of the poet's time, and that every thing else had been restored; I am
quite sure the chairs and inkstand are kindly-meant inventions;
for the poet's burly great arm-chair and graceful inkstand are both
preserved in the Library. But the house is otherwise decent and
probable; and I do not question but it was in the hall where we
encountered the meal-tub that the poet kept a copy of his "_Furioso_,"
subject to the corrections and advice of his visitors.

The ancestral house of the Ariosti has been within a few years
restored out of all memory and semblance of itself; and my wish to see
the place in which the poet was born and spent his childhood resulted,
after infinite search, in finding a building faced newly with stucco
and newly French-windowed.

Our _portier_ said it was the work of the late English Vice-Consul,
who had bought the house. When I complained of the sacrilege, he said:
"Yes, it is true. But then, you must know, the Ariosti were not one of
the noble families of Ferrara."


VI.

The castle of the Dukes of Ferrara, about which cluster so many sad
and splendid memories, stands in the heart of the city. I think
that the moonlight which, on the night of our arrival, showed me its
massive walls rising from the shadowy moat that surrounds them, and
its four great towers, heavily buttressed, and expanding at the top
into bulging cornices of cavernous brickwork, could have fallen on
nothing else in all Italy so picturesque, and so full of the proper
dread charm of feudal times, as this pile of gloomy and majestic