There is little of tenderness, and less of stern sublimity, in any of his poems; and yet it is uniformly affirmed that his aspect and manner were grave, melancholic, and contemplative,--from habit, probably, more than from nature; for in company he was affable, and his conversation peculiarly captivating to women, whom, no doubt, he laid himself out to please, and with whom he was no small favourite. So far, also, as they could appreciate his merit, and endure that aristocracy of mind which pressed hard upon the heels of hereditary rank, or mushroom vanity raised from stercorarious heaps in ecclesiastical hotbeds, his society was courted by the greatest personages in church and state, including popes, cardinals, and sovereign princes. Unassuming, but not indifferent to slights or wrongs from the highest with whom he was associated, he led, on the whole, a feverish life between resolute poverty and precarious dependence, with the continual temptation to rise to wealth by means which he abhorred, and for which he must have abhorred himself had he stooped to employ them. Of persons of the other sex, who, from time to time, caught his wandering affections, the names of two (whether real or disguised) have been preserved--Alexandra and Guenevra. It is understood that the former (to whom he may have been privately married) was the mother of his two sons,--Giambattista, who devoted himself to a military life, and Virginio, who obtained distinction in literature. For the other lady, his passion might be no more than a poetical one--she being married, and a mother, in an honourable family of Florence akin to his own. Finding her one day adorning a silk coat for one of her children, so as to resemble armour by the devices--the ground silver, and the embroidery purple--against a festival spectacle, at which the lad was to figure in it on Midsummer Eve, he was so inspired by the hand and the needle, that he celebrated their performance in the twenty-fourth book of the "Orlando Furioso;" where, describing a wound, "not deep but long," received in combat with Mandricardo by Zerbino, from which the blood trickled over his splendid panoply, the poet introduces the following admired but frigid simile:-- "Le lucide arme il caldo sangue irriga Per sino al piè de rubiconda riga. "Cosi talora un bel purpureo nastro Ho veduto partir tela d' argento, Da quella bianca man più ch' alabastro, Da cui partire il cor spesso mi sento." "The warm blood, with a crimson rivulet, Down to the foot his shining armour wet. "So have I seen a beauteous purple zone Divide a web of silver, by the art Of that white hand, outvying Parian stone, Which oft I feel dividing thus my heart."