tossed country or continent. How paltry do the triumphs of conquerors which end with the night, the feasts of princes which leave still hungry, appear beside the triumphs of intellect, the symposium of souls.
After Boccaccio, Mary rapidly ran over the careers of Lorenzo de' Medici, Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Politiau, and the Pulci, exhibiting again, after the lapse of a century, the study in Italy of the Greek language. The story of the truly great prince with his circle of poet friends, one of whom, Politian, died of a broken heart at the death of his beloved patron, is well told. From these she passes on to the followers of the romantic style begun by Pulci, Cieco da Ferrara, Burchiello, Bojardo; then Berni, born at the end of the fifteenth century, who carried on or recast Bojardo's Orlando Innamorato, which was followed by Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, the delight of Italy. In Ariosto's life Mary, as ever, delights in showing the filial affection and fine traits of the poet's nature. She quotes his lines—
Our mother's years with pity fill my heart,
For without infamy she could not be
By all of us at once forsaken.
But with these commendations she strongly denounces the profligacy of his writing as presumably of his life. She says: "An author may not be answerable to posterity for the evil of his mortal life; but for the profligacy of that life which he lives through after ages, contaminating by irrepressible and incurable infection the minds of others, he is amenable even in his grave."
