After the death of Hippolito, who was never reconciled to him, Ariosto was persuaded to enter into the service of the cardinal's brother, Alfonso the duke, who, if he neither exalted nor enriched the poet greatly, honoured him for his genius, delighted in his society, and enabled him to build a house to his own fancy in the midst of an ample garden. This gave him an opportunity of indulging in one of his peculiar tastes, in which, however, it was not easy to please himself, for the pleasure rather consisted in trying to do so by modelling and remodelling, and making experiment after experiment on whatever he had in hand. Thus his mansion was constructed by piecemeal, pulled down in like manner, enlarged, reduced, amended over and over again before he permitted it to stand, or deemed it worthy of the following quaint inscription, which he placed over the entrance:-- "Parva sed apta mihi, sed nulli obnoxia, sed non Sordida, parta meo sed tamen fere domus." "'T is small but fit for me, gives none offence, Not mean, yet builded at my own expense." "A verse," says sir John Harrington, with an emphasis as though he spoke from experience, "which few of the builders of this latter day could truly write, or, at least, if they could, I would lay that their houses were strongly built, indeed, for more than the third heir." When asked by a friend how it happened that he who, in "building the lofty rhyme," had reared so many superb palaces, could submit to dwell under so humble a roof, he very ingenuously replied, "Words are sooner put together than bricks and mortar." Yet in constructing his verse he was equally fastidious; no poet probably ever bestowed more patience and pains in weighing syllables, collocating sounds, balancing periods, and adjusting the nicest points that bore upon the harmony, splendour, or fluency of his compositions; yet it is the charm of his style that the whole seems as natural as if the thoughts had told themselves in their own words. In stocking his garden, and, training his flowers, Ariosto is said to have been not less fickle and capricious than in framing his habitation and adapting his poetical numbers; but with far less felicity; for, like a child impatient to witness the growth of his plants, he would pull them up from time to time to see how the roots were thriving below ground, as well as how they shot upwards. This plan, however it might suit masonry to practise on dead materials, or poetry to weave and disentangle rhythmical cadences, was ill adapted to gardening.