"From me, my son, learn worth and honest toil; Fortune from others take."[78]
"And do you, Anna, who first endeared to me a daughter's name, so perfect yourself in moral graces, that whatever beauty your person may develop, shall be the handmaid of your virtues, and shall figure last in the compliments paid you. And you, Ippolita, reflect on my love for her whose name you bear; and how charming it would be for your merits to surpass your sister's as much as her years do yours. Go on both, as you are doing, and, having lost the mother who bore you before you could know her to be so, do you imitate her qualities, that all may remark how greatly you resemble her. Adieu.
"Disce, puer, virtutem ex me, verumque laborem; Fortunam ex aliis."
Dryden has missed the point of this passage.]
The position which BEMBO holds in the literature of Italy's golden age is not less singular than prominent. As an historian and poet, a philologist and rhetorician, and as a voluminous writer of official and private letters, he challenges criticism and has gained applause. It is, however, as a reformer of style that his claims have been most freely accorded, and his example held up to general imitation. Following the fashion of his day, he regarded classical, and especially Latin, attainments, as the attribute most needful for an accomplished man. But he went further; and, aware of the coarse and rugged manner into which literature had fallen, sought to correct Latin composition, and to perfect his own tongue, after the purest ancient standards. On this object he spared no pains, till by long and laborious practice he wrote in both with equal precision. He is said to have subjected each of his works to forty separate critical revisions, and no one can read a page without feeling that, as with too many of his countrymen, the manner has occupied quite as much thought as the matter. This naturally tended to an opposite extreme, for the studied structure of his sentences, and the fatiguing recurrence of mythological allusion, are blemishes greatly detracting from the pleasure afforded by his works.[79] Scaliger, accordingly, has scourged his pagan misnomers of divine things, while his "childish heresy" of abject Ciceronian imitation is ridiculed by Lansius and Lipsius. Yet there is justice in the test applied to them by Tiraboschi; for great and wide-spread evils require extreme remedies, and the prevailing laxity of style having been once brought into discredit by his example, those who followed were able to avail themselves of his guidance and taste, without falling into the rigidity and constraint which blemish his compositions. Indeed, notwithstanding these obvious blots, which hero-worship has mistaken for beauties, his History of Venice, his Essay on Imitation, his diplomatic and familiar correspondence, and even his poetry, must, when tried by then-received standards, be allowed a merit entitling them to the general suffrage of contemporaries. It is to his Latin prose that our strictures are most applicable. Forgetting, in his zealous imitation of Cicero, the allowance due to modern themes, principles, and feelings, he so slavishly followed that heathen philosopher's idioms, as to clothe what he meant for Christianity in the words of paganism. Even his letters, running in name of the successor of St. Peter, transmuted the Almighty into a pantheistic generality, our Saviour into a hero, and the Madonna into a goddess of Loreto. It may be feared that this latitudinarianism was not limited to manner, for an anecdote alleges him to have seriously recommended a young divine to avoid reading St. Paul's Epistles, lest they might mar his style.