poet having been despatched between the two events to Pope Julius the
Second on the delicate business of at once appeasing his anger with the
duke for resisting his allies, and requesting his help to a feudatary of
the church. Julius was in one of his towering passions at first, but
gave way before the address of the envoy, and did what he desired. But
Ariosto's success in this mission was nearly being the death of him in
another; for Alfonso having accompanied the French the year following
in their attack on Vicenza, where they committed cruelties of the same
horrible kind as have shocked Europe within a few months past,[12] the
poet's tongue, it was thought, might be equally efficacious a second
time; but Julius, worn out of patience with his too independent vassal,
who maintained an alliance with the French when the pope had ceased to
desire it, was to be appeased no longer. He excommunicated Alfonso, and
threatened to pitch his envoy into the Tiber; so that the poet was fain
to run for it, as the duke himself was afterwards, when he visited Rome
to be absolved. Would Julius have thus treated Ariosto, could he have
foreseen his renown? Probably he would. The greater the opposition to the
will, the greater the will itself. To chuck an accomplished envoy into
the river would have been much; but to chuck the immortal poet there,
laurels and all, in the teeth of the amazement of posterity, would have
been a temptation irresistible.

It was on this occasion that Ariosto, probably from inability to choose
his times or anodes of returning home, contracted a cough, which is
understood to have shortened his existence; so that Julius may have
killed him after all. But the pope had a worse enemy in his own
bosom--his violence--which killed himself in a much shorter period. He
died in little more than two years afterwards; and the poet's prospects
were all now of a very different sort--at least he thought so; for in
March 1513, his friend Giovanni de' Medici succeeded to the papacy, under