ill-adapted he felt himself to this masquerade life may be gathered from the following sentence: "I am already in my forty-fourth year, the father of eight children, two of whom are old enough to be my censors, while my daughters are of an age to marry." Abandoning so uncongenial a strain upon his faculties, Guarini retired in 1582 to his ancestral farm, the Villa Guarina, in the lovely country that lies between the Adige and Po, where he gave himself up to the cares of his family, the nursing of his dilapidated fortunes and the composition of the _Pastor fido_. He was not happy in his domestic lot; for he had lost his wife young, and quarrelled with his elder sons about the division of his estate. Litigation seems to have been an inveterate vice with Guarini; nor was he ever free from legal troubles. After studying his biography, the conclusion is forced upon our minds that he was originally a man of robust and virile intellect, ambitious of greatness, confident in his own powers, and well qualified for serious affairs, whose energies found no proper scope for their exercise. Literary work offered but a poor sphere for such a character, while the enforced inactivity of court life soured a naturally capricious and choleric temper. Of poetry he spoke with a certain tone of condescension, professing to practise it only in his leisure moments; nor are his miscellaneous verses of a quality to secure for their author a very lasting reputation. It is therefore not a little remarkable that the fruit of his retirement--a disappointed courtier past the prime of early manhood--should have been a dramatic masterpiece worthy to be ranked with the classics of Italian literature. Deferring a further account of the _Pastor fido_ for the present, the remaining incidents of Guarini's restless life may be briefly told. In 1585 he was at Turin superintending the first public performance of his drama, whence Alphonso recalled him to Ferrara, and gave him the office of secretary of state. This reconciliation between the poet and his patron did not last long. Guarini moved to Florence, then to Rome, and back again to Florence, where he established himself as the courtier of Ferdinand de' Medici. A dishonourable marriage, pressed upon his son Guarino by the grand-duke, roused the natural resentment of Guarini, always scrupulous upon the point of honour. He abandoned the Medicean court, and took refuge with Francesco Maria of Urbino, the last scion of the Montefeltro-della-Rovere house. Yet he found no satisfaction at Urbino. "The old court is a dead institution," he writes to a friend; "one may see a shadow of it, but not the substance in Italy of to-day. Ours is an age of appearances, and one goes a-masquerading all the year." This was true enough. Those dwindling deadly-lively little residence towns of Italian ducal families, whose day of glory was over, and who were waiting to be slowly absorbed by the capacious appetite of