This poem, having remained unedited in the Vatican arcana, long escaped the literary historians of the Peninsula, but it has been recently quoted by two writers, Pungileone and Passavant, the former of whom had not seen it.[88] Although, in his dedication to Duke Guidobaldo, composed after 1490, the author accounts for his becoming a painter, as we shall see in chapter xxviii., he gives no further explanation of the motives which inspired the labour of a poem, containing some twenty-four thousand lines, than "that after anxious thought and consideration of such new ideas as offered themselves, I wished to sing in this little used style of _terza rima_, the story of your most excellent and most renowned father's glorious deeds," whose "brilliant reputation not only was and is well known throughout Italy, but is, if I may say so, the subject of discourse beyond the Caucasus," "not without a conscious blush at the idea of dipping so mean a vessel in the water of this limpid and sparkling spring." With equal modesty, he deprecates all rivalry with the learned commentators who had celebrated the same theme in Latin, limiting the ambition of his "rude and brief compend" to rendering its interest accessible to more ordinary readers; but, looking back upon his twenty-three ample cantos, he fervently thanks the Almighty that an undertaking of so extended time and toil had at length attained its termination, and concludes by "humbly beseeching that you will regard the hero's far-famed actions, rather than the baseness of my style, whose only grace is the sincere devotion of a faithful servant to his lord." A similar tone marks the outset of his Chronicle:-- "If e'er in by-gone times a shallow mind Shrank from the essay of a grand design, So quake I in the labour-pangs of fear." [Footnote 88: _Elogio Storico di Giovanni Santi_, pp. 14 and 69, etc.; Rafael von Urbino. The original and only MS. is described in III. of our Appendix.]