perspective, and if the poet and his friends have ever a mind for a
posthumous meeting in his little reddish brick house, there is nothing
to prevent their assembly, in broad daylight, from any part of the
neighborhood. There was no presence, however, more spiritual than a
comely country girl to respond to our summons at the door, and nothing
but a tub of corn-meal disputed our passage inside. Directly I found
the house inhabited by living people, I began to be sorry that it was
not as empty as the Library and the street. Indeed, it is much better
with Petrarch's house at Arquà, where the grandeur of the past
is never molested by the small household joys and troubles of the
present. That house is vacant, and no eyes less tender and fond than
the poet's visitors may look down from its windows over the slope of
vines and olives which it crowns; and it seemed hard, here in Ferrara,
where the houses are so many and the people are so few, that Ariosto's
house could not be left to him. _Parva sed apta mihi_, he has
contentedly written upon the front; but I doubt if he finds it large
enough for another family, though his modern housekeeper reserves him
certain rooms for visitors. To gain these, you go up to the second
story--there are but two floors--and cross to the rear of the
building, where Ariosto's chamber opens out of an ante-room, and looks
down upon a pinched and faded bit of garden. [In this garden the poet
spent much of his time--chiefly in plucking up and transplanting the
unlucky shrubbery, which was never suffered to grow three months
in the same place,--such was the poet's rage for revision. It was
probably never a very large or splendid garden, for the reason that
Ariosto gave when reproached that he who knew so well how to describe
magnificent palaces should have built such a poor little house: "It
was easier to make verses than houses, and the fine palaces in his
poem cost him no money."] In this chamber they say the poet died. It
is oblong, and not large. I should think the windows and roof were