The proof of the scrupulous attention which he devoted to the _Furioso,_ is to be found in the twelve years, during which he worked upon it in the flower of his age, "with long vigils and labours," as he wrote to the Doge of Venice, when requesting the privilege of printing the first edition of 1516; and in his having always returned to it, to chisel smooth and to soften it in innumerable delicate details, or to amplify it, or in the throwing away of five cantos, which he had written by way of amplification, but which did not go well with the general design, and finally failed to content him. For these he substituted as many more, and personally superintended the edition of 1532, which also failed to content him altogether, so that he began to work upon it again during the few months which separated him from death. His son Virginio attests that he "was never satisfied with his verses, that he kept changing them again and again, and for this reason never remembered any of them ..."; and contemporaries never cease marvelling at his diligence as a corrector and a maker of perfect things: Giraldi Cinzio, to mention but one witness, says that after the first edition, "not a single day passed," during sixteen years, "that he was not occupied upon it with pen and with thought," and that he was also desirous of obtaining the opinions and impressions of the greatest men of letters and humanists in Italy as to every part of it, men such as Bembo, Molza, Navagero; and as Apelles with his paintings, Ariosto kept his work for two years "in the hall of his house, leaving it there that it might be criticised by everyone"; and he particularly said that he wished his critics merely to mark with a stroke of the pen those parts which did not please them, without giving any reason for so doing, that he might find it out for himself, and then discuss it with them, and so arrive at a decision and a solution in his own way. He pushed his minute delicacy of taste so far as to be preoccupied about the choice of modes of spelling, refusing, for instance, to remove the "h" from those words which possessed it by tradition, thus opposing the suggestion of Tolomei and the new fashion of the illiterate crowd, by jocosely replying that "He who removes the _h_ from _Huomo,_ does not know _Huomo_ (man), and he who removes it from _Honore,_ is not worthy of honour."