Now, this letter I consider to be a very great curiosity! The other two written from the same place, one to a Signor Bulgarini at Siena, the other to a lady, the Marchesa di Grana, at Mantua, are of an entirely similar description. I turned to them in the hope of finding how Innspruck, its stupendous scenery, its court, its manners so widely different from those to which the writer and his correspondents were used, its streets, its people, impressed a sixteenth century Italian from the valley of the Po. I find instead a psychological phenomenon! The writer is a grave, austere man (Guarini was notably such), celebrated throughout Italy for his intellectual attainments, in the fifty-seventh year of his age, with a wife and family; he is amidst scenes which must, one would have thought, have impressed in the very highest degree the imagination of a poet, and must, it might have been supposed, have interested those he was writing to in an only somewhat less degree, and he writes the stuff the reader has just waded through. It is clear that this Italian sixteenth century scholar, poet and of cultivated intellect as he was, saw nothing amid the strange scenes to which a hard and irksome duty called him, which he thought worthy of being mentioned even by a passing word to his friends! Surely this is a curious trait of national character. He remained in the service of the court for fourteen years, employed mainly, as it should seem, in a variety of embassies; an employment which seems to have left him a disappointed, soured, and embittered man. He considered that he had not been remunerated as his labour deserved, that the heavy expenses to which he had been put in his long journeys had not been satisfactorily made up to him, and that he had not been treated in any of the foreign countries to which his embassies had carried him with the respect due to his own character and to his office. He determined therefore to leave the court and retire to Padua, a residence in which city, it being not far distant from his estate of Guarina, would offer him, he thought, a convenient opportunity of overlooking his property and restoring order to his finances, which had suffered much during his travels. This was in the year 1582, when Guarini was in the forty-fifth year of his age. It is not clear, however, that this retirement was wholly spontaneous; and the probability is that the Duke and his ambassador were equally out of humour with each other. And it is probable that the faults were not all on the side of the Duke. There is sufficient evidence that the author of the "Pastor Fido" must have been a difficult man to live with.