And, in fact, 'the
first of the house of Este who attended the corpse of a subject'
walked, clad in black, after the coffin, weeping, while behind him came
the relatives of Casella, each conducted by one of the gentlemen of the
court: the body of the plain citizen was carried by nobles from the
church into the cloister, where it was buried. Indeed this official
sympathy with princely emotion first came up in the Italian States. At
the root of the practice may be a beautiful, humane sentiment; the
utterance of it, especially in the poets, is, as a rule, of equivocal
sincerity. One of the youthful poems of Ariosto, on the Death of
Leonora of Aragon, wife of Ercole I, contains besides the inevitable
graveyard flowers, which are scattered in the elegies of all ages, some
thoroughly modern features: This death had given Ferrara a blow which
it would not get over for years: its benefactress was now its advocate
in heaven, since earth was not worthy of her; truly the angel of Death
did not come to her, as to us common mortals, with blood-stained
scythe, but fair to behold (onesta), and with so kind a face that every
fear was allayed.' But we meet, also, with sympathy of a different
kind. Novelists, depending wholly on the favour of their patrons, tell
us the love stories of the prince, even before his death, in a way
which, to later times, would seem the height of indiscretion, but which
then passed simply as an innocent compliment.
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