But while Ariosto, from his twenty-fourth to his forty-fifth year, was thus humbly, yet honourably, nourishing his mother and training up his brothers and sisters--though his studies were much interrupted at first, and he was obliged to abandon the Greek language altogether (which he had recently been recovering)--he maintained his reputation among the first Latin scholars; and in the same busy interval achieved his greatest triumph in the literature of his own land. Under the voluntary burthen of domestic cares, the buoyancy of irrepressible genius bore him up from obscurity; and whatever might have been the secret misgivings, or the generous forecastings, of undeveloped but conscious powers, he found himself, at nine and twenty years of age, in the first circles of Italian society, courted, admired, applauded, and of course envied, both for his conversation, his learning, and his poetry. In the latter, indeed (judging by what remains), he seems to have produced nothing but two or three indifferent dramas, certain loose love elegies, with a few middling sonnets and madrigals,--all fantastic and pleasant enough in their way, but the best of them affording no great promise that their writer would ere long surpass all predecessors in one wide field of invention, and leave to successors nothing to do in it but--not to imitate him: so late and slowly, often, are the most extraordinary talents brought into exercise. It is difficult to imagine, in our cold clime, with our refractory tongue, and accustomed as we are to the phlegm of our countrymen, how such performances as the above could raise a man to celebrity: but verse was not then the pastime of every lover of verse; and reputations were not so numerous as they are in these days, when there are a thousand avenues to the temple of fame not then opened,--and quite as many out of it,--while candidates are seen crowding in such throngs as to tread on one another's heels, those behind forcing onward those in front; so that our literary ephemera resemble a procession of spectators through a palace, when a royal corpse lies in state; multitudes coming in, passing on, going out continually, a few pausing, none stopping. The Italian language, however, it must be observed, for all the minor and more exquisite forms of verse, is not less felicitously and inimitably adapted, than is the French to the _badinage_ of prose. Ariosto gained credit for these _bagatelles_, in an age when Bembo, Molza, and many others were his contemporaries, who, to this hour, are chiefly known by such things, and nothing better. But, for some reason or other which is not apparent, Ariosto was certainly looked up to, and renowned by anticipation, for a long contemplated achievement of equal daring to any of the knights' adventures which in due course he celebrated, and which proved not less successful in the issue than his own "Astolpho's Journey to the Moon:"