In a period when princes and courts little resembled what they have since become, we possess from the pens of Machiavelli and Castiglione generalised portraits of both; and they may be relied on as genuine, although the Tuscan, like the _tenebristi_ painters, overloaded his darker shadows, whilst the Mantuan Count employed the roseate tinting of licensed flattery. Roscoe considers the _Cortegiano_ an ethical treatise, yet it belongs as much to belles-lettres as to moral philosophy. Its author has been called the Chesterfield of Italy, and the parallel is singularly apt. The Count and the Earl have each supplied "a glass of fashion and a mould of form" for the guidance of their courtly contemporaries, and the posthumous reputation of both with the world at large rests more upon their dicta as arbiters of politeness, than upon their rare diplomatic address and statesmanlike attainments. With all its interest as a picture of manners and a test of civilisation in that proverbially refined age, with every charm which elegance of style can impart, it is impossible to dwell on the _Cortegiano_ without feeling that its influence was then fraught with evil. In the pages of that essay were first systematically embodied precepts of tact, lessons of adulation, all repugnant to the stern manners and wholesome independence of antecedent generations. The homely bearing of honest burghers, the rough and ready speech of men who lived in harness, were there put out of fashion by studied phrase and cringing flattery, too easy preparations for the effeminate euphuism and fulsome servility which Spanish thraldom soon after imposed upon Italy. Another work of Castiglione, to which we have already had occasion to refer, is his letter, written in Latin, to Henry VIII., containing an account of Guidobaldo's death, with a somewhat meagre sketch of his character. But there is in its composition an air of effort, a straining at rhetorical effect, which leave upon us the inevitable conclusion that he thought more of his style than his hero. These faults and deficiencies belong, however, in a still greater degree to that more ambitious disquisition, wherein Bembo has sought to honour the memory of the Duke and Duchess, whose favour he had amply enjoyed. His few fugitive poems well merit the preference accorded to them by Tiraboschi over most contemporary effusions, from force of sentiment not less than felicitous expression. It would be difficult to rival in the literature of any age the pathos of that ode wherein his beloved wife is supposed to sigh over his prolonged absence, and send him the sympathetic yearnings of her long-suppressed affection. Of this, however, and his Tirsis, we have already said enough.[77] [Footnote 77: See above, pp. 49-50, 53-4, 58.]