Note 614 — Chapter VIII
Reading edition
See the Opere Minori, vol. i. p. 336. Also Carducci's eloquent defense of these Horatian verses in his essay, Delle Poesie Latine di L. Ariosto (Bologna, Zanichelli, 1876), p. 82. The latter treatise is a learned criticism of Ariosto's Latin poetry from a point of view somewhat too indulgent to Ariosto as a poet and a man. Carducci, for example, calls the four Alcaic stanzas in question "una cosellina quasi perfetta," though they contain three third lines like these:
Furore militis tremendo.... Jacentem aquæ ad murmur cadentis.... Mecumque cespite hoc recumbens.
Ariosto was but second-rate among the Latin versifiers of his century. It must, however, be added that his Latin poems were written in early manhood and only published after his death by Giambattista Pigna, in 1553.