The marriage was never acknowledged. The husband was in the receipt of
profits arising from church-offices, which put him into the condition of
the fellow of a college with us, who cannot marry so long as he retains
his fellowship: but it is proved to have taken place, though the date of
it is uncertain. Ariosto, in a satire written three or four years after
his falling in love, says he never intends either to marry or to take
orders; because, if he takes orders, he cannot marry; and if he marries,
he cannot take orders--that is to say, must give up his semi-priestly
emoluments. This is one of the falsehoods which the Roman Catholic
religion thinks itself warranted in tempting honest men to fall into;
thus perplexing their faith as to the very roots of all faith, and
tending to maintain a sensual hypocrisy, which can do no good to the
strongest minds, and must terribly injure the weak.

Ariosto's love for this lady I take to have been one of the causes of
dissatisfaction between him and the cardinal. "Fortunately for the poet,"
as Panizzi observes, Ippolito was not always in Ferrara. He travelled
in Italy, and he had an archbishopric in Hungary, the tenure of which
compelled occasional residence. His company was not desired in Rome, so
that he was seldom there. Ariosto, however, was an amusing companion; and
the cardinal seems not to have liked to go anywhere without him. In the
year 1515 he was attended by the poet part of the way on a journey to
Rome and Urbino; but Ariosto fell ill, and had leave to return. He
confesses that his illness was owing to an anxiety of love; and he even
makes an appeal to the cardinal's experience of such feelings; so that it
might seem he was not afraid of Ippolito's displeasure in that direction.
But the weakness which selfish people excuse in themselves becomes a
"very different thing" (as they phrase it) in another. The appeal to the
cardinal's experience might only have exasperated him, in its assumption