Renaissance in Italy Volume V Part 4

The same judgment may be pa.s.sed upon a large portion of the _Novelle_ which deal with secular characters. They are indecent anecdotes, and do not ill.u.s.trate any specific quality in the author or in the temper of his times.[71] The seasoning of horror only serves to render their licentiousness more loathsome. As Bandello lacked the indignation of Masuccio, so he failed to touch Masuccio's tragic chord. When he attempted it, as in the ghastly story of Violante, who revenged herself upon a faithless lover by tearing him to pieces with pincers, or in the disgusting novel of Pandora, or again in the tale of the husband who forced his wife to strangle her lover with her own hands, he only rouses physical repulsion.[72] He makes our flesh creep, and produces literature a.n.a.logous to that of the _Police Times_. Nor does he succeed better with subjects that require the handling of a profound psychologist. His Rosmunda and Tarquin, his Faustina and Seleucus, leave an impression of failure through defect of imaginative force[73]; while the incestuous theme of one tale, treated as it is with frigid levity, can claim no justification on the score of dramatic handling or high-wrought spiritual agony.[74]

[Footnote 71: I need not give any references to the _Novelle_ of this groveling type. But I may call attention to i. 35; ii. 11; iv. 34, 35.

These tales are not exceptionally obscene; they ill.u.s.trate to what extent mere filth of the Swiftian sort pa.s.sed for fun in the Italy of Bembo and Castiglione.]

[Footnote 72: i. 42; iii. 21; iii. 52; ii. 12.]

[Footnote 73: iii. 18; ii. 21; i. 36; iii. 55.]

[Footnote 74: ii. 35; cp. i. 37.]

It was not in this region of tragic terror that Bandello's genius moved with freedom. In describing the luxury of Milan or the manners of the Venetian courtesans, in bringing before us scenes from the _demi-monde_ of Rome or painting the life of a _grisette_, he shows acute knowledge of society, studied under its more superficial aspects, and produces pictures that are valuable for the antiquarian.[75] The same merit of freshness belongs to many minor anecdotes, like the romance of the girl who drowned herself in the Oglio to save her honor, or the pretty episode of Costantino Boccali who swam the Adige in winter at a thoughtless lady's behest.[76] Yet in Bandello's versions of contemporary histories which taxed the imaginative powers or demanded deeper insight into human pa.s.sions, we miss the true dramatic ring. It was only when it fell into the hands of Webster, that his dull narrative of the d.u.c.h.ess of Amalfi revealed its capacities for artistic treatment.[77] Nor is the story of the Countess of Cellant, though full of striking details, so presented as to leave the impression of tragedy upon our minds.[78] We only feel what Webster, dealing with it as he dealt with Vittoria Corombona's crime, might have made out of this poor material.

[Footnote 75: The pictures of Milanese luxury before the Spanish occupation are particularly interesting. See i. 9, and the beginning of ii. 8. It seems that then, as now, Milan was famous for her equipages and horses. The tale of the two fops who always dressed in white (iii. 11) brings that life before us. For the Venetian and Roman _demi-monde_, iii. 31; i. 19; i. 42; ii. 51, may be consulted. These pa.s.sages have the value of authentic studies from contemporary life, and are told about persons whom the author knew at least by name.]

[Footnote 76: i. 8; i. 47.]

[Footnote 77: i. 26.]

[Footnote 78: i. 108.]

It may be asked, if this is all, why any one should take the pains to read through the two hundred and fourteen _Novelle_ of Bandello, and, having done so, should think it worth his while to write about them.

Ought they not rather to be left among the things the world would willingly let die? The answer to this question is twofold. In the first place they fairly represent the whole cla.s.s of novels which were produced so abundantly in Italy that the historian of Renaissance literature cannot pa.s.s them by in silence. Secondly, Bandello at his best is a great artist in the story-teller's craft. The conditions under which he displayed his powers to true advantage, require some definition. Once only did he successfully handle a really comic situation. That was in his tale of the monkey who dressed himself up in a dead woman's clothes, and frightened her family when they returned from the funeral, by mimicking her movement.[79] He was never truly tragic. But in the intermediate region between tragedy and comedy, where situations of romantic beauty offer themselves to the sympathetic imagination--in that realm of pathos and adventure, where pictures of eventful living can be painted, and the conflicts of tender emotion have to be described, Bandello proved himself a master.

It would make the orthodox Italian critics shudder in their graves to hear that he had been compared to Ariosto. Yet a foreigner, gifted with obtuser sensibility to the refinements of Italian diction, may venture the remark that Bandello was a kind of prose Ariosto--in the same sense as Heywood seemed a prose Shakspere to Charles Lamb. Judged by the high standard of Athenian or Elizabethan art, neither Ariosto nor Bandello was a first-rate dramatist. But both commanded the material of which romantic tragedies can be constructed. Bandello's best _Novelle_ abound in the situations which delighted our playwrights of the Jacobean age--in the thrilling incidents and scenes of high-wrought pa.s.sion we are wont to deem the special property of Fletcher. He puts them before us with a force of realistic coloring, and develops them with a warmth of feeling, that leave no doubt of his artistic skill. Composition and style may fail him, but his sympathy with the poetic situation, and his power to express it are unmistakable. In support of this opinion I might point to his vigorous but repulsive presentation of Parisina's legend, where the gradual yielding of a sensitive young man to the seductions of a sensual woman, is painted with touches of terrible veracity.[80] Or the tale of the Venetian lovers might be chosen.[81] Gerardo and Elena were secretly married; but in his absence on a voyage, she was plighted by her father to another husband. Before the consummation of this second marriage, Elena fell through misery into a death-like trance, and was taken by her kindred to be buried at Castello on the sh.o.r.es of the lagoons. At the moment when the funeral procession was crossing the waters by the light of many torches, the s.h.i.+p of Gerardo cast anchor in the port of Venice, and the young man heard that his wife was dead.

Attended by a single friend, he went under cover of the night to where she had been laid in a sarcophagus outside the church. This he opened, and, frantic between grief and joy, bore the corpse of his beloved to his boat. He kissed her lips, and laid himself beside her lifeless body, wildly refusing to listen to his friend's expostulations. Then while the gondola rocked on the waves of the lagoons and the sea-wind freshened before daybreak, Elena awoke. It is needless to add that the story ends in happiness. This brief sketch conveys no notion of the picturesque beauty of the incidents described, or of the intimate acquaintance with Venetian customs displayed in the _Novella_. To one who knows Venice, it is full of delicate suggestions, and the reader illuminates the margin with ill.u.s.trations in the manner of Carpaccio.

[Footnote 79: iii. 65.]

[Footnote 80: i. 44.]

[Footnote 81: ii. 41.]

There is a point of Romeo and Juliet in the tale of Gerardo and Elena.

Bandello's own treatment of the Veronese romance deserves comparison with Shakspere's.[82] The evolution of the tragedy is nearly the same in all its leading incidents; for we hear of Romeo's earlier love, and the friar who dealt in simples is there, and so are the nurse and apothecary. Bandello has antic.i.p.ated Shakspere even in Juliet's soliloquy before she drinks the potion, when the dreadful thought occurs to her that she may wake too soon, and find herself alone among the dry bones of her ancestors, with Tybalt festering in his shroud.

But the prose version exhibits one motive which Shakspere missed.

When Romeo opens the tomb, he rouses Juliet from her slumber, and in his joy forgets that he has drunk the poison. For a while the lovers are in paradise together in that region of the dead; and it is only when the chill of coming death a.s.sails him, that Romeo remembers what he has done. He dies, and Juliet stabs herself with his sword. Had Shakspere chosen to develop this catastrophe, instead of making Romeo perish before the waking of Juliet, he might have wrought the most pathetically tragic scene in poetry. Reading the climax in Bandello, where it is overpoweringly affecting, we feel what we have lost.

[Footnote 82: ii. 37. It is clear that both followed the earlier version of Da Porto.]

Another _Novella_ which provokes comparison with our dramatic literature--with the _Twelfth Night_ or with Fletcher's _Philaster_--is the tale of Nicuola.[83] She and her brother Paolo were twins, so like in height and form and feature that it was difficult even for friends to know them apart. They were living with their father at Rome, when the siege of 1527 dispersed the family.

Paolo was taken prisoner by Spaniards, and Nicuola went to dwell at Jesi. The _Novella_ goes on to relate how she fell in love with a n.o.bleman of Jesi, and entering his service disguised as a page, was sent by him to woo the lady of his heart; and how this lady loved her in her page's dress. Then her brother, Paolo, returned, attired like her in white, and recognitions were made, and both couples, Paolo and the lady, Nicuola and the n.o.bleman, were happily married in the end.

It will be seen that these situations, involving confusions of ident.i.ty and s.e.x, unexpected discoveries, and cross-play of pa.s.sions, offered opportunities for rhetorical and picturesque development in the style of a modern Euripides; nor did Bandello fail to utilize them.

[Footnote 83: ii. 36. This tale was fas.h.i.+onable in Italy. It forms the basis of that rare comedy, _Gli Ingannati_, performed by the Academy degli Intronati at Siena, and printed in 1538. The scene in this play is laid at Modena; the main plot is interwoven with two intrigues--between Isabella's father and Lelia, the heroine; and between Isabella's maid and a Spaniard. In spite of these complications the action is lucid, and the comedy is one of the best we possess. There is an excellent humorous scene of two innkeepers touting against each other for travelers (Act iii. 2). That Shakspere knew the _Novella_ or the comedy before he wrote his _Twelfth Night_ is more than probable.]

Of a higher type is the _Novella_ which narrates the love of Edward III. for the virtuous Alice of Salisbury.[84] Here the interest centers in four characters--the King, Alice, and her father and mother, the Earl and Countess of Salisbury. There is no action beyond the conflict of motives and emotions caused by Edward's pa.s.sion, and its successive phases. But that conflict is so vigorously presented that attention never flags; and, though the tale is long, we are drawn without weariness by finely-modulated transitions to the point where a felicitous catastrophe is not only natural but necessary. What is at first a mere desire in Edward, pa.s.ses through graduated moods of confident, despairing, soul-absorbing love. The ordinary artifices of a seducer are replaced by the powerful compulsion of a monarch, who strives to corrupt the daughter by working on her father's ambition and her mother's weakness. Thwarted by the girl's constancy at every turn, he sinks into love-melancholy, then rouses himself with the furious resolve to attempt force, and lastly, yielding to his n.o.bler nature, offers his crown to Alice. These several moments in the King's pa.s.sion are exhibited with a descriptive wealth and exuberance of resource that remind us forcibly of our own stage. The contrasts between the girl's invincible honor and her lover's ungovernable impulse, between her firmness and her mother's feebler nature, and again between the sovereign's overbearing willfulness and the Earl's stubborn but respectful resistance, suggest a series of high-wrought situations, which only need to be versified and divided into acts to make a drama. Fletcher himself might have proudly owned the scene in which Edward discovers his love to the Earl, begs him to plead with his daughter, and has to hear his reproaches, so courteously and yet unflinchingly expressed. What follows is equally dramatic. The Earl explains to Alice his own ideal of honor; still he fairly sets before her the King's lawless offer, and then receives the a.s.surance of her unconquerable chast.i.ty. Her mother, moved to feebler issues by the same pressure, attempts to break her daughter's resolve, and at last extorts a reluctant consent by her own physical agony. Finally, the girl, when left alone with her royal lover, demands from him or death or honor, and wins her cause by the n.o.bility of her carriage in this hour of trial. The whole _Novella_ in its choice of motives, method of treatment, and ethical tone, challenges comparison with Beaumont and Fletcher's serious plays. Nor is the style unlike theirs; for the situations are worked out in copious and colored language, hasty and diffuse, but charged and surcharged with the pa.s.sion of the thing to be portrayed. Bandello, like Fletcher, strikes out images at every turn, enlarges in rhetorical digressions, and pours forth floods of voluble eloquence.[85] The morality, though romantic, is above his usual level; for while he paints a dissolute and willful prince in Edward, he contrives to make us feel that the very force of pa.s.sion, when purified to true love by the constancy of Alice, has brought the monarch to a knowledge of his better self. Nor is the type of honor in Alice and the Earl exaggerated. They act and speak as subjects, conscious of their duty to the King, but resolved to preserve their self-respect at any cost, should speak and act. The compliance of the Countess, who is willing to sacrifice her daughter's honor under the impulse of blind terror, cannot be called unnatural. The consequent struggle between a mother's frailty and a daughter's firmness, though painful enough, is not so disagreeably presented as in Tourneur's _Revenger's Tragedy_. If all Bandello's novels had been conceived in the same spirit as this, he would have ranked among the best romantic writers of the modern age. As it is, we English may perhaps take credit to ourselves for the superior inspiration of the legend he here handled. The moral fiber of the tale is rather English than Italian.

[Footnote 84: ii. 37. Historians will not look for accuracy in what is an Italian love-tale founded on an English legend.]

[Footnote 85: Take the description of the King's love-sickness (_Nov.

It._ vol. v. p. 352), the incident of the King's offer to the Earl (pp. 353, 354), Edward's musings (p. 364), Alice alone in London (p.

376), the King's defiance of opinion (p. 379), the people's verdict against Alice (p. 380), Alice arming herself with the dagger (p. 398), the garden scene upon the Thames (p. 399). Then the discourses upon love and temperament (p. 325), on discreet conduct in love affairs (pp. 334-338), on real and false courtiers (pp. 382-388). Compare the descriptive pa.s.sages on pp. 352, 354, 369, 393, 395, 398, with similar pa.s.sages in Beaumont and Fletcher.]

Bandello was not unaware that his _Novelle_ lay under censure for licentiousness. His apology deserves to be considered, since it places the Italian conscience on this point in a clear light. In the preface to the eleventh _Novella_ of the second part, he attacks the question boldly.[86] "They say that my stories are not honest. In this I am with them, if they rightly apprehend honesty. I do not deny that some are not only not honest, but I affirm and confess that they are most dishonest; for if I write that a maiden grants favors to a lover, I cannot pretend that the fact is not in the highest sense immoral. So also of many things I have narrated. No sane person will fail to blame incest, theft, homicide, and other vicious actions; and I concede that my _Novelle_ set forth these and similar enormous crimes. But I do not admit that I deserve to be therefore blamed. The world ought to blame and stigmatize those who commit such crimes, and not the man who writes about them." He then affirms that he has written his stories down as he heard them from the lips of the narrators, that he has clothed them in decent language, and that he has always been careful to condemn vice and to praise virtue. In the twenty-fourth novel of the same part he returns to the charge.[87] Hypocrites, he argues, complain that the Decameron and similar collections corrupt the morality of women and teach vice; "but I was always of opinion that to commit crimes rather than to know about them was vicious. Ignorance is never good, and it is better to be instructed in the wickedness of the world than to fall into error through defect of knowledge." This apology, when read by the light of Bandello's own _Novelle_, is an impudent evasion of the accusation. They are a school of profligacy; and the author was at pains to make his pictures of sensuality attractive. That he should plume himself upon the decorum of his language, is simply comic. Such simulation of a conscience was all that remained at an epoch when the sense of shame had been extinguished, while acquiescence in the doctrines of a corrupt Church had not ceased to be fas.h.i.+onable.

[Footnote 86: _Nov. It._ vol. iv. p. 226. Compare the peroration of his Preface to the third part (vol. vii. p. 13).]

[Footnote 87: Vol. v. p. 38.]

Bandello is more sensitive to strictures on his literary style, and makes a better defense. "They say that I have no style. I grant it; nor do I profess to be a master of prose, believing that if those only wrote who were consummate in their art, very few would write at all.

But I maintain that any history, composed in however rough and uncouth a language, will not fail to delight the reader; and these novels of mine (unless I am deceived by their narrators) are not fables but true histories."[88] In another place he confesses that his manner is and always has been "light and low and deficient in intellectual quality."[89] Again, he meets the objection that his diction is not modeled on the purest Tuscan masterpieces, by arguing that even Petrarch wrote Italian and not Tuscan, and that if Livy smacked of Patavinity, he, a Lombard, does not shrink from Lombardisms in his style.[90] The line of defense is good; but, what is more, Bandello knew that he was popular. He cared to be read by all cla.s.ses of the people rather than to be praised by pedants for the purity of his language. Therefore he snapped his fingers at Speron Sperone and Trifone, the so-called Socrates of his century. The _Novella_ was not a branch of scholarly but of vulgar literature; and Bandello had far better right to cla.s.s himself among Italian authors than Straparola or Giraldi, whose novels were none the less sought after with avidity and read with pleasure by thousands. It is true that he was not a master of the best Italian prose, and that his _Novelle_ do not rank among the _Testi di Lingua_. He is at one and the same time prolix and involved, ornate and vulgar, coa.r.s.e in phraseology and ambitious in rhetoric. He uses metaphors borrowed from the slang of the fas.h.i.+onable world to express gross thoughts or actions. He indulges in pompous digressions and overloads his narrative with ill.u.s.trations. But, in spite of these defects, he is rarely dull. His energy and copiousness of diction never fail him. His style is penetrated with the pa.s.sion of the subject, and he delights our imagination with wonderfully varied pictures drawn from life. It is probable that foreigners can render better justice to the merits of Bandello as a writer, than Italians, who are trained to criticise language from a highly refined and technical point of view. We recognize his vividness and force without being disgusted by his Lombardisms or the coa.r.s.eness of his phrases.

Yet even some Italian critics of no mean standing have been found to say a good word for his style. Among these may be reckoned the judicious Mazzuch.e.l.li.[91]

[Footnote 88: Vol. iv. p. 226. Cp. vol. ix. p. 339.]

[Footnote 89: Vol. vi. p. 254.]

[Footnote 90: Vol. vii. p. 11.]

[Footnote 91: In the biography of Bandello he says, "Lo stile e piuttosto colto e studiato, che che taluno n'abbia detto in contrario, non per in guisa che possa mettersi a confronto di quello del Boccaccio."]

The author of _Le Cene_ presents a marked contrast to Bandello.

Antonfrancesco Grazzini belonged to an ancient and honorable family of Staggia in Valdelsa.[92] Some of his ancestors held office in the Florentine republic, and many were registered in the Art of the Notaries. Born at Florence in 1503, he was matriculated into the Speziali, and followed the profession of a druggist. His literary career was closely connected with the academies of Gli Umidi and La Crusca.[93] The sobriquet Il Lasca, or The Roach, a.s.sumed by him as a member of the Umidi, is the name by which he is best known. Besides _Novelle_, he wrote comedies and poems, and made the renowned collection of _Canti Carnascialeschi_. He died in 1583 and was buried in S. Pier Maggiore. Thus while Bandello might claim to be a citizen of the great world, reared in the ecclesiastical purple and conversant with the n.o.blest society of Northern Italy, Il Lasca began life and ended it as a Florentine burgher. For aught we know, he may not have traveled beyond the bounds of the republic. His stories are written in the raciest Tuscan idiom and are redolent of the humor peculiar to Florence. If Bandello appropriated the romantic element in Boccaccio, Il Lasca chose his comic side for imitation. Nearly all his novels turn on _beffe_ and _burle_, similar to those sketched in Sacchetti's anecdotes, or developed with greater detail by Pulci and the author of _Il Gra.s.so Legnaiuolo_.[94] Three boon companions, Lo Scheggia, Il Monaco, and Il Pilucca are the heroes of his comedy; and the pranks they play, are described with farcical humor of the broadest and most powerful sort. Still the specific note of Il Lasca's novels is not pure fun. He combines obscenity with fierce carnal cruelty and inhuman jesting, in a mixture that speaks but ill for the taste of his time.[95] Neither Boccaccio nor the author of _Il Gra.s.so_ struck a chord so vicious, though the latter carried his buffoonery to the utmost stretch of heartlessness. It needed the depravity of the sixteenth century to relish the l.u.s.t, seasoned with physical torture and spiritual agony, which was so cunningly revealed, so coldly reveled in by Il Lasca.[96] A practical joke or an act of refined vengeance had peculiar attraction for the Florentines. But the men must have been blunted in moral sensibility and surfeited with strange experiences, who could enjoy Pilucca's brutal tricks, or derive pleasure from the climax of a tale so ghastly as the fifth _Novella_ of the second series.

[Footnote 92: See Sonnet 79, _Rime_ (ed. 1741).]

[Footnote 93: Founded respectively in 1540 and 1583. Grazzini quarreled with them both.]

[Footnote 94: _Cena_ i. _Nov._ 3, is in its main motive modeled on that novel.]

[Footnote 95: The contrast between the amiable manners of the young men and women described in the introduction to _Le Cene_, and the stories put into their mouths; between the profound immorality, frigid and repellent, of the tales and Ghiacinto's prayer at the beginning; need not be insisted on.]

[Footnote 96: As I shall not dilate upon these novels further in the text, I may support the above censure by reference to the practical joke played upon the pedagogue (i. 2), to the inhuman novel of _Il Berna_ (ii. 2), to the cruel vengeance of a brother (ii. 7), and to the story of the priest (ii. 8).]

This is a story of incest and a husband's vengeance. Substantially the same as Parisina's tragedy, Il Lasca has invented for it his own whimsically horrible conclusion. The husband surprises his wife and son. Then, having cut off their hands, feet, eyes and tongues, he leaves them to die together on the bed where he had found them. The rhetoric with which this catastrophe is embellished, and the purring sympathy expressed for the guilty couple, only serve to make its inhumanity more glaring. Incapable of understanding tragedy, these writers of a vitiated age sought excitement in monstrous situations.

The work produced is a proper pendent to the filth of the burlesque _Capitoli_. Literature of this sort might have amused Caligula and his gladiators. Prefaced by an unctuous prayer to G.o.d, it realizes the very superfluity of naughtiness.[97]

[Footnote 97: See above, p. 56, note.]

In favor of the Florentines, we might plead that these _Novelle_ were accepted as pure fictions--debauches of the fancy, escapades of inventive wit. The ideal world they represented, claimed no contact with realities of life. The pranks of Lo Scheggia and Il Pilucca, which drove one man into exile, another to the hospital, and a third to his death, had no more actuality than the tricks of clown and pantaloon. A plea of this sort was advanced by Charles Lamb for the dramatists of the Restoration; and it carries, undoubtedly, its measure of conviction. Literature of convention, which begins by stimulating curiosity, must find novel combinations and fresh seasonings, to pique the palate of the public. Thus the abominations of Il Lasca's stories would have to be regarded as the last desperate bids for popularity, as final hyperboles of exhausted rhetoric. Yet, after all, books remain the mirror of a people's taste. Whatever their quality may be, they are produced to satisfy some demand. And the wonderful vivacity of Il Lasca's coloring, the veracity of his art, preclude him from the benefit of a defense which presupposes that he stood in some unnatural relation to his age. While we read his tales, we cannot but remember the faces painted by Bronzino, or modeled by Cellini. The sixteenth-century Florentines were hard and cold as steel. Their temper had been brutalized by servitude, superficially polished by humanism, blunted by the extraordinary intellectual activity of three centuries. Compared with the voluptuous but sympathetic mood of the Lombard novelists, this cruelty means something special to the race.

Some of Il Lasca's stories, fortunately, need no such strained apology or explanation. The tale of Lisabetta's dream, though it lacks point, is free from his worse faults[98]; while the novel of Zoroaster is not only innocent, but highly humorous and charged with playful sarcasm.[99] It contains a portrait of a knavish astrologer, worthy to be set beside the _Negromante_ of Ariosto or Ben Jonson's _Alchemist_.

When Jerome Cardan was coquetting with chiromancy and magic, when Cellini was raising fiends with the Sicilian necromancer in the Coliseum, a novelist found sufficient stuff for comedy and satire in the foibles of ghost-seekers and the tricks of philter-mongers. The companion portrait of the dissolute monk, who sets his hand to any dirty work that has the spice of fun in it, is also executed with no little spirit.

[Footnote 98: _Cena_ ii. 3.]

[Footnote 99: _Cena_ ii. 4.]

Among the most graceful of the Tuscan novelists may be mentioned Agnolo Firenzuola. His family derived its name from a village at the foot of the Pistojan Apennines, and his father was a citizen of Florence. Agnolo spent his youth at Siena and Perugia, where he made the friends.h.i.+p of Pietro Aretino, leading the wild student life described in their correspondence.[100] That he subsequently entered the Vallombrosan order seems to be certain; but it is somewhat doubtful whether he attained the dignity of Abbot which his biographers ascribe to him.[101] Tiraboschi, unwilling to admit so great a scandal to the Church, has adduced reasons why we should suspend our judgment.[102] Yet the tradition rests on substantial authority. A monument erected by Firenzuola to his uncle Alessandro Braccio in the church of S. Pra.s.sede, at Rome, describes him as _aedis hujus Abbas_. S. Maria di Spoleti and S. Salvator di Vaiano are supposed to have been his benefices. Some further collateral proof might be drawn from the opening of the dialogue _Sopra le Bellezze delle Donne_. The scene of it is laid in the convent grounds of Grignano, and Celso is undoubtedly Firenzuola. A portion of his manhood was spent at Rome in friends.h.i.+p with Molza, Berni, and other brilliant literary men. While resident in Rome he contracted a severe and tedious illness, which obliged him to retire to Prato, where he spent some of the happiest years of his life.[103] Nearly all his works contain frequent and affectionate recollections of this sunny little town, the beauty of whose women is enthusiastically celebrated by him. Firenzuola died before the middle of the sixteenth century at the age of about fifty. Neither his life nor his friends.h.i.+ps nor yet his writings were consistent with his monastic profession and the dignity of Abbot. The charm of Firenzuola's _Novelle_ is due in a large measure to his style, which has a wonderful transparency and ease, a wealth of the rarest Tuscan phrases, and a freshness of humor that renders them delightful reading. The storm at sea in the first tale, and the night scene in the streets of Florence in the third, are described with Ariostean brilliancy.[104] In point of subject-matter they do not greatly differ from the ordinary novels of the day, and some of the tales reappear in the collections of other novelists.[105]