[Footnote 437: 'Fame herself, seated by my tomb with golden raiment, mighty-mouthed, mighty-voiced, with mighty wings, shall spread abroad among the people my names with mighty sound of praise, and carry through the centuries my titles, and with my glory shall resound applauding airs of heaven; renowned through everlasting ages Jovian shall live.'] Sannazzaro's own elegies on the joys of love and country life, the descriptions of his boyhood at Salerno, the praises of his Villa Mergillina, and his meditations among the ruins of Cumæ, are marked by the same characteristics. Nothing quite so full of sensual enjoyment, so soft, and so voluptuous can be found in the poems of the Florentine and Roman scholars. They deserve study, if only as illustrating the luxurious tone of literature at Naples. It was not by these lighter effusions, however, that Sannazzaro won his fame. The epic on the birth of Christ cost him twenty years of labour; and when it was finished, the learned world of Italy welcomed it as a model of correct and polished writing. At the same time the critics seem to have felt, what cannot fail to strike a modern reader, that the difficulties of treating such a theme in the Virgilian manner, and the patience of the stylist, had rendered it a masterpiece of ingenuity rather than a work of genius.[438] Sannazzaro's epigrams, composed in the spirit of bitterest hostility towards the Borgia family, were not less famous than his epic. Alfonso of Aragon took the poet with him during his campaign against the Papal force in the Abruzzi; and these satires, hastily written in the tent and by the camp-fire, formed the amusement of his officers. From the soldiers of Alfonso they speedily passed, on the lips of courtiers and scholars, through all the cities of Italy; nor is it easy to say how much of Lucrezia Borgia's legend may not be traceable to their brief but envenomed couplets. What had been the scandal of the camp acquired consistency in lines too pungent to be forgotten and too witty to remain unquoted.[439] As a specimen of Sannazzaro's style, the epigram on Venice may here be cited:-- Viderat Hadriacis Venetam Neptunus in undis Stare urbem, et toto ponere jura mari: Nunc mihi Tarpeias quantumvis, Jupiter, arces Objice, et illa tui moenia Martis, ait: Si Pelago Tybrim præfers, urbem aspice utramque; Illam homines dices, hanc posuisse deos.[440] [Footnote 438: 'Lilius Gyraldus,' loc. cit. p. 384, writes about this epic, 'in quibus, ut sic dicam, statarius poeta videri potest. Non enim verborum volubilitate fertur, sed limatius quoddam scribendi genus consectatur, et limâ indies atterit, ut de illo non ineleganter dictum illud Apellis de Protogene Pontanus usurpare solitus esset, eum manum de tabulâ tollere nescire.'] [Footnote 439: See _Delitiæ Poetarum Italorum_, second part, pp. 713-761. The following couplet on the death of Cesare Borgia is celebrated:--