His feeling towards his own sovereign lords, the Estes, has not, as we have suggested, either in his soul or in the _Furioso,_ anything in it of the specifically political, although he admired them for the splendour of art and letters, which they and their predecessors had conferred upon the country, and for the strength of their rule. And he praised them with words and comparisons, which he introduced into his poem on a large scale, and into the general scheme itself. These have at times been held to be base adulation or a subtle form of irony almost amounting to sarcasm; they were however neither, being serious celebrations of glorious military enterprises and of magnanimous acts (it does not matter whether they really were so or seemed so and were bound to seem so to him); and for the rest, and especially as far as concerned Cardinal Hippolyto, they resemble the madrigals addressed to ladies or their attendants, which always contain a vein of mockery mingled with the hyperbole of their compliments. In fact he treated this material as an imaginative theme, now decorous and grave, now elegant and polished as by a courtier; and he would have been still more inclined to treat the Estes in this way, had they in return for his words and "works of ink" dispensed him from the duties of his post, and particularly from those which obliged him to run hither and thither, to behave like a "teamster." Like many peaceful individuals, who have no taste for finding themselves in the midst of battles, or for changing the place of their abode, or for travelling to see foreign races, or for voyages, or for rapid ups and downs and adventures, or for anything of an upsetting and extraordinary nature that happens unexpectedly, he was quite ready to accept all these things in his imagination, where he preserved, caressed and made idols of them. His inclination imaginatively to decorate the Estes, the nobles of Italy, great ladies, artists, good or bad men of letters of any sort, to make radiant statues of them, had the same root as his inclination for stories of knightly romance.