aving once bagged his game, as capable of
availing himself without scruple of his trophies as Ippolito I. of
tearing the antlers from a dying stag.

The princely Cardinal entertained on one occasion a house party of two
hundred and fifty guests in his palatial villa, and established here a
veritable court. The grandiose frescoes of Zuccari, Tempesta, Muziano,
and Vasari still celebrate the glories of his family under the guise of
the heroes of mythology garlanded by troops and bevies of cupids, "_una
copiosa quantita di Amorini_." But the gods and demigods banquet all
alone on the ceiling of the great hall where they once looked down upon
the revels of the Cardinal's convives--noble or distinguished men all of
them in their day, although the one name that comes to us of all who
shared Ippolito's lavish hospitality and that sheds most glory upon his
proud house is that of a poet, by turns patronised as a dependent,
ungratefully neglected, and cruelly wronged.

The visitor is shown with pride the room so whimsically decorated with
singing birds, where Tasso wrote his _Amyntas_, and the Fountain of
Nature in the lower garden where the pastoral was presented with musical
accompaniment before a distinguished audience.

That Leonora d'Este was among those who listened, and indeed had been
her uncle's guest and Tasso's good and evil fate during the months which
he spent at Villa d'Este, is the only conclusion possible for the
thoughtful reader of the poem; and the idyl composed under such
circumstances leads inevitably to the tragedy (enacted at that other
villa) of Belriguardo, of which Goethe has given us so truthful and so
masterly a transcription.

Cardinal Ippolito, as his portraits make him known to us, has none of
the sensuality which stamped the face of his grandfather Pope
Alexander Borgia, or the heaviness of jaw expressing the stubborness and
brutality of the earlier D'Estes; on the contrary, every line of the
slight figure is expressive of refinement, the delicate red-stockinged
feet are as shapely as a woman's, the expressive, almost transparent
hands might be those of an artist as they finger caressingly his
collection of intaglios and luxuriate in the smoothness of jades and
ivory carvings. His excessive pallor and thinness would give an
expression of asceticism, almost of spirituality to the intellectual
face were it not in a measure contradicted by the craft in the
close-set, slanting eyes, which with the