Philiroe's lap beside a limpid rivulet, he basks away the summer hours, and cares not whether French or German get the upper hand in Italy.[614] Does it greatly signify, he asks Ercole Strozzi in one of his Latin poems, whether we serve a French or an Italian tyrant? Servitude is the same, if the despot be a barbarian only in manners, like our princelings, or in name too, like these foreigners.[615]