Among these duties and labours one single passion ran like an ever warm stream through his brain: love, or rather the need of woman's society, to have with him a beloved woman, to enjoy her beauty, her laughter, her speech: and although he frequently alludes to this passion, it is as one ashamed of a weakness, but aware that he can by no means dispense with the sweetness that it procures for him and which is a vital element of his being. But even his love for woman, however strong it may have been, found its correct framework in his idyllic ideal and in his reflective and temperate spirit: it contained nothing of the fantastic, the adventurous, the Donjuanesque; and after the customary evil and evanescent adventures of youth, he took refuge in her "for whom he trembled with amorous zeal" and (as his friend Hercules Bentivoglio tells us in verse): in that Alexandra, who was his friend for twenty years, and finally his more or less legal wife. United to his desire for quietude, there was thus a potent stimulus not to remove himself at all, or if at all, then as little as possible, from her who was warmth and comfort for him, and to whom he clung like a child to the bosom of its mother. His latter years, in which, recalled from his severe sojourn at Garfagnana, he occupied himself with correcting his poems at Ferrara, with the woman he loved at his side, were perhaps the happiest he knew; and he passed away in that peace for which he had sighed, ere attaining to old age. Such tendencies of soul and the life which resulted from them, have sometimes been admired and envied, as for instance by the sixteenth century English translator of the _Furioso,_ Harrington. After having described them, and having disclaimed certain sins, indeed as he said, the single _pecadillo of love,_ he concludes with a sigh: "_Sic me contingat vivere, Sicque mori._" Sometimes too they have been looked upon from above and almost with compassion, as by De Sanctis and others, who have insisted upon the negative aspects of the character of Ariosto. These negative aspects are however nothing but the limits, which are found in everyone, for we are not all capable of everything; and really Italian critics, especially in the period of the Risorgimento, were often wrong in laying down as a single measure for everyone, civil, political, patriotic, religious, excellence, forgetful that judgment of an individual's character should depend upon his natural disposition, his temperament. Certainly, the life of Ariosto was not rich and intense, nor does it present important problems in respect of social and moral history; and the industry of the learned, although it has been able to increase its collections and conjectures as to his economic and family conditions, as to his official duties as courtier, as ambassador and administrator for the Duke of Ferrara, as to his loves and as to the names and persons of the women whom he