It was still, however, and to his life's end, the misfortune of Ariosto to struggle against the solicitudes, discomforts, and mortifications of narrow and precarious circumstances. His own family were long dependent upon him for entire subsistence, or occasional aid; yet he seems to have kept his inheritance, small as it was, unimpaired, otherwise he could not have looked to it as a last resource, when courtly favour, whether of prelate or prince, should be withdrawn. What regular stipends he might receive for his services from Hippolito and Alfonso, is nowhere recorded, beyond the five and twenty crowns every four months, bestowed by the former, when he could get them, by fair means or foul, from those who were to pay them; and according to some of his biographers, withdrawn from him by his patron, after their quarrel. But it appears that he enjoyed the revenues of some ecclesiastical benefices, though not in priest's orders, and that, though not married, he had two sons, whom he educated liberally. In his third satire, he assigns a very equivocal reason for this not very equivocal conduct; for who will pretend that both circumstances were not greatly to his discredit, though countenanced in simony and licentiousness by the shameless practices of many of his most honourable contemporaries:--"I will not take orders, because then I can never take a wife; I will not take a wife because then I can never take orders, and I am shy of tying a knot, which, if I repent, I cannot loose." From popes, cardinals, and princes, both native and foreign, he is said to have received large gifts, in return for copies of his poems, and in compliment to those rare talents, by which he furnished the most popular, as well as the most fashionable reading of all who spoke the Italian tongue, or understood it: yet few of these are so authenticated as to confer unquestionable credit on the presumed donors.