He must have been a stern and unforgiving man. And indeed all the available testimony represents him as having been so,--upright, honest, and honourable, but haughty, punctilious, litigious, quick to take offence, slow to forget or forgive it, and cursed with a thin-skinned _amour propre_ easily wounded and propense to credit others with the intention of wounding where no such intention existed. The remainder of the story of his life offers an almost unbroken series of testimonies to the truth of such an estimate of his character. It was after fourteen years' service in the court of Duke Alphonso, as has been said, that he retired disgusted and weary to live in independence and nurse his estate in the neighbourhood of Padua. But the part of Cincinnatus is not for every man! It was in 1582 that he retired from the court intending to bid it and its splendours, its disappointments and its jealousies, an eternal adieu. In 1585, on an offer from the Duke to make him his secretary, he returned and put himself into harness again! But this second attempt to submit himself to the service, to the caprices and exigencies of a master and of a court ended in a quicker and more damaging catastrophe than the first. In a diary kept by the poet's nephew, Marcantonio Guarini, under the date of July 13, 1587, we find it written that "the Cavalier Batista Guarini, Secretary of the Duke, considering that his services did not meet with sufficient consideration in proportion to his worth, released himself from that servitude." The phrase here translated "released himself" is a peculiar one--_si licenzio_--"dismissed himself." To receive _licenza_, or to be _licenziato_, is to be dismissed, or at least parted with in accordance with the will of the employer. But the phrase used by the diarist seems intended to express exactly what happened when the poet, once more discontented, took himself off from Ferrara and its Duke. He seems to have done so in a manner which gave deep and lasting offence. In a subsequent passage of the above-quoted diary we read, "the Cavaliere Batista Guarini having absented himself from Ferrara, disgusted with the Duke, betook himself to Florence, and then, by the intermedium of Guido Coccapani the agent, asked for his dismissal in form and obtained it." We happen, however, to have a letter written by this Coccapani, who seems to have been the Duke's private secretary and managing man, in which he gives his version of the matter. He was "stupefied," he says, "when he received the extravagant letter of the Cavaliere Guarini, and began to think that it would be with him as it had been with Tasso," who by that time had fallen into disgrace. There is reason to think that he left Ferrara secretly, without taking leave of the Duke, or letting anybody at court know where he had gone. He did, however, obtain his formal dismissal, as has been said, but the Duke by no means forgave him.