een shed,
And all inebriate with delight."

So the Swiss,[6] he continues, when they fall out among themselves, are
appeased by some grave old gentleman, who says a few pleasant words, and
orders up a good stoop of sweet wine, in which all parties presently dip
their beards, and laugh and embrace and make peace, and so forget
outrage. It may have been the sixteenth-century way of closing a battle.

[Footnote 6:
"Come quando nei Suizzeri si muove
Sedizione, e che si grida a l' arme;
Se qualche nom grave allor si leva in piede
E comincia a parlar con dolce lingua,
Mitiga i petti barbari e feroci;
E intanto fa portare ondanti vasi
Pieni di dolci ed odorati vini;
Ahora ognun le labbra e 'l mento immerge
Ne' le spumanti tazze," etc.
]

Guarini, with all his affectations, has little prettinesses which charm
like the chirping of a bird;--as where he paints (in the very first
scene of the "Pastor Fido") the little sparrow flitting from fir to
beech, and from beech to myrtle, and twittering, "How I love! how I
love!" And the bird-mate ("_il suo dolce desio_") twitters in reply,
"How I love, how I love, too!" "_Ardo d' amore anch' io._"

Messer Pietro Bembo was a different man from Guarini. I cannot imagine
him listening to the sparrows; I cannot imagine him plucking a
flower,--except he have some courtly gallantry in hand, perhaps toward
the Borgia. He was one of those pompous, stiff, scholastic prigs who
wrote by rules of syntax; and of syntax he is dead. He was clever and
learned; he wrote in Latin, Italian, Castlian: but nobody reads him; he
has only a little crypt in the "Autori Diversi." I think of him as I
think of fine women who must always rustle in brocade embossed with hard
jewels, and who never win the triumphs that belong to a charming morning
_deshabille_ with only the added improvisation of a rose.

In his "Asolani" Bembo gives a very full and minute description of the
gardens at Asolo, which relieved the royal retirement of Caterina, the
Queen of Cyprus. Nothing could be more admirable than the situation:
there were skirts of mountain which were covered, and are still covered,
with oaks; there were grottos in the sides of cliffs, and water so
disposed--in jets, in pools inclosed by marble, and among rocks--as to
counterfeit all the wildness of Nature; there was the same stately array
of cypresses, and of clipped hedges, which had belonged to the villas of
Pliny; te