Roscoe that "any person of good taste and extensive reading might, by a due portion of labour, produce works of equal merit," we must nevertheless allow that it will probably be long ere such a capacity for labour reappears. He entirely fulfilled the requirements of his own age, by which he was simply idolised. The quintessence of his contemporaries' admiration is concentrated in Vittoria Colonna's humble yet dignified remonstrance with him for having failed to celebrate the death of her husband:
"Unkind was Fate, prohibiting the rays
Of my great Sun your kindling soul to smite;
For thus in perpetuity more bright
Your fame had been, more glorious his praise.
His memory, exalted in your lays,
That ancient times obscure, and ours delight,
Had 'scaped in fell Oblivion's despite
The second death, that on the spirit preys.
If in your bosom might infused be
My ardour, or my pen as yours inspired,
Great as the dead should be the elegy.
But now I fear lest Heaven with wrath be fired;
Toward you, for overmuch humility;
Toward me, who have too daringly aspired."
Bembo's Latin poetry, of which charming specimens may be seen in Symonds's Renaissance, is better than his Italian, for it does not disappoint. The fame of Francesco Maria Molza (1489–1544) was in his day hardly second to Bembo's, and was based on much the same grounds. Like Bembo, he was an elegant Latin poet, who carried the maxims appropriate for composition in a dead language into a living one. Like Bembo's, his vernacular poems, with one remarkable exception, are models of diction as inexpressive as harmonious—a perpetual silvery
