travellers have said or written about them. I had read so much of
Ariosto's industry, and of the proof of it in this manuscript, that I
doubted if I should at last marvel at it. But the wonder remains
with the relic, and I paid it my homage devoutly and humbly, and was
disconcerted afterward to read again in my Valery how sensibly all
others had felt the preciousness of that famous page, which, filled
with half a score of previous failures, contains in a little open
space near the margin, the poet's final triumph in a clearly written
stanza. Scarcely less touching and interesting than Ariosto's painful
work on these yellow leaves, is the grand and simple tribute which
another Italian poet was allowed to inscribe on one of them: "Vittorio
Alfieri beheld and venerated;" and I think, counting over the many
memorable things I saw on the road to Rome and the way home
again, this manuscript was the noblest thing and best worthy to be
remembered.

When at last I turned from it, however, I saw that the custodian had
another relic of Messer Lodovico, which he was not ashamed to match
with the manuscript in my interest. This was the bone of one of the
poet's fingers, which the pious care of Ferrara had picked up from his
dust (when it was removed from the church to the Library), and
neatly bottled and labeled. In like manner, they keep a great deal
of sanctity in bottles with the bones of saints in Italy; but I found
very little savor of poesy hanging about this literary relic.

As if the melancholy fragment of mortality had marshaled us the way,
we went from the Library to the house of Ariosto, which stands at the
end of a long, long street, not far from the railway station. There
was not a Christian soul, not a boy, not a cat nor a dog to be seen
in all that long street, at high noon, as we looked down its narrowing