things, which is nobleness of heart. I confess I think Ariosto was wrong
in expecting what he did of a man he must have known so well, and in
complaining so much of courts, however good-humouredly. A prince occupies
the station he does, to avert the perils of disputed successions, and
not to be what his birth cannot make him--if nature has not supplied the
materials. Besides, the cardinal, in his quality of a mechanical-minded
man with no taste, might with reason have complained of his servant's
attending to poetry when it was "not in his bond;" when it diverted
him from the only attentions which his employer understood or desired.
Ippolito candidly confessed, as Ariosto himself tells us, that he not
only did not care for poetry, but never gave his attendant one stiver in
patronage of it, or for any thing whatsoever but going his journeys and
doing as he was bidden.[17] On the other hand, the cardinal's payments
were sorry ones; and the poet might with justice have thought, that he
was not bound to consider them an equivalent for the time be was expected
to give up. The only thing to have been desired in this case was, that he
should have said so; and, in truth, at the close of the explanation which
he gave on the subject to his friends at court, he did--boldly desiring
them, as became him, to tell the cardinal, that if his eminence expected
him to be a "serf" for what he received, he should decline the bargain;
and that he preferred the humblest freedom and his studies to a slavery
so preposterous.[18] The truth is, the poet should have attached himself
wholly to the Medici. Had he not adhered to the duller house, he might
have led as happy a life with the pope as Pulci did with the pope's
father; perhaps have been made a cardinal, like his friends Bembo and
Sadolet. But then we might have lost the _Orlando_.

The only sinecure which the poet is now supposed to have retained, was a
grant of twenty-five crowns every four months on the episcopal chancery
of Milan: so, to help out his petty income, he proceeded to enter into