The poet's mother. Madonna Daria, belonged to a branch of the Malegucci, one of the wealthiest and noblest families in the north of Italy. Nicolo Ariosto, his father, held various places of trust and authority under the dukes of Ferrara. In youth he had been the companion of Borso, and steward of the household of Hercules, besides being occasionally employed on embassies to the pope and the king of France; in which he is said to have received more substantial recompence than barren dignities, in ample official salaries, and rich presents for special services. At the birth of the poet he was governor of the castle and territory of Reggio, and afterwards advanced to those of Modena; but as emolument came easily, and there were abundant temptations, besides heavy family expenses, to spend it lavishly, wealth never accumulated in his hands: wherefore, having nine younger children born to him, his views with respect to the eldest, Ludovico, were prudently directed towards establishing him in some profession, whereby he might acquire riches and rank for himself by perseverance in honourable labour. At the age of fourteen or fifteen years,--when he had already signalised himself by composing a drama on the story of Pyramus and Thisbe, which was performed by his little brothers and sisters,--no doubt as happily as the same subject in the Midsummer Night's Dream (whenever that happened) was enacted by Bottom the weaver and his comrades, or, rather, as happily as Oberon, Titania, and their train could have done it in fairy-land,--the young poet was sent, grievously against his will, to study civil law at Padua under two eminent practitioners, Angelo Castrinse and Il Maino. With them, like Ovid, Petrarch, Tasso, Marino, or our own Milton and Cowper, he spent five years to little profit, hating his profession, and studying so listlessly, that it became more and more manifest, the longer he drawled at it, that he never would excel in the strife of words and tournaments of tongues, by which the ample fortunes and broad lands of many families, whose founders the gods had fortunately not made poetical, were then, as now, like the prizes at hardier exercises, acquired. Nicolo Ariosto, therefore, at length abandoned the folly of spoiling a good poet to make a bad lawyer, and permitted his son to return to those learned studies and exercises of native talent, which had been either suspended, or indulged in by stealth, after his parent, "with spears and lances," had driven him from them into the toils of pleadings and precedents. Released from these trammels, (strewed as they were to his loathing eye with the mangled remains of causes, like cobwebs with sculls, wings, and fragments of flies,) Ludovico, at the age of twenty, found himself free to expatiate in that fields of classic literature, whose buried treasures, in his age, continued still to be dug up and brought to light from time to. time; or to roam abroad seeking adventures suited to his youthful