Nevertheless, such as it was, the life of a good and of a poor man, of one tenaciously devoted to love and poetry, it found literary expression in the minor works of the author: in the Latin songs, in the Italian verses, and in the satires.
In saying this, we shall set aside the comedies, which seem to be the most important of those minor works and are notwithstanding the least significant, so that they might be almost excluded from the history of his poetical development, connected rather with his doings as a courtier, as an arranger of spectacles and plays, for which purpose he decided to imitate the Latin comedy, for he did not believe there was anything new to be done in that field, since the Latins had already imitated the Greeks. No doubt Ariosto's comedies stand for an important date in the history of the Italian theatre and of the Latin imitation which prevailed there, that is to say, the history of culture, but not in that of poetry. There they are mute. They are works of adaptation and combination, and therefore executed with effort; there is nothing new, even about their form, and a proof of this is that Ariosto, after he had made a first attempt to write them in prose, finally put them into monotonous and tiresome ante-penultimate hendecasyllabics, which have never pleased anyone's ear, because they were not born, but constructed according to design, with evident artifice and with a view to giving to Italy the metre of comedy, analogous to the Roman iambic. Whoever (to cite an instance from the same period and "style") calls to memory the _Mandragola_ of Machiavelli, instinct with the energetic spirit, the bitter disdain of the great thinker, or even the sketches thrown upon paper anyhow by the ne'er-do-well Pietro Aretino, is at once sensible of the difference between dead ability and living force, or at any rate careless vigour. Nor does the dead material come alive, as some easily contented critics maintain, from the fact that Ariosto introduced, especially into the later of those comedies, allusions to persons, places and customs of Ferrara, or satirical gibes at the vices of the time; all these things are light as straws and quite indifferent when original inspiration lacks, as in the present case.