A Manual of

Italian Literature

BY

FRANCIS HENRY CLIFFE

LONDON: JOHN MACQUEEN

1896

CONTENTS.

[CHAPTER I.]

INTRODUCTION.

Whoever examines a map of Europe, and sees the position occupied by Italy, must, even without knowledge of history, come to the conclusion that a country situated in so central a position and favoured in so many respects by Nature, cannot have failed to command an exalted rank in the hierarchy of nations. But the most daring conjectures would probably fall short of the brilliant reality. The rise and the dominion of Rome would be regarded in a romance as too improbable for the credulity of the simplest reader, but as a well-established fact in the annals of mankind, it becomes a phenomenon of the most striking importance and interest. That a solitary city should produce brave and distinguished men, and even, aided by wealth and courage, establish settlements in remote countries, is not wonderful; Carthage and Tyre did so at an earlier period, Venice and Genoa did so in times nearer the present; but that a solitary city should play a part reserved apparently only for a great nation, should draw to itself, as in a magic circle, all Italy, should conquer Gaul, Greece, Africa, Spain, Britain, Asia Minor, and even threaten Persia and India, is indeed marvellous. Nor were the conquests of Rome transient conflagrations whose fury was soon exhausted; they were as durable as they were brilliant, and the subjugated races speedily learned the language and the manners of their masters. Only one nation, though politically enslaved, remained intellectually free. Greece had produced poets so sublime, philosophers so profound, historians so brilliant, that even in the darkest hour of degradation, even when Memmius was despoiling Corinth of the works of the greatest of statuaries, even when Sulla was slaughtering the helpless inhabitants of Athens, she had the satisfaction of seeing the master minds of Rome coming as humble disciples to the sources of art and wisdom that took their origin only on her soil.

Indeed, it is scarcely far-fetched to say that Greece was avenged for her slavery by the not less complete slavery of Rome to her intellectual supremacy. The Roman poets, dazzled by the brilliancy of their Athenian prototypes, fancied that only by imitating, could they hope to excel. A more unfortunate idea never took possession of a nation. It destroyed everything in their writings that was spontaneous and redolent of their native soil. Whatever is really endowed with life and intrinsic value in their works, has had to struggle into existence through the suffocating atmosphere of foreign fashions and foreign trains of thought. This evil was apparent in other branches of literature, but it was very far from injuring them as it injured poetry. Virgil was assuredly one of the greatest poets that ever lived, and yet how much of his poetry is second-hand, or, at best, adapted from others. The adaptations are often executed with marvellous skill, but this fact only enhances our regret that he should have made of his Æneid but an echo of Homer; and of his Eclogues but a repetition of Theocritus. His Georgia, indeed, escaped being only a decoction from Greek herbs, because in them he wrote of what he had actually seen and experienced, and they are, in truth, his masterpiece. Indeed, if we deduct the extraordinary beauty of the style, which is above praise, what is there of great value in the Eclogues, except some images of rural beauty, and some outbursts of exquisite tenderness? Or in the Æneid, except those passages where he praises the greatness of Italy and Rome, expatiates on his philosophy, and depicts with tenderness and fire, such as no other ancient poet could command, the passion of love? Better, far better, would it have been for him if he had never heard of Homer, and had never studied Theocritus. This great poet would then have been compelled to rely on his own resources, and would have produced works, different it may be, but far more striking and profound, than those we now possess.

The vigorous mind of Lucretius suffered but little from reliance on Greek models. But this was partly owing to the nature of his subject. A philosopher is assisted, his mind is enriched, by the speculations of his predecessors; and the fact of his writing in verse is but an accident which in no way detracts from the truth of this remark. His strength of mind and matchless powers of description make his poem one of the finest monuments in the Latin language. Catullus had so much sweetness and tenderness, a cast of thought at once so fiery and so natural, that even the study of the most laboured performances of Alexandrian pedants could not rob him of his spontaneity and freshness. With Horace the case is somewhat different. He was deeply read in the poets of Greece, and that course of study is visible in every line he wrote. But he had the wisdom to select as models only the sublimest passages of the noblest writers, and he adapted what he borrowed from them with such exquisite art to his Roman surroundings, that we may well ask whether he did not positively gain by having Pindar, Alcæus and Sappho constantly before him. Still, the result is artificial in a high degree, and the emotions that greater poets really feel, he too often only simulates.

If we except many tender passages from Tibullus, many picturesque passages from Ovid, and many vigorous passages from Lucan, Roman Poetry presents us for centuries with nothing but feeble echoes of Greek models, and those models too often the pedantic and lifeless productions of Alexandria. A genuine Roman Drama may be said never to have existed. Plautus and Terence are but pale reflections of the Attic comedies; the tragedies attributed to Seneca, the only specimens that have come down to us of Roman Tragedy, are but clumsy imitations, or rather travesties, of Sophocles and Euripides. In the declining ages of Roman Literature, Claudian was the only poet who showed genuine originality and freshness of thought, and he, strange to say, was an Alexandrian by birth, to whom the Latin language was not natural, but acquired.

I know of no other instance of a great nation, victorious and dominant over the whole civilised world, humbly sitting as a disciple at the feet of one of her captives, and that not only for a short time, but for the whole course of her intellectual development. Spain, in the Sixteenth Century, borrowed many of her literary fashions from Italy; England, in the Seventeenth Century, modelled her productions in many respects on France, as did Germany somewhat later; but these were merely transient fashions, not deep-rooted customs, and produced no very lasting effect. Rome was alone, and has been since, in her deference to a foreign model, nor can it be said in extenuation that she had only the choice of having poetry on that model or no poetry at all. She had plenty of indigenous material, and Niebuhr has well said that the true poetry of Rome must be found in her history and in her early legends rather than in the finished productions of her literary poets.

This is all the more remarkable, as her greatness was such that it could not fail to inspire even the least susceptible of minds. It made itself felt from the shores of the Baltic to the Persian Gulf, and is attested by ruins more substantial than the uninjured structures of feebler races. Such was its inherent strength, that it withstood the bloodiest civil wars and the most crushing despotism; nor is it easy to surmise what could have undermined it, had not the immigration of barbarian tribes from the mysterious and unexplored regions of the North given shock after shock to that stately system, the work of so many warriors and legislators. It may truly be said that the walls of Rome fell at the blast of the Gothic trumpet.

When Constantine removed the seat of Empire to Constantinople, he broke the spell that had for so many ages held the nations captive. The partition of the Empire into East and West finished what the removal began. Nor had Rome only the rivalry of Constantinople to dread. Milan, and then Ravenna, became the scene of Imperial splendour ind the centre of Imperial policy. Rome would, indeed, have been deserted but for her Bishop, who was gradually establishing for himself and his successors a dominion not less brilliant and more durable than that of the Cæsars.

When at last the old order of things had so completely collapsed that the phantom Emperor was no longer allowed to retain his phantom title, it must have been obvious to all thinking men that changes so far reaching had come over Italy as to make it almost another world. The invaders had mingled largely with the conquered nation, inter-marriages were frequent; and it must, in justice to the barbarians, be admitted that they rapidly assumed the manners, and, indeed, the thoughts, of civilisation. If we compare the Court of Theodoric to that of Honorius, or even to that of Valentinian III, the superiority of the Gothic ruler in statesmanship, and even in superficial attainments, is manifest. But wars and invasions desolated the unhappy country. Belisarius defeated the Goths and regained Sicily and the South of Italy for the Emperors of the East. Although the Byzantine dominion was not of long duration, traces of its existence may still be found in those regions by the curious. It must not be forgotten that the Goths introduced new blood into the country, and that every new invasion tended to modify, if not to alter, the national character of the Peninsula.

But while Italy was suffering for ages from the invasions of the Lombards, the Saracens, and the Normans, it must not be forgotten that she was steadily increasing in wealth, until, in the Thirteenth Century, she became the great money market of the world, and retained that position until shortly after the discovery of America. Wealth produced its usual effect of giving men ample leisure, and leisure created the demand for intellectual and artistic gratifications. Sicily was the favourite abode of the Emperor Frederick II, and at his brilliant Court poets were encouraged and minstrels rewarded. The Troubadours of Provence offered to Italy in noble verse that chivalric spirit of gallantry and love so congenial to the taste of the age. What the Italians so much admired, they naturally desired to emulate. But in order to do so they required a language capable of expressing thoughts with accuracy and adorning them with splendour. It is no exaggeration to say that from the decadence of the Latin language arose, not one tongue, but many dialects. These dialects were fostered by the division of the Peninsula into many principalities, townships, republics, and kingdoms. It was, therefore, incumbent upon the Italians to combine from existing materials a literary language. By a fortunate coincidence, the most gifted writers arose in Tuscany, where the most promising of these dialects was spoken. Thus it happened that the Tuscan idiom became the standard for literary composition. It was felt, even by the least discerning, that the Latin language, no longer the living property of the nation, was not suited to express the inspirations of contemporary poets, however advantageously it might be retained for legal, theological, and historical works.

At the end of the Thirteenth Century, Guinicelli of Bologna and Cavalcanti of Florence gave greater finish and regularity, more scholarly perfection, and more literary merit to that style of amorous poetry which they, in common with their contemporaries, so greatly admired in the Troubadours. Even in prose, valuable works were produced. The Chronicle of Dino Compagni has many passages deserving the highest praise. Those writers were worthy predecessors of the poet who was to give the Divine Comedy to the world, and first among the moderns was to equal, if, indeed, he did not in some respects excel, the greatest poets of antiquity.

[CHAPTER II.]

DANTE.

Durante (a name afterwards called for shortness Dante) was born in Florence in the month of May, 1265, the son of Aldighiero Aldighieri and Bella, his wife. "Of his ancestors, this much is evident through the mists of a very nebulous antiquity," says Symonds, in his Introduction to the Study of Dante, "that they were well-placed among the citizens of Florence, and it seems that their primitive name was not Aldighieri, but Elisei. Tradition differs about the origin of the Elisei. Some of Dante's biographers trace them to Roman colonists of Florence in the time of Julius Cæsar. Others, and these are the majority, derive them from one Eliseo, of the noble Roman house of Frangipani, or bread-breakers—so called by reason of some eminent act of public charity—who is said to have settled at Florence in the days of Charlemagne, or soon after. In any case, the Elisei were honourable in Florence, possessing castles in the country round and towered houses in the city. They dwelt within the old Pomoerium, or primitive walled circuit, in the Via degli Speziali, near the Mercato Vecchio; this in itself was a sign of ancient blood. Dante prided himself upon his descent from the purest blood of Florentine citizens. The change in the name of Dante's family from Elisei to Aldighieri took place thus: Cacciaguida degli Elisei, who was born in 1106, married Aldighiera degli Aldigheri of Ferrara, and he had a son by her whom he called Aldighiero. This son gave his Christian name to his descendants, whilst a brother of Cacciaguida continued the line and name of the Elisei. Cacciaguida followed Conrad III to the Crusades in 1147, was knighted by him, and died, at the age of forty-two, in the Holy Land."

The poet introduces this ancestor in one of the finest passages of the Paradiso.

Dante was educated by Brunetto Latini, the author of a curious poem, entitled the Tesoro, in which the germ of many thoughts of the Divine Comedy may be traced. He was subsequently placed by his grateful pupil in the centre of Hell. Dante possessed a thorough knowledge of the science of his day, and we may give his instructor credit for having carefully developed the brilliant abilities of his pupil. He is said to have studied music and to have shown decided skill in painting.

His father died when he was nine or ten years of age. Shortly before his death, he introduced his son to Folco Portinari, a rich citizen of Florence, and to his daughter, Beatrice, who was his first, and probably his only, love. Although but a child, he was struck by her beauty. "Her dress on that day," he says, "was of a most noble colour, a subdued and goodly crimson, girdled and adorned as best suited with her very tender age." Beatrice died when Dante was in his twenty-sixth year, and the blow was so great that it was long before he was comforted by philosophy and study. She became, in his mind, the personification of everything great and noble. In the Divine Comedy she appears as his guide from the summit of Purgatory to Paradise.

In 1292, he married Gemma Donati, by whom he had seven children. Thus, it can hardly have been an unhappy marriage; but as she did not follow him into exile, and as he never mentions her in any of his extant letters, we may suppose there was no very ardent affection on either side.

The latter part of Dante's life was destined to be marked with many sorrows and disasters. He was dragged into the vortex of faction and civil war, and was wrecked with many less noteworthy mariners.

He was made Prior of Florence in 1300, and so eminent was he that he was appointed one of the four ambassadors who were sent to Pope Boniface Viii to complain of the French intervention under Charles of Valois. Before they returned, Charles had entered Florence; Dante and his companions were outlawed, his property was confiscated, his house pillaged, and he never again was suffered to return to the city of his birth.

Tradition says, and I think it is supported by the internal evidence of the poem, that he wrote the first seven cantos of the Inferno in Florence before his exile, and that the beginning of the eighth canto:

"Io dico, seguitando,"

is a proof that the poem was continued after having been laid aside for a time, otherwise the word "seguitando" would be unnecessary to the sense, and it is not in Dante's style to admit unnecessary words into his lines. If this reasoning hold good, we can determine pretty accurately the date of the Divine Comedy. The poet feigns that he descended into the infernal regions on Good Friday of the year 1300; his exile began in 1301; therefore, the latter part of 1300 very probably saw him write the first seven cantos of the work. In the sixth canto there is an allusion to his exile, and to the defeat of his party; but that may have been inserted afterwards.

Cruel was the blow that fell upon him, doubly cruel after so many years of prosperity and honour. He had to consort with unworthy companions; he had to eat the bitter bread of dependence; he was severed from those whom he loved most dearly; and, as he makes Cacciaguida foretell in Paradise, "this was the first arrow with which the bow of exile struck him."

"Tu lascerai ogni cosa diletta
Più caramente; e questo è quello strale
Che l'arco dell esilio pria saetta."

The reader may peruse in the seventeenth canto of the Paradiso, his concise and pathetic account of the sorrows of his later years. Clad in the form of prophecy, it constitutes one of the grandest passages in the whole poem. Some letters, written during his exile, are still extant and breathe a spirit so lofty that versification alone is wanting to equal them to his sublimest inspirations. Amid all the troubles of his eventful life, he still found leisure to study, meditate, and write, and when he died in Ravenna in 1321, the first great poem of modern times was completed.

"Many volumes have been written," says Carlyle, "by way of commentary on Dante and his book; yet, on the whole, with no great result. His biography is, as it were, irrecoverably lost for us. An unimportant, wandering, sorrow-stricken man, not much note was taken of him while he lived; and the most of that has vanished, in the long space that now intervenes. It is five centuries since he ceased writing and living here. After all commentaries, the Book itself is mainly what we know of him. The Book, and one might add, that Portrait commonly attributed to Giotto, which, looking on it, you cannot help inclining to think genuine, whoever did it. To me it is a most touching face; perhaps of all faces that I know, the most so. Lonely there, painted as on vacancy, with the simple laurel wound round it; the deathless sorrow and pain, the known victory which is also deathless; significant of the whole history of Dante. I think it is the mournfullest face that ever was painted from reality; an altogether tragic, heart-affecting face. There is in it, as foundation of it, the softness, tenderness, gentle affection as of a child; but all this is as if congealed into sharp contradiction, into abnegation, isolation, proud, hopeless pain. A soft, ethereal soul, looking out so stern, implacable, grim, trenchant, as from imprisonment of thick-ribbed ice. Withal it is a silent pain, too, a silent, scornful one; the lip is curled in a kind of god-like disdain of the thing that is eating out his heart, as if it were withal a mean insignificant thing, as if he whom it had power to torture and strangle, were greater than it. The face of one wholly in protest, and life-long unsurrendering battle against the world. Affection all converted into indignation; slow, equable, silent, like that of a god. The eye, too, it looks out as in a kind of surprise, a kind of inquiry, why the world was of such a sort? This is Dante, so he looks, this 'voice of ten silent centuries,' and sing us his 'mystic, unfathomable song.'"

Dante is one of those authors who concentrate all their greatness in one stupendous work. The Vita Nuova has many beauties, the Convito deserves to be read, the Latin Treatises offer numerous points of interest, but it is only in the Divina Commedia that he rises to the height of his sublimity. He was singularly judicious, both in the choice of his subject and in the form of his verse. The Terza Rima carries the reader onwards in its progress, calmly, nobly, irresistibly. Had the work been written in prose, it would not have commanded the attention of future ages, so great is the embalming power of verse. A fine prose work may be neglected in the course of ages; a fine poetical work, never. Had the work been written in Latin verse, as indeed it was begun, it would only be a study for the curious and not a possession for all humanity.

The vivid power of Dante's imagination, the intense and rugged strength of his thoughts, and the graphic realism with which he presents the scenes of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven to his readers, are above praise and can find no parallel in the works of other poets. Milton surpasses him in sustained grandeur, but in picturesqueness the English poet does not attempt to rival the Florentine.

Dante's Poem is so well known that it is needless to insist upon particular beauties. All cultivated readers are familiar with them, if not in the original, at least in translations. If any fault is to be found in the poem, it is that it somewhat falls off; the Purgatorio is not quite so fine as the Inferno; the Paradiso, not quite so fine as the Purgatorio. The poet sometimes has an unfortunate tendency only to hint at the histories of the spirits he meets, so that we are indebted to his commentators rather than to himself for stories worthy to be chronicled in immortal verse. His style is not always free from coarseness on the one hand, and from obscurity on the other. But in so noble an achievement it would be mean to dwell on occasional blemishes, instead of being grateful to the poet who has presented us with a work, perhaps in many respects, the noblest production of the human mind.

As a specimen of Dante's Poem, I quote the last canto of the Inferno, in Cary's translation. The reader will notice the curious passage that seems to prove that Dante was aware, four hundred years before Newton, of the law of gravitation:

CANTO XXXIV.
"The banners of Hell's Monarch do come forth
Towards us; therefore look," so spake my guide,
"If thou discern him." As when breathes a cloud
Heavy and dense, or when the shades of night
Fall on our hemisphere, seems view'd from far
A windmill, which the blast stirs briskly round,
Such was the fabric then methought I saw.
To shield me from the wind, forthwith I drew
Behind my guide: no covert else was there.
Now came I (and with fear I bid my strain
Record the marvel) where the souls were all
Whelmed underneath, transparent, as through glass
Pellucid the frail stem. Some prone were laid,
Others stood upright, this upon the soles,
That on his head, a third with face to feet
Arched like a bow. When to the point we came
Whereat my guide was pleas'd that I should see
The creature eminent in beauty once,
He from before me stepp'd and made me pause.
"Lo!" he exclaimed, "lo Dis! and lo the place
Where thou hast need to arm thy heart with
strength."
How frozen and how faint I then became,
Ask me not, reader! for I write it not,
Since words would fail to tell thee of my state.
I was not dead nor living. Think thyself,
If quick conception work in thee at all,
How I did feel. That Emperor who sways
The Realm of Sorrow, at mid breast from th' ice
Stood forth; and I in stature am more like
A giant, than the giants are his arms.
Mark now how great that whole must be, which suits
With such a part. If he were beautiful
As he is hideous now, and yet did dare
To scowl upon his Maker, well from him
May all our misery flow. Oh what a sight!
How passing strange it seem'd when I did spy
Upon his head three faces: one in front
Of hue vermilion, th' other two with this
Midway each shoulder join'd and at the crest;
The right 'twixt wan and yellow seem'd: the left
To look on, such as come from whence old Nile
Stoops to the lowlands. Under each shot forth
Two mighty wings, enormous as became
A bird so vast. Sails never such I saw
Outstretch'd on the wide sea. No plumes had they,
But were in texture like a bat, and these
He flapp'd i' th' air, that from him issued still
Three winds, wherewith Cocytus to its depth
Was frozen. At six eyes he wept; the tears
Adown three chins distill'd with bloody foam.
At every mouth his teeth a sinner champ'd
Bruis'd as with pond'rous engine, so that three
Were in this guise tormented. But far more
Than from that gnawing, was the foremost pang'd
By the fierce rending, whence ofttimes the back
Was stript of all its skin. "That upper spirit,
Who hath worse punishment," so spake my guide,
"Is Judas, he that hath his head within
And plies the feet without. Of th' other two,
Whose heads are under, from the murky jaw
Who hangs, is Brutus: lo! how he doth writhe
And speaks not! Th' other Cassius, that appears
So large of limb. But night now re-ascends,
And it is time for parting. All is seen."
I clipp'd him round the neck, for so he bade;
And noting time and place, he, when the wings
Enough were op'd, caught fast the shaggy sides,
And down from pile to pile descending stept
Between the thick fell and the jagged ice.
Soon as he reached the point whereat the thigh
Upon the swelling of the haunches turns,
My leader there with pain and struggling hard
Turn'd round his head, where his feet stood before,
And grappled at the fell, as one who mounts,
That into hell methought we turned again.
"Expect that by such stairs as these," thus spake
The teacher, panting like a man forespent,
"We must depart from evil so extreme."
Then at a rocky opening issued forth,
And placed me on a brink to sit, next join'd
With wary step my side. I raised mine eyes,
Believing that I Lucifer should see
Where he was lately left, but saw him now
With legs held upward. Let the grosser sort,
Who see not what the point was I had pass'd,
Bethink them if sore toil oppress'd me then.
"Arise," my master cried, "upon thy feet.
The way is long, and much uncouth the road;
And now within one hour and half of noon
The sun returns." It was no palace hall
Lofty and luminous wherein we stood.
But natural dungeon where ill footing was
And scant supply of light. "Ere from th' abyss
I sep'rate," thus when risen I began,
"My guide! vouchsafe few words to set me free
From error's thraldom. Where is now the ice?
How standeth he in posture thus reversed?
And how from eve to morn in space so brief
Hath the sun made his transit?" He in few
Thus answering spake: "Thou deemest thou art still
On th' other side the centre, where I grasp'd
Th' abhorred worm, that boreth through the world.
Thou wast on th' other side so long as I
Descended; when I turn'd, thou didst o'erpass
That point, to which from every part is dragg'd
All heavy substance. Thou art now arriv'd
Under the hemisphere opposed to that,
Which the great continent doth overspread,
And underneath whose canopy expir'd
The Man, that was born sinless, and so liv'd.
Thy feet are planted on the smallest sphere,
Whose other aspect is Judecca. Morn
Here rises, when there evening sets: and he,
Whose shaggy pile was scal'd, yet standeth fix'd,
As at the first. On this part he fell down
From heav'n; and th' earth, here prominent before,
Through fear of him did veil her with the sea,
And to our hemisphere retir'd. Perchance
To shun him was the vacant space left here
By what of firm land on this side appears,
That sprang aloof." There is a place beneath,
From Belzebub as distant, as extends
The vaulted tomb, discover'd not by sight,
But by the sound of brooklet, that descends
This way along the hollow of a rock,
Which, as it winds with no impetuous course,
The wave hath eaten. By that hidden way
My guide and I did enter, to return
To the fair world: and heedless of repose
We climb'd, he first, I following his steps,
Till on our view the beauteous lights of heav'n
Dawn'd through a circular opening in the cave.
Thence issuing we again beheld the stars.

[CHAPTER III.]

PETRARCH.

Unlike the life of Dante, of which so few particulars have come down to us that our curiosity is rather excited than satisfied by the information we possess, the life of Petrarch is illustrated in its minutest details by extracts from his works and correspondence.

Francesco Petrarca was born at Arezzo on the twentieth of July, 1304. His family originally came from the little village of Ancisa, fifteen miles from Florence, but for many years his ancestors had been settled in that city. His father, Pietro di Parenzo, was familiarly called Petracco, in Latin, Petracchus, whence his son was designated "Petracchi filius," and thus the poet evolved the more euphonious name of Petrarca. His father was a Notary Public, and seems to have held some responsible posts, but he belonged to the party of the "Bianchi," and was exiled in 1302 with Dante and many others. His property was confiscated, and he never returned to the city of his birth. In 1313, he went with his wife and children to Avignon, where the Popes then held their court. He sent his children to the quieter neighbourhood of Carpentras, and there, under an able master, Petrarch studied Latin, and the acquaintance of the ancient writers kindled him in an enthusiasm that only ended with his life. He was destined for the study of the law, and in 1318 he went to Montpellier, and in 1322 to Bologna, but he felt little inclination for this science, and on the death of his father in 1326 he returned to Avignon and devoted himself to literature and society.

His name is inseparably connected with that of Laura, and it was on Good Friday of the year 1327 that he met her for the first time.

"Era il giorno, ch'ai Sol si scoloraro
Per la pietà del suo Fattore i rai,
Quando i' fuipreso, e non me ne guardai,
Che i he' vostr' occhi, Donna, mi legaro."
Sonnet 3.

From the researches of her descendant, the Abbé de Sade, there can be no doubt that Laura was the wife of Hugo de Sade, and the daughter of Audibert de Noves. She died in 1348 of the Black Death, which was then devastating Europe, and her loss inspired the poet with some of his noblest effusions. The attachment was perfectly platonic, nor does it seem to have excited any adverse comments among his contemporaries, for similar homage had been paid by poetry to beauty from the first appearance of the Troubadours.

Petrarch was fortunate in acquiring the friendship and favour of some of the most eminent men of his time. Jacopo Colonna, Bishop of Lombés, invited him to his palace at the foot of the Pyrenees. He gratified his intense desire to see the world by travelling through France and Germany, and subsequently visiting many cities of Italy. In Rome he was welcomed by Stefano Colonna, the head of that illustrious family, but Rome was then deserted and lonely, and Petrarch soon returned to the more brilliant circles of Avignon. He found a delicious retreat fifteen miles from Avignon, at Vaucluse, a pleasant valley, watered by the river Sorga. Here he produced some of his loveliest Italian poems, and some of his most elaborate Latin compositions. So uncertain are the vicissitudes of literary taste, and so little do even great poets know where their real strength lies, that Petrarch treated his sonnets and canzoni, to which alone he is indebted for his immortality, as the amusement of his leisure hours, and devoted all his care and study to those Latin works which are now read only by the curious. He composed a ponderous epic poem in Latin hexameters, and gave it to the world under the title of Africa. It procured for him an immense reputation. The whole literary world read it with avidity, and all Europe resounded with his praises. Paris and Rome simultaneously invited him to be crowned with the laurel within their walls. He decided to accept the invitation of Rome; but before the ceremony he went to Naples, where he was received with enthusiasm by King Robert, who was so enraptured with the Africa that he begged it should be dedicated to himself. This request the poet gladly granted, and he left for Rome laden with signs of Royal favour. He was crowned in the Capitol by the Senator Orso dell' Anguillara, on the 8th of April, 1341, and the laurel wreath bestowed upon him he hung up as a votive offering in the Church of St. Peter.

Petrarch was one of those who succeed in everything; and, as if the distinctions already showered upon him were not enough, he was, when visiting Parma, invited to the Court by Azzo da Correggio, and within a short time sent as his envoy to Clement VI at Avignon. He wrote a Latin poem advising the Pope to return to Rome, and his Holiness, though he did not take the advice, was so delighted with the poem that he bestowed a valuable benefice on its author.

From the end of May, 1342, until September, 1343, Petrarch resided chiefly at Vaucluse, with occasional visits to Avignon. He was occupied writing his work, De Contemptu Mundi, and studying Greek under Barlaam, who was one of those emigrants from Greece willing to impart their language to the few desirous of acquiring it. No more zealous disciple could have been found than Petrarch. He spent large sums, like his friend, Boccaccio, in collecting manuscripts, and he even copied many rare works with his own hand. He seems to have been in possession of some productions of classical writers, which were subsequently lost during the interval between his death and the invention of printing.

When Rome rose against the tyranny of the noble houses, Colonna and Orsini, and when Cola di Rienzi proclaimed himself the Tribune of the People, Petrarch's imagination took fire, and he hailed the deliverer in prose and verse. Cardinal Colonna was deeply offended at his taking the part of one whom he regarded as a rebel and a traitor. This diversity of opinion seems to have induced him to leave the Papal Court, and for some years he resided in various towns of Italy. He was in Parma, where he had just received a valuable benefice attached to the Cathedral, when he heard of the death of his beloved Laura. The blow was terrible, and he long refused to be comforted. But if he lost his love, he gained a friend, for in the year of Jubilee, 1350, on his way to Rome, he made the acquaintance of Boccaccio at Florence. This was his first visit to the Tuscan city, and the Florentines offered to restore his father's confiscated property, on condition that he should lecture at their newly-founded University. But this he refused, and nothing came of the offer. For many years he lived in Milan, the favoured guest of the Visconti. There is a pretty story of Galleazzo Visconti telling his little son in jest, at a brilliant entertainment he was giving, to find out the wisest man present, and to bring him forward. The child looked at the assembled company, and then went up to Petrarch and led him to his father, to the admiration of all beholders. "So clearly," says Schopenhauer, who quotes the anecdote, "does Nature stamp the greatness of the mind on the countenance, that even a child can perceive it."

Petrarch was sent by the Visconti to Prague, as envoy to the Emperor Charles IV, and afterwards in the same capacity to King John of France. He subsequently resided in Padua and Venice, and in 1370 he retired to the village of Arqua, in the Euganean mountains, where he was destined to pass the remainder of his days. He was found on the morning of the 18th of July, 1374, dead in his library, with his head resting on a book.

The host of imitators who, without a spark of Petrarch's genius, mimicked his mannerisms for centuries, produced at last the inevitable reaction, and of recent years many censors have insisted on his faults, while ignoring his beauties. But Petrarch was assuredly one of the greatest lyric poets that ever lived. The melody of his sonnets and the splendour of his odes are unrivalled in the literature of his country, nor did any Italian lyrist rise to an equal height until in the Nineteenth Century Leopardi combined inspiration no less ardent with a style more natural, simple and direct. Petrarch is one of those poets who present nothing to their readers in a sharp and graphic style, but everything involved in a rich haze of trope and metaphor. From this tendency, it cannot be denied, he becomes occasionally artificial and forced, but he is far more frequently soul-stirring and magnificent. Unlike Dante, whose chief inspirers were hatred and indignation, he is prompted by love and reverence: love for his country and for Laura, and reverence for all that is noble and heroic. His sublime ode, Spirto gentil, addressed to Rienzi, rouses the spirit like a trumpet, even after the lapse of so many centuries. How noble is the invocation to the heroes of ancient Rome: "O grandi Scipioni! O fedel Bruto!" And the conclusion is superb:

"Sopra il monte Tarpeo, Canzon, vedrai,
Un cavalier[1] ch' Italia tutta onora,
Pensoso più d'altrui che di sè stesso.
Digli: Un che non ti vide ancor da presso,
Se non come per fama uom s'innamora,
Dice che Roma ogni ora,
Con gli occhi di dolor bagnati e molli
Ti chier mercè da tutti sette i colli."

Magnificent is the Ode to Italy, Italia Mia, and even superior, if possible, is the poem addressed to Giacomo Colonna in favour of another Crusade. Marvellous in their delicate beauty are the Odes addressed to Laura, In quella parte dov' Amor mi sprona, and, Di pensier in pensier, di monte in monte. But to enumerate the poems in which extraordinary beauties are to be found would be to enumerate nearly the whole collection. The tenderness and fire, the melody and richness of his style are equalled by no poet in any language unless it be by Tennyson in his finest lyric effusions, especially in the In Memoriam.

That Petrarch brought the Sonnet to the highest point of perfection is universally allowed, and to those readers who wish to enter into the details of the subject, I can recommend The Sonnet, its origin and history, by Charles Tomlinson.

Dante was altogether a man of the Middle Ages, dwelling upon the past, and scarcely bestowing a thought upon the future; but Petrarch was in many respects surprisingly modern, and both in his Latin Prose and in his Italian Verse we can find many passages instinct with the fire of hope and the belief in progress.

[1] Rienzi.

[CHAPTER IV.]

BOCCACCIO AND THE PROSE WRITERS OF THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY.

Giovanni Boccaccio was born in 1313 in Paris, the son of a Florentine merchant and a French-woman. His father had property in the hamlet of Certaldo, and the author always signed himself "Boccaccio da Certaldo." He was destined, first for commerce, then for the study of the law, but finding neither avocation congenial, he after his father's death, devoted himself entirely to his favourite pursuits. He was honoured with the favour of King Robert of Naples and with the love of the King's daughter, Maria, whom he celebrates in his poems under the name of Fiammetta. His zeal for the writers of antiquity was not inferior to that of Petrarch. He sent for Leontius Pilatus to teach him Greek. He devoted large sums to the purchase and reproduction of the works of classical writers. He seems to have been an amiable and honourable man, free alike from pride like that of Dante, and from vanity like that of Petrarch. He repented in later years of the somewhat frivolous character of many of his writings, took holy orders, and spent the last days of his life at Certaldo. When Florence endowed a chair for the explanation of the Divine Comedy, Boccaccio was the first to be appointed. He wrote a life of Dante and began a commentary on the Inferno, which, however, he did not live to finish, dying at Certaldo on the 21st of December, 1375.

Boccaccio was a most fertile writer, both in Latin and in Italian. His Latin works have but little merit and are vastly inferior to those of Petrarch in strength and originality of thought. His Italian poems are heavy and uninteresting, but he has the credit of inventing the "Ottava Rima," the stanza in which Ariosto and Tasso subsequently wrote their immortal epics. Praise-worthy as these works were for the time in which they were written, he would not occupy a high position in the literature of his country, had he not proved himself in other productions to be the first great writer of Italian prose. His romantic stories, Il Filocopo, La Fiammetta, l'Admeto, are written in a flowing and pleasing style; his Life of Dante and Commentary on the Inferno are valuable for the information they impart, but the crowning glory of his literary career is the collection of stories published under the title of Il Decamerone.

The terrible plague that swept over the earth in the middle of the Thirteenth Century, known in history as the "Black Death,"[1] ravaged Florence with peculiar malignity, and Boccaccio feigns that five ladies and their cavaliers took refuge in a villa in the neighbourhood and beguiled their leisure by telling stories to each other. Being a collection of tales told by various characters, the Decamerone bears a certain resemblance to another memorable work of the Fourteenth Century, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, but happier than his great contemporary, Boccaccio lived to complete his design.

The work opens with a noble description of the Plague of Florence, but this gloomy and terrible introduction gives no forecast of the light, festive and occasionally indecorous character of many of the tales. Others, however, are highly picturesque and even poetical, and some have a special interest for English readers as being the sources whence Shakespeare drew All's Well that Ends Well, and Cymbeline,—Dryden, Theodore and Honoria and Sigismonda and Guiscardo, and Keats Isabella, or the Pot of Basil.

Boccaccio had every quality of a great novelist. His style is varied, flexible and animated, and his idiom is so purely Tuscan that it was held up as a standard by the Accademia della Crusca, and if any fault can be found with it, it is that the copiousness of his vocabulary sometimes leads him into florid and redundant amplifications. His characters are drawn with considerable skill. His dialogue is invariably natural and appropriate. His incidents, though sometimes overstepping the limits of decorum, are ingenious and entertaining. The work gives a brilliant panorama of the men and manners of Italy in the Fourteenth Century.

No writer has derived more advantage from the admiration of other writers than Boccaccio. Great poets are indebted to him for the plots of some of their most successful works. Great painters have vied with each other in illustrating the brilliant scenes of his Decamerone. Great philologians and grammarians have expressed their admiration for the purity and elegance of his style. Brilliant as his services were to the literature of his country, they have received a more than ample measure of reward from the gratitude of posterity.

Italy produced in the Fourteenth Century many other prose writers of note, though none so eminent as Boccaccio.

First and foremost we must mention the invaluable Chronicle of Giovanni Villani. This historian rose in the service of the Florentine Republic until he became Prior. He was one of the many victims of the Black Death, and his unfinished work was continued by his brother Matteo, and this continuation was completed by Matteo's son, Filippo. All these are quoted as classics by the Accademia della Crusca. According to competent judges, Giovanni was the most brilliant, Matteo the most noteworthy for the important events he narrates, and Filippo remarkable rather for industry and research than for ability as a writer.

The Travels of Marco Polo, a Venetian, were an inestimable contribution to the knowledge of remote countries. For centuries he lay very unjustly under the suspicion of falsehood and exaggeration, and it was only at a comparatively recent date that his veracity, nay, his scrupulous exactness, received a tardy vindication.

Jacopo Passavanti, a Dominican. Friar, wrote a devotional book, entitled, Lo Specchio della Penitenza, written in prose so musical and flowing as to be preferred by some to the prose of Boccaccio, because Passavanti never indulges in the over-elaboration sometimes to be detected in the pages of the Decamerone.

Giovanni Da Catignano known in the Calendar as the Blessed John of the Cells, after a dissolute youth was converted by the ardent exhortations of the Abbot of Vallombrosa, and in deep contrition ended his days as a hermit. Some letters from this interesting penitent are extant, written in a style so exquisitely Tuscan that they are quoted by the Accademia della Crusca as models of propriety and elegance.

Another canonized celebrity, Saint Catherine of Siena, is no less remarkable for the beauty of her style than for the beauty of her character.

A Life of Saint Francis of Assisi, entitled Fioretti di San Francesco, has been highly praised for the freshness and simplicity of the language. The piety or the modesty of the author induced him to conceal his identity.

These religious writers, though treating of subjects so different, almost equalled Boccaccio in perfection of style, but the two authors who produced collections of stories somewhat similar to his, Franco Sacchetti and Ser Giovanni Fiorentino, were very far indeed from approaching his mastery.

On reviewing the literary development of Italy in the Fourteenth Century, we find that the language attained the fullest perfection both in prose and verse, only the lighter kinds of poetry remaining uncultivated. The appearance in one century of two such great poets as Dante and Petrarch was quite phenomenal and threw a lustre over the age which has attracted the whole world. But another fact, less universally known, is equally worthy of attention, namely the extraordinary merit of the prose writers of the period. It may well be doubted whether any compositions in Italian prose of a later date exhibit the rare qualities of those of the Fourteenth Century. Leopardi, indeed, produced marvels of style, but they were the result of art and study, whereas the writers of the Fourteenth Century display an ease and a simplicity, a freshness and a graphic power, combined with the most exquisite lightness and harmony in their phrases, that must ever render them more admirable models than the artificial and laborious productions of later ages.

[1] For details on the subject of this most terrible pestilence, probably the worst that ever afflicted humanity, we may refer the reader to Father Gasquet's valuable and interesting work on the subject.

[CHAPTER V.]

WRITERS OF THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY.

In striking contrast to the Fourteenth Century, the Fifteenth is conspicuous for a great dearth of eminent authors. The same may be noticed in the literary development of England. After the brilliant apparition of Chaucer, more than a hundred years elapsed before an eminent writer arose. This may be partly accounted for by the Civil Wars which devastated the island and brought misery and anarchy in their train. Widely different was the plight of Italy. There were wars and disturbances, it is true, but the wealth of the country became more enormous than ever, and great princes extended munificent patronage to science and learning. But all intellectual energies were directed, not to the cultivation of the Italian language, but to the study of the writers of antiquity. Greek and Latin were alone held in estimation, the vulgar tongue was contemptuously neglected.

The only eminent prose writer was Feo Belcari, a Florentine magistrate, who wrote the Lives of the Blessed Giovanni Colombini and other Friars, and who reproduced the beauty and elegance of the best authors of the Fourteenth Century. He died at an advanced age in 1484.

Leon Battista Alberti was a universal genius. He distinguished himself as painter, sculptor and architect, but his Italian writings would hardly be of sufficient importance to mention, had not the dearth of names in this barren century made historians of literature thankful for any means of filling up the blank.

Leonardo Da Vinci wrote a Treatise on Painting, and he impressed upon all artists the necessity of being original, and of not copying their predecessors. It would have been well if the writers of the age had laid this injunction to heart as well as the painters, for as years advanced, the servile imitation of conventional forms became more and more the bane of Italian literature.

Pulci is celebrated for his mock-heroic poem, the Morgante Maggiore. The giant Morgante is the hero, but we also make the acquaintance of Orlando, Rinaldo, Charlemagne, and many other characters that appear in the more famous poems of Bojardo and Ariosto. It was unfortunate for Pulci that he had such great successors. He had abundance of wit and originality, but he had neither the poetical imagination of Bojardo nor the magic style of Ariosto, so that it is no cause for astonishment that he fell into neglect.

Matteo Bojardo, Count of Scandiano, was born in 1430 and died in 1494. He was favoured by nature and fortune; a soldier and a statesman, he had every opportunity of enriching his mind with varied experiences, nor can we say that those opportunities were neglected. His Orlando Innamorato, which he did not live to finish, long as it is, displays great wealth of imagination and considerable creative power; but unfortunately, his style is heavy and rough, and was completely eclipsed by the extraordinary merits of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, which professes to be only a continuation of the earlier poem. Fifty years later, Berni entirely re-wrote Bojardo's work and certainly succeeded in giving it greater elegance, but he did not make it more interesting to modern readers. In truth, the knights of the epic cycle beginning with the Morgante Maggiore and ending in the Eighteenth Century with the Ricciardetto, appear terribly uninteresting in the present day, and it requires the picturesque and melodious style of a really great poet like Ariosto to entice the reader through the account of their numerous adventures.

The celebrated scholar, Angelo Poliziano, shows a poetical mind in his poems, and his Orfeo may claim the credit of being the first dramatic work of any literary value in the Italian language. It has many lyric beauties and the choruses are spirited.[1]

His poem in Ottava Rima on a tournament given by Giniano de Medici, was interrupted by the tragic death of his patron in the conspiracy organised by the Pazzi family, nor was the loss of the remainder of the poem the least deplorable consequence of that great crime. Politian died in the prime of life in 1494. It is reasonable to suppose that if his years had been prolonged, he might have enriched the literature of his country with works of even greater beauty.

A poet of true tenderness and fire, but more remarkable for the extraordinary perfection of his Latin poems than for any other productions of his muse, was Jacopo Sannazzaro, a Neapolitan. He survived until the year 1530, but his Italian poems are the productions of his youth. His Arcadia, a pastoral romance in prose with poems interspersed, acquired a great celebrity and undoubtedly served as model to Sir Philip Sydney's work of the same name. It is tender and graceful, but the extreme unreality of the Nymphs and Shepherds makes it rather cloying to a modern taste. His Italian poems have not nearly so much melody and fire as those he wrote in Latin, which are, indeed, so perfect that they cannot be distinguished, as far as rhythm is concerned, from those of Virgil himself.

These names practically exhaust the band of Italian writers of the Fifteenth Century, truly a meagre list, and in striking contrast to the countless painters who were an ornament to their country during the same period.

[1] The Chorus from the Orfeo—

"Noi seguiamo, Bacco, te;
Bacco, Bacco, evoè, evoè!"

is quoted by George Eliot in Romola.

[CHAPTER VI.]

ARIOSTO.

The Sixteenth Century had not seen many years before the world was presented with one of the most celebrated works in the Italian Language, a poem destined to acquire a reputation hardly inferior to that of Dante's great work, the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto.

Ludovico Ariosto was born at Reggio in Lombardy on the eighth of September, 1474. His father was attached to the Court of Ferrara, and he himself entered the services of Cardinal Ippolito d'Esté, brother to the Duke, but in what capacity is not accurately known. To the Cardinal he dedicated his great work, but received no thanks for the homage. He fell into complete disgrace by refusing to accompany his patron to Hungary. He then tried his luck with the reigning Duke, who was more generous than his kinsman, and who appointed the poet Governor of Garfagnana, a remote province of the Duchy, infested by brigands. He retained this post for three years, and brought the province into such excellent order that he acquired the love and esteem of the whole district.

When he returned to Ferrara, he enjoyed the highest consideration and favour of the Duke, who took great pleasure in the representation of his comedies. He was clandestinely married to a Florentine lady, by whom, however, he had no children. It is supposed that secrecy was kept in order to preserve some ecclesiastical revenues assigned to his share by the Cardinal. From previous connections he had two sons, on whom the Duke conferred patents of legitimacy. His descendants acquired considerable opulence, and became one of the first families of Ferrara. His son Orazio made himself remarkable by declaring, when the question of Torquato Tasso's superior genius roused the attention of Italy, that both poets had their particular beauties, for which opinion he was fiercely attacked by the zealots in his father's cause. In the Eighteenth Century, a Marquis Ariosto was intimate with Voltaire at Brussels. The last descendant of the poet, the Countess Ariosto, died at Ferrara in 1878, at the age of ninety years.

Ariosto gives us in his Satires with rare candour a picture of his mind and of the vicissitudes of his life. He was of a buoyant and open disposition, fond of pleasure and susceptible to the attractions of love, but faithful and sincere to his friends, and very generous to his numerous brothers and sisters. Titian was among his friends, and the great painter has preserved for us the features of the great poet. Curious anecdotes are told of his absence of mind when plunged in thought. Once he went through the streets of Ferrara in his dressing-gown, and was not aware of his apparel until an acquaintance accosted him and told him of the fact. He built himself a little house, and placed a Latin inscription over the entrance, and when someone remarked that it was very small for one who had described such splendid edifices in his verses, he made answer that fabrics of the imagination are erected with little, and those of stone and mortar, with great, cost. His death, the result of indigestion, owing to the rapidity with which he took his meals in order to return to his studies, took place in 1533.

Fully to appreciate the genius of Ariosto we must understand the spirit of his age, for in him were developed, more fully than in any other writer of the period, the qualities, moral and intellectual, that gave their stamp to the memorable epoch of the Renaissance. The taste, the love of beauty, the classical simplicity, the vivid imagination, the ethereal lightness of touch characterising the productions of the great contemporary painters, are united in as high perfection in the verse of Ariosto as on their canvas and frescoes. He had, with the merits of his age, also its shortcomings: the want of moral elevation, the frivolity, and the absence of religious enthusiasm.

He was, therefore, unfitted to be an heroic poet in the stiff old conventional style, and it was not until he had tried and abandoned many subjects chat he discovered himself to be something infinitely more striking and original. At last he discovered in the subject that inspired Pulci and Bojardo, an inexhaustible mine of poetry, and he took up the thread of narrative where Bojardo's unfinished poem had left it, and produced one of the greatest masterpieces in the whole range of literature.

He is matchless in the ease and clearness of his style, which never flags for one moment in the forty-six cantos of the work. He is said to have written with the greatest care, and to have corrected much and erased not a little. The stanza in the first canto:

"La verginella è simile alla rosa,"

he wrote nine times before he was satisfied. Galileo confessed that he owed the lucidity of his style to the assiduous study of Ariosto, but accused him of introducing verses for the sake of the rhyme; but we may pardon an occasional blemish in a work of such immense length.

He tells us himself that he saturated his mind with the spirit of the Latin poets, especially with Catullus, and in his works we find the urbanity of the Augustan age united to a strength and vivacity of imagination unknown to the Romans. With great judgement he improved on the hints they gave him, and the graceful manner in which he occasionally introduces mythological allusions seems to have been Milton's model when he did the same. Although he rates Virgil's flattery of Augustus at its proper value when he says:

"Non era cosi saggio e grande Augusto
Come la tromba di Virgilio suona,
E per avere in poesia buon gusto
Le proscrizioni inique gli perdona,"

he cannot himself be acquitted of the charge of gross flattery to the House of Este, without having even the excuse of Virgil, for it is well known with how little applause his patrons received his masterpiece. Some critics have asserted that he chose his subject merely because he could introduce the character of Ruggiero, ancestor to his patrons, but, fortunately for the glory of one of the greatest of human minds, there is no reason to believe this libel. The subject recommended itself by its own merits to the poet, as any candid reader, after perusing the work, will confess. It is impossible to enter the maze of incidents in the Orlando Furioso without being bewildered, astonished, dazzled, and lost in all the wonders conjured up by the poet's fancy. His genius was essentially narrative (as is proved by his comedies being so vastly inferior to his Epic), and his subject allowed him to heap story on story, and to develop adventure out of adventure.

No finer compliment was ever paid by one poet to another, than by Byron to Scott, when he called him the Northern Ariosto, and the Italian poet the Southern Scott,

"Who, like the Ariosto of the North, worth."
Sang ladye-love and war, romance and knightly

It was not a mere compliment, but a very just parallel, and it would be difficult to decide which of the two poets was the greater. Scott had certainly more power of delineating character; but Ariosto had, if not the richer, the more vivid imagination. If we take only Scott's poetical works into consideration, Ariosto would have the advantage; but if the prose romances of Scott are thrown into the balance, they incline the scales in his favour. Both poets were, as Byron called them, bards of chivalry, but Scott's chivalry was that of the soul, and Ariosto's too often only that of the sword. Perhaps we may come to a satisfactory conclusion by saying that Ariosto was the greater, and Scott the nobler, poet.

Ariosto's rapidity of style is such that I know of no poem more concise than this Epic, containing over forty thousand lines. One of his tricks to arrest the attention, or to tantalize the curiosity of the reader, is to break off a story in the middle, passing on to other incidents, and concluding the interrupted episode in a later canto. The graceful badinage with which he amuses us when the interest threatens to flag, is most judiciously introduced, for such a subject treated with solemn glumness and heavy pomp would become irksome in the extreme.

Every canto has an introduction, as ingenious in thought as it is beautiful in expression. The most interesting Introduction is probably that of the last canto, where he represents his contemporaries congratulating him on the completion of so arduous a work; but others deserve scarcely less praise; for instance, that on jealousy, and that in which he enumerates the great painters of the age, amongst others, Michael Angelo:

"Quel che a par sculpe e colora,
Michel, più che mortal, Angel divino."

The rapidity of his transitions is truly amazing. He whirls the reader in two lines from one end of the world to the other. When we are harassed and wearied by the breathless speed of his Pegasus, he pauses, lavishing all the riches of his mind on a description or an incident. Here he reveals himself the wonderful poet he is. The maiden chained to a rock and about to be devoured by the sea-monster; Zerbino and Isabella, Ginevra and Ariodante; above all, Alcina and her magic garden; and, not inferior to any passage in the greatest poets, the frenzy of Orlando: these are only a few of the wonderful passages that place his Epic among the noblest productions of the human mind.

His style is, perhaps, if not the most lofty, yet the most perfect of any Italian poet; it is so sweetly varied, so gracefully and judiciously adorned with metaphors and tropes, so picturesque in description, so vivid in narrative, so exquisitely graduated to impart the suitable colouring to the poet's thoughts. Perhaps the only quality it lacks, is the expression of deep emotion, which his joyous and animated verse seldom attains. Nor can it be said that he ever displays great depth of thought, so that we seek in vain in his works for those marvellous flashes that irradiate the mystery of things. With this want is connected the absence of striking individuality in many of his characters; they are Knights and Saracens such as tradition supplied. When he chooses, however, he can individualize his figures, like Angelica, or Orlando and Alcina, with great success, and many observations interspersed throughout the work, show keen insight into human nature. Voltaire, an ardent admirer of this poet, said he had more knowledge of the human heart than is to be found in all epics and novels from Homer's Iliad down to Richardson's Pamela. He regretted Madame du Deffand had not learnt Italian in order to read so admirable a poet. He says in one of his last poems:

"Je relis l'Arioste ou même la Pucelle."

The Pucelle, indeed, was written in emulation of the Orlando Furioso which it resembles no more than a statue of Silenus resembles the Jupiter of Otricoli.

No one represented more truthfully the effect produced by Ariosto on the mind than Leopardi in the following lines:

"Nascevi ai dolci sogni intanto, e il primo
Sole splendeati in vista,
Cantor vago dell' arme e degl' amori,
Che in età della nostra assai men trista
Empièr la vita di felici errori,
Nova speme d'Italia. O torri, O celle,
O donne, O cavalieri,
O giardini, O palagi! a voi pensando,
In mille vane amenità si perde
La mente mia."

Ariosto began his great poem in 1505, at the age of thirty-one, and finished it in 1516; but the year before his death he published an edition with countless alterations and improvements, and with six additional cantos, and it is in the latter form that it has descended to posterity. At his death he left five cantos of an unfinished epic, entitled Rinaldo Ardito, in which many characters of the Orlando reappear; but the fragment is in a very imperfect state and by no means approaches the beauty of the completed work.

[CHAPTER VII.]

POETS CONTEMPORARY WITH ARIOSTO.

The age of Ariosto is remarkable for the first appearance of blank verse in the Italian language. The Italia Liberata of Trissino, on the subject of the victories of Belisarius over the Goths, is the first work in that metre. Trissino thought himself a second Homer, and his epic is full of injudicious imitations of the Iliad. The scene between Jupiter and Juno on Mount Ida is transferred to Justinian and Theodora, in the Palace of Constantinople, with very voluptuous amplifications More than with this ponderous epic, Trissino did his country service by writing the first Italian tragedy, Sofonisba, a work containing passages almost worthy of Euripides. With a style less languid and prosaic, Trissino might have achieved considerable success in the drama.

The poet who came nearest to Ariosto in elegance of style, though far indeed from possessing equal fire and genius, was Francesco Berni, mentioned in a previous chapter, as having recast the Orlando Innamorato of Bojardo. He cannot have had a very original mind, or he would not have submitted to the drudgery of re-writing, line for line, the work of another man, when he might have been employed on poems of his own; but he had plenty of vivacity and raciness, as his Satires and Sonnets attest. So popular did they become, that light and comic poetry came to be called after him, Poesia Bernesca. His end was more tragic than his works. Unfortunately for himself, he lived in Florence in the intimacy of the Medici family. A bitter feud arose between the Duke Alexander and Cardinal Ippolito. The Duke endeavoured to bribe Berni to poison the Cardinal, and on his refusing to be a party to so terrible a crime, Alexander had him poisoned in his turn, lest he should reveal the secret of his guilt.

Luigi Alamanni was an indefatigable writer of poetry. He wrote two enormous epics, Giron il Cortese and the Avarchide; but it would require the musical diction of Ariosto to make such productions live; and, unfortunately, Alamanni, though a scholarly and painstaking writer, had nothing like Ariosto's powers of versification. The work by which he is most honourably remembered is a didactic poem, La Coltivazione, on the same subject as the Georgics.

Giovanni Rucellai, a nephew of Lorenzo the Magnificent, was also indebted to the Georgics for his poem, Le Api (on Bees), in blank verse, of which there is an excellent defence in the introductory lines, quite the most original and pleasing passage in the poem.

Monsignor Giovanni Della Casa acquired an immense reputation in his own age for his works in prose and verse, in Latin and Italian; but as his merit consists exclusively in the finished style—his thoughts not rising above conventionality—he has been neglected for writers combining equal, if not greater, beauty of language with more originality of thought.

Annibal Caro rendered signal service to his country by giving it a spirited translation of the Æneid, and his works in prose and verse are all characterised by vigour of style. He rose from a humble origin to considerable wealth and prominence, and he became notorious by reason of a bitter feud with a contemporary critic of the name of Castelvetro. He had written a poem in praise of the House of Valois, "Venite all'ombra de' gran gigli d'oro," and Castelvetro wrote a sharp and acrimonious criticism upon it, to which he retorted in his Apologia with almost insane rancour. Castelvetro was not tardy in replying, and Caro is suspected of having used all his influence to ruin the career of his adversary. But it is painful to dwell upon these ebullitions of spite, unfortunately too frequent in the annals of literature.

Cardinal Bembo was a writer fastidiously elegant. He is reported to have possessed forty portfolios, in the first of which he put the first draft of his works; in the second, the second; and so on until the fortieth revision reached the fortieth receptacle, after which alone would he suffer the work to see the light. His productions are such as might be expected from a man so minutely laborious. He is more intent upon words than upon realities. His poetry is modelled on Petrarch, his prose on Boccaccio. He wrote a History of Venice in twelve books, originally in Latin, translating it himself into Italian. A dialogue, entitled Gli Asolani, is interesting to English readers from its similarity of title to Browning's Asolando. The name is taken from Asolo, a spot on the mainland not far from Venice, whither he loved to retire, as Browning did three hundred years later. His letters are esteemed his best production, being less over-elaborated in style than his other works. His Latin works are entirely modelled on those of Cicero.

Francesco Grazzini, surnamed Il Lasca, was a sort of inferior Berni in his poems, but he is remarkable as one of the founders of the Florentine Accademia della Crusca.

Bernardino Rota, a Neapolitan, produced some really pathetic poems on the death of his wife.

The Sixteenth Century was remarkable for three poetesses of considerable merit: Vittoria Colonna, Gaspara Stampa, and Veronica Gambara. Vittoria Colonna was the widow of the Marquis of Pescara, and dedicates many of her verses to his memory. Gaspara Stampa, a native of Padua, was deeply in love with Collatino Collalto, and gave utterance to her passion in numerous Sonnets, some of which rise to considerable beauty and dignity. Veronica Gambara, of Brescia, produced some noble verses, especially the fine Sonnet in which she implores, in the name of Christ, Charles V and Francis I, to put an end to their hostilities.

Although he lived until nearly the end of the century, we may for convenience mention Angelo Di Costanzo in this chapter. He was born in Naples, in 1507, of a wealthy and noble family, but in spite of his wealth he had many sorrows. Don Pedro de Toledo, Viceroy of Naples, banished him from the city of his birth. His first wife died in youth; his second wife caused him much unhappiness by her misconduct; and to complete his misfortunes, he lived to deplore the loss of his two sons. He appealed in vain to be allowed to return to his home. His petitions were rejected, and he died in grief and exile in 1591. Some of his poems are eminently beautiful; his Sonnet on Virgil, "Quella cetra gentil," is justly celebrated. In prose he wrote a history of Naples, frequently reprinted.

On reviewing the poetry of this period, with the brilliant exception of Ariosto, the result is, perhaps, a feeling of disappointment. Certainly, the achievements are not commensurate with the undoubted culture and intellect of the writers. There is nothing (always excepting Ariosto) that has taken hold of the world's attention. How different in this respect are the poets from the painters of the same period! How obscure by the side of Michael Angelo, Raphael, Correggio, Titian, Giorgione, Sebastian del Piombo, Tintoretto, and the whole galaxy sparkling for ever in the heaven of Art! Some powerful minds, such as Vida and Fracastoro, were diverted into the path of Latin poetry; but I think the chief explanation of the inferiority of the poets is their lack of really fine subjects; for how can a poet write nobly if he has no adequate theme for his verse? Their amorous poetry ran too much in the Petrarchan groove; their heroic poetry was too apt to assume the form of ponderous epics, utterly unreadable without the graces of Ariosto. Religious enthusiasm seems to have been remote from their minds. Another generation had to arise before that fire was again kindled on the shrine of Poetry.

[CHAPTER VIII.]

MACHIAVELLI AND THE PROSE WRITERS OF THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.

Niccolò Machiavelli, the profoundest thinker and the keenest politician of his century, was born in Florence on the third of May, 1469. In 1498 he was made Secretary of State of the Florentine Republic. But this dignity was the cause of his subsequent adversity. When the Medici family was restored to power in Florence, he was imprisoned, fined, and even put to the torture. He profited by an amnesty issued by Leo X on his accession, but he was relegated to poverty and obscurity. Impatient of both, he curried favour with the reigning dynasty, but such was the ill-luck that steadily pursued him through life, that no sooner had he acquired a certain degree of favour than the Medici were again expelled from Florence, and he, as one of their adherents, was regarded by the triumphant party with suspicion and hostility. He did not long survive the wreck of all his hopes, dying on the twenty-second of June, 1527.

In his generation, Italy had fallen on evil days. The invasion of Charles VIII of France opened the flood-gates of a deluge of disasters; and the devastations of the King were succeeded by the crushing despotism of the Emperor. The immense wealth, accumulated during centuries of prosperity, was rapidly melting away. The Republic of Venice lost much of her trade owing to the rivalry of Holland and Portugal, and the stream of commerce was directed from the Adriatic by the discovery of the new passage to India round the Cape of Good Hope. The reckless extravagance of Leo X exhausted the Papal Treasury; a great religious schism cut off abundant supplies from distant countries; and the terrible sack of Rome, with the ruinous ransom demanded from Clement VII, completed, in the year of Machiavelli's death, a long series of disasters. Freedom was crushed by native tyrants and foreign oppressors. The present was ghastly with innumerable wounds, the future looked blacker than the grave. What wonder was it, therefore, that men sought refuge from such horrors in every finesse that diplomacy could suggest? This is the true explanation and the one excuse of Machiavelli's tortuous policy. He is utterly unscrupulous, but it is the unscrupulousness of a patriot at bay who has exhausted all other means of self-defence.

Still, it cannot be denied that Machiavelli is anything but a sympathetic figure. We admire the keenness of his intellect as we admire the keenness of a sharp-edged sword; but where is the love of humanity, the enthusiasm for great ideals, the indignation of a noble mind at the iniquities of an evil age? Wonderful is the penetration of his remarks; unrivalled his insight; above praise the clearness and precision of his thoughts. No historian has ever surpassed him in unrolling a panorama of past events. No politician has ever laid down more sagacious rules for attaining an object in view. No statesman has ever discerned with a keener eye the symptoms of the times.

But if we ask what profit has been derived from the exertions of this most acute and logical of minds, what is the answer? His name has become a byeword as the symbol of a heartless intriguer, and his works glare like a meteor of evil in the dark and troubled sky of his century.

Great praise is due to his History of Florence. In the first book, with a concise lucidity which later historians have emulated without surpassing, he surveys the events of ten centuries, and that noble introduction is followed by a work which displays to the fullest advantage the great powers of its author.

The Discourses on the First Decade of Livy and The Art of War both treat of the same subject; the necessity of a freedom-loving nation to attain and preserve a high standard of military efficiency. The system of hiring venal condottieri had profoundly demoralised the forces of Italy, indeed, it had paved the way for the invasion of France and the dominion of Spain, and its effects were felt even to the middle of the present century, for no other explanation suffices to account for the submission of a nation with such a history as Italy to the oppression of foreign garrisons. So clear-sighted a patriot as Machiavelli could not fail to see the evil and to point out the remedy. His despatches and correspondence are also invaluable for the history of his times.

But the work pre-eminently associated with his name is the treatise, entitled Il Principe, a manual for a ruler who desires to keep an unsteady throne and to outwit unscrupulous enemies. He advocates, it is true, a policy regardless of all mercy and morality in the pursuit of its object; but injustice to Machiavelli, we must bear in mind what his object was. He had seen his country desolated for years by cruel and rapacious invaders, and he thought, most justly, that the only chance of Italy against her enemies was the establishment of the dominion of one powerful and politic prince over the whole Peninsula, and it was to establish a standard of conduct for such a prince that he wrote his book.

His story, Belphegor, and his plays, among which the Mandragora stands pre-eminent, are witty and lively, but they frequently overstep the limits of decorum. All his works are interspersed with innumerable proofs of the keenness of his observation, and the style is clear and forcible, but somewhat wanting in colour. He wrote a few poems, but they are of no great value or interest.

Machiavelli is as undoubtedly the first prose writer of the age as Ariosto is the first poet, Second to him as an historian, though at a wide interval, we may place his friend and fellow-townsman, Francesco Guicciardini, born in 1480, died in 1540. He studied law to such good purpose at Florence, Ferrara and Padua, that at the early age of twenty-two he was chosen to lecture on the Institutes of Justinian, and at the age of thirty-one he was sent as Ambassador to Ferdinand of Aragon, which post he occupied for two years. With the help of that King, Julius the Second forced the Florentines to submit again to the rule of the Medici family. Guicciardini was suspected by the friends of liberty of having a hand in the negotiations between the Pope and the King, and of being a tool of that ambitious dynasty. Such, in truth, he proved himself; and harshness, rancour, and vindictiveness characterised his conduct towards his political opponents. When Leo X visited Florence in 1515, Guicciardini was sent by the Republic to receive him at Cortona. No circumstance could have proved more favourable to the historian's career. Leo X looked upon him with the utmost favour, and nominated him to high and important offices, which his successor, Adrian VI, continued, and to which Clement VII subsequently added others. When the "Holy League," headed by the Duke of Urbino, was formed against the Emperor Charles V, Guicciardini was one of its leading spirits. But the Imperial arms prevailed; Clement VII had to take refuge in the Castle of St. Angelo, and had the agony of seeing Rome stormed and plundered under his very eyes. Atrocious were the cruelties committed. St. Peter's itself was stained with the blood of the slaughtered. Huge contributions were levied on the citizens, and an enormous ransom exacted from the Pope. Seeing Clement, himself a Medici, deprived of liberty and even in danger of his life, the Florentines took to arms and expelled the obnoxious dynasty. But the unexpected happened. The injured Pope and the tyrannical Emperor became reconciled; and probably to atone for the atrocities committed by his forces, Charles V lent effective aid to Alexander de Medici in his endeavour to regain his lost dominion over Florence. Guicciardini became the instrument of Alexander, a cruel and relentless tyrant, who was subsequently assassinated by his kinsman Lorenzino. Guicciardini was an active agent in the election of Cosimo I, and when he was reproached for imposing another tyrant on his country, he answered that the more princes were assassinated, the more would arise. But Cosimo was ungrateful when Guicciardini demanded the reward of his services; bitter disappointment was in store for him; he withdrew from public affairs, and lived in retirement at Arcetri, where he died.

It was in the leisure hours of this retirement that he wrote the history on which his literary reputation is founded. It embraces the period from the invasion of Charles VIII to the year 1532. It is a valuable and important work; but, as may be gathered from the details of his life, the author shows no elevation or purity of mind. His view of human nature is low; his estimate of his fellow-creatures harsh and cynical. But if the colours are unpleasing, the picture is valuable, and it would have been a great loss had it not been preserved for posterity.

Guicciardini is often heavy and prolix, and many ludicrous stories have been told of the sufferings of those readers who conscientiously plodded through the entire work. Thus it is related of the jocular Governor of a Province, that he promised a free pardon to a convict if he would read Guicciardini's History from the first page to the last. The prisoner gladly embraced this opportunity of regaining his liberty. He little knew the task that was imposed upon him. As he turned over page after page of the ponderous tomes, a deadly weariness overpowered him, until at last the endless details of the Siege of Pisa exhausted his patience. "Take me back to the galleys," he exclaimed. "Rather that than the misery of toiling through this awful book."

Agnolo Firenzuola was a good prose writer, out a very inferior poet; indeed, so great is the contrast between the two classes of his works, that it is difficult to believe that they can emanate from the same pen. The most striking of his works is a Dialogue on the Beauty of Women.

Pier Francesco Giambullari wrote a History of Europe from the accession of Charlemagne to the year 913. The history is unfinished, the author dying in 1555. He was one of the founders of the Florentine Accademia della Crusca. He has been highly praised for the dignity and finish of his style.

Vasari and Cellini are names renowned in the annals of Art, the former for his invaluable biographies of painters, and the latter as a sculptor and a worker in gold and bronze. His biography is a striking memorial of the man and the age.

Benedetto Varchi had many qualities of an able historian, but as he was in the pay of the Grand Duke Cosimo I, his independence may be more than suspected.

In contrast to him, Jacopo Nardi was a bitter opponent of the Medici family, and in his History of Florence from 1494 to 1531 he paints them in the blackest colours. So determined an adversary of the ruling dynasty could not be suffered to remain in Florence. He was driven into banishment, and took refuge in Venice, where he died after the middle of the Century. As a biographer he distinguished himself by his life of Antonio Giacomini.

The Sixteenth Century was fertile in historians, for we have to chronicle the name of another in Bernardo Segni. He wrote the History of Italy from 1527 to 1555, or three years before his death. Dealing with contemporary events, he could not treat his subject with the requisite independence, and living a quiet and studious life, it is difficult to see how he could gather reliable information, or have access to important documents.

Vincenzo Borghini was a laborious antiquarian, who wrote a book on the Origin of the City of Florence.

Giambattista Adriani professed to continue Guicciardini's work in his History of his Own Times, but it is complete in itself, and has many merits, both of style and subject. Adriani was celebrated in his day as a public speaker, and his Latin Orations were so much admired that they were translated into Italian as soon as they were held. He died in 1579.

Camillo Porzio who survived until 1603, wrote several historical monographs concerning the Kingdom of Naples.

Skilful as they were in all the arts of composition, the writers of the Sixteenth Century too frequently indulged in redundant prolixity. Conscious of this defect, Bernardo Davanzati determined to cultivate the opposite quality of laconic conciseness. He was brilliantly successful. He translated Tacitus, that great model of brevity, and boasted that his rendering contained fewer words than the original without sacrificing a particle of the sense. He wrote a book on the Reformation in England, a Funeral Oration on Cosimo I, and several treatises on finance and agriculture.

In reviewing the writers of this Epoch, we are struck with the number and merit of the historians. The other Prose Writers appeal but faintly to modern readers. With the exception of Baldassare Castiglione, who, in his Cortegiano gives us a pleasing picture of the more refined circles of Italian society, and of Vasari and Benvenuto Cellini, they do not disclose much of the manners and customs of their age. No Boccaccio arose to portray for future times the men and women of his day.

The stories of Bandello and of Luigi Da Porto have but little to recommend them except the fact that they supplied Shakespeare with some of his plots. Bandello, however, is by no means destitute of vivacity. Straparola, the author of Tredici Piacevoli Notti, and Fiorentini, the author of Il Pecorone, also had the honour of furnishing hints to the great dramatist. Too often it happens that the extreme prolixity of the writers of the Sixteenth Century drowns their thoughts in an ocean of words. It is strange that the great convulsion of the Reformation did not produce any theological work written in the Italian language. The controversies were all carried on in Latin, but even in Latin nothing was produced in the Peninsula that is now remembered. Indeed, the great Catholic reaction had the effect of making writers fearful of giving offence. It restricted them more and more within academic grooves, thus unhappily fostering that tendency to conventionality and unreality which immersed Italian literature deeper and deeper into a morass of mediocrity.

[CHAPTER IX.]

BERNARDO AND TORQUATO TASSO.

It is but seldom that poets are as romantic as their poems, or as interesting as the offspring of their imagination. When, therefore, a poet arises gifted with an interesting personality, the attention he excites becomes universal. Such was the fate of Torquato Tasso. It would not be altogether unjust to say that had he not suffered so many misfortunes, his name would not be a household word, for the merit of his poems hardly sustains the dignity of his renown.

His father, Bernardo, a native of Bergamo, was born in 1493, and died in 1569. He was a writer in prose and verse, his chief work being the Amadigi, an epic of immense length, well and carefully written, but without any spark of genius. He was attached to the Court of Ferrante Sanseverino, Prince of Salerno, and when his master was driven out of his dominions by the Emperor Charles V, he followed his fortunes, leaving his wife, Properzia de' Rossi, and three children, the youngest of whom was Torquato, born in 1544, to the care of her relatives. His devotion to the fallen fortunes of the Prince of Salerno was the cause of many of the sorrows of his illustrious son. His patrimony was sequestrated, and when he died, he had nothing to leave to his children. Nor was this the greatest of his trials. He never saw his wife again, and when he wished to have her with him in Rome, she was in a dying condition. All she could do, was to send him the little Torquato, whose training was henceforth confided to the father's care.

The youth displayed as much love and more aptitude for poetical composition. When he was eighteen, he published his epic, Rinaldo, a wonderfully mature work for so young a writer. Torquato Tasso was one of those poets who produce their finest works in the earlier portion of their career. The works by which alone he is remembered, were all produced before his thirty-second year. His mind attained full mastery over its powers at a very early period, and when, like the voice of a singer, it lost its freshness, it also lost its charm. Corneille and Tennyson resemble him in this peculiarity of producing their masterpieces in comparative youth, but in their case, the division between the two periods is not quite so marked as in his. Corneille produced no really great drama after La Mort de Pompée, but some of his later tragedies have occasional flashes of his early fire. Tennyson gave no memorable creation to the world after Maud, but his Idylls of the King offer some poetical details, and a few lyrics are not devoid of that perfection which characterised his previous poems. But Tasso produced absolutely nothing that could, by any stretch of indulgence, be said to add to his renown after the publication of the Gerusalemme Liberata. On the contrary, he rather injured his reputation by yielding to the cavils of his detractors, and re-writing his great work under the title of Gerusalemme Conquistata, and producing an epic so feeble and lifeless that it immediately sank into utter neglect.

Precocious as he was in the manifestation of brilliant genius, his father was anxious that such powers should be cultivated to the utmost, and Torquato was sent to study law at Padua. But the law was little to his taste. His Rinaldo procured him immense renown, and he found it more agreeable to bask in the sunshine of the brilliant society that courted him in the dawn of his celebrity, than to spend laborious hours in the pursuit of a dry and distasteful science. No poet at so early an age ever had so brilliant a prospect of renown and fortune before him. But the very extent of the admiration he excited laid the foundations of the terrible disasters that were to overtake him ere many years had elapsed.

Cardinal Luigi of Este, attracted by his brilliant reputation, offered him a post in his household and an introduction to the Court of Ferrara. The dazzling offer was accepted by the poet; but the kindness of the Cardinal had results more fatal than could have attended the machinations of his bitterest enemies.

At first all went well. Tasso produced a favourable impression upon the Duke Alfonso and upon his two sisters, Lucrezia and Eleonora. He accompanied the Cardinal on a mission to the Court of Charles IX of France, and after a year's sojourn in Paris, where he was fêted by the leading authors, including Ronsard, then at the height of his fame, he returned to Ferrara to receive new proofs of the favour of the Duke. But the more he rose in the estimation of his master, the more he excited the jealousy of those who were equally ambitious but less successful. There is, indeed, no truth in the popular legend of his love for the Princess Eleanora. The object of his affections appears to have been a lady of the Court, Leonora Scandiano. The poet Guarini was also in love with this lady, and bitter hostility resulted from the rivalry of the two poets. The malignant envy of his opponents was excited by the brilliant success of his pastoral play, Aminta, produced in 1573. So much was that poem talked of, that the Princess Lucrezia, who had meanwhile married the Duke of Urbino, sent for Tasso to read it to her at Pesaro. So pleased was she both with the work and the writer, that she invited him to pass the summer at her palace of Castel Durante. The exquisite beauty of the gardens and the grounds is said to have been in his mind when he described the gardens of Armida in the Gerusalemme.

This was the happiest time of Tasso's life. He was honoured with the favour of the highest in the land, and with the admiration of the whole of Italy. He was congenially employed on the completion of the great epic which was to make his name immortal. Never was a poet placed in a more brilliant position, nor more apparently certain of a splendid and triumphant career.

But the seeds of evil were already sown, and the mischief soon became apparent. He completed the Gerusalemme in 1575, and from that moment his peace of mind was gone. Whether he overworked himself in that great task, or whether he had secret causes of annoyance and humiliation, of which his biographers know nothing, it is difficult to conjecture, but from that period his temper seems to have become morbidly suspicious and irritable. He was painfully sensitive to criticism, and he harassed himself and others by perpetually altering and correcting passages to which objection had been taken. When at last the poem was published, which was not until some time after its completion, it was attacked by the Accademia della Crusca with considerable harshness and unfairness. The great fault found by the Academy was that the idiom was not always purely Tuscan. The very first line of the first Canto was singled out for censure:

"Canto l'arme pietose e il Capitano."

The poet uses the word "pietose" in the sense of 'pious," whereas the Academy contended that it could never mean anything but "compassionate."

Tasso was not only worried by these minute quibbles, but he was also haunted by the dreadful apprehension that his religious orthodoxy might be impugned, and he himself applied to the Fathers of the Holy Inquisition for an examination and a vindication. In vain the Fathers assured him with unanimous cordiality that such a process was utterly superfluous, and that the purity of his faith had never for a moment been held in doubt; he still professed himself dissatisfied, and he long continued to torment himself with religious scruples.

The Duke of Ferrara, doubtless highly gratified at the success of the masterpiece of his Court Poet, appointed Tasso his private secretary when that post became vacant through the death of Giambattista Pigna in 1577. Probably the arduous duties and the heavy responsibilities of this appointment weighed him down with a fresh load of anxiety, and he may have felt that he had become more than ever the object of malice and envy; whatever the cause, excitability verging on frenzy, and suspicion verging on madness betrayed themselves more and more in his speech and actions. He fancied, perhaps not without reason, that some of his letters had been intercepted; he firmly believed, though with less foundation, that there was a plot to poison him. He had also the annoyance, peculiarly galling to an author, of knowing that spurious copies of his great epic were being circulated throughout Italy, full of mistakes and interpolated passages.

All these causes of uneasiness culminated in frightful violence in the month of June of that fatal year. One evening in the apartments of the Princess Lucrezia, and even in her presence, he drew a dagger and stabbed a manservant whom he suspected of being concerned in the robbery of some missing documents. He was arrested, and the Duke ordered him to be kept a close prisoner. When released from captivity, he was so excited with grief and indignation, that all observers pronounced him mad. He took refuge in a Franciscan Monastery; but when the Duke refused to receive his letters, he dreaded the effects of his master's anger, and fled from Ferrara in a pitiable condition, without his manuscripts, without sufficient clothes, and without a particle of money. He seems actually to have begged his way from Ferrara to Sorrento, near Naples, where his sister was married to Marzio Sersale. It would be difficult to find a more picturesque episode in the life of any poet than that of Tasso presenting himself to his sister in the garb of a mendicant. She received the unhappy wanderer with hospitality and affection, welcomed him in her house, and when he was sufficiently recovered from the fatigues of mind and body to discuss his affairs, gave him the sensible advice never to return to the Court of Ferrara.

Unhappily, this advice was rejected; but to be perfectly just in our estimate of Tasso's conduct, we must bear in mind the position of men of letters of the Sixteenth Century in Italy. The complete absence of copyright law made it impossible for even the most popular writer to derive emolument from his books, for as soon as they acquired any popularity, they were shamelessly pirated all over the Peninsula. Enormously popular as they were, even during their lifetime, it does not appear that either Ariosto or Tasso ever profited to the extent of even one scudo by the sale of their poems. Thus a writer, unless he possessed ample means, or held some lucrative office, was entirely dependent for his bread on the fickle favour of the great. Tasso, in consequence of the reverses experienced by his father and the sequestration of his property, was absolutely devoid of anything he could call his own, and owed even the barest necessaries of life to the bounty of the Prince whom his violent conduct had, it must be admitted, justly offended. Great as his reputation was, he might well doubt whether any other sovereign in Italy would extend to him even a quarter of similar favour after the reckless and violent conduct of which he had been guilty.

Whatever may have been his motives, he wrote again and again to Alfonso and the Princesses for pardon for his errors and for permission to return. Eleonora alone answered him, and her reply was not encouraging. The mortification of being repulsed was doubtless intolerable to his proud spirit. He deserted Sorrento and the sister whose affection he should have valued above all the favours of princes. He went straight to Ferrara, but the doors of the Palace were barred against him, and to add to his afflictions, the Duke refused to allow his manuscripts to be given up to him. He was lonely and destitute, and the bitterness of his fall was intensified by the jeers of those who, on the very spot of his disgrace, had envied him the brilliancy of his triumph. Without a morsel of bread to eat, or a roof under which to take shelter, he sold some valuable trinkets which had been given to him in happier days by the Princess Lucrezia, and with the proceeds he made his way through Mantua and Padua to Venice.

In these towns he seems to have been received with the consideration due to his poetical renown; but still the painful question as to where he should find a permanent home occurred to him in moments of anxiety and gloom. Strange to say, help came to him from an unexpected quarter. The Duke of Urbino's marriage with the Princess Lucrezia had turned out most unhappily, and the couple were now separated. It probably occurred to the Duke that the best way of annoying the House of Este would be to show favour to the poet who had been expelled from Ferrara in such deep disgrace, and Tasso owed to rancour and resentment that temporary respite from misfortune which he might have implored in vain from esteem and humanity.

The Duke in time wearied of the capricious and irritable poet, and Tasso found it expedient to remove to Turin. He received no countenance from the House of Savoy, and again his evil star led him to the Court of Ferrara.

In the month of February, 1579, he returned to Ferrara when it was at its gayest, on the occasion of the Duke's marriage to Margherita Gonzaga, daughter of the Duke of Mantua. But Tasso was looked upon with aversion as an intruder. He wearied those who did not want to see him with long stories of his grievances, and with bitter invectives at princely ingratitude. These invectives waxed fiercer, until, after a culmination of insane violence, the Duke's patience was exhausted, and he had the unhappy poet arrested and thrown into a cell in the madhouse of Ferrara.

Here Tasso languished for more than seven years, until July, 1586. The most zealous admirers of the poet cannot deny that he brought this terrible catastrophe upon himself. The Duke cannot be blamed for having ordered his incarceration; indeed, in the frenzied condition of his mind at the time of arrest, it was probably the best thing that could have happened to him. If not placed under restraint, he might have done himself an injury, or he might even have attacked others. If he had been held in captivity for some weeks, or even months, until the paroxysm of his frenzy had spent itself, the Duke would not have incurred the odium which subsequently blackened his memory. But the peculiar hardship of Tasso's imprisonment was its long duration. A short period of restraint might actually have been beneficial, but seven years of gloomy captivity aggravated the malady which they were intended to cure, and it is no wonder that the patient subsided from wild excitability into sullen despair.

It is due to his gaolers to say that he was not treated with the inhumanity popularly supposed. Visitors were admitted into his presence, he was allowed occasionally to take walks in the town of Ferrara and the neighbourhood; his manuscripts were restored to him; he was at liberty to receive the letters of his friends, and to beguile with composition the weary hours of captivity. But still the galling fact remained that he was a prisoner, and a mind naturally prone to melancholy was still more darkened by contrasting the stern reality with the brilliant hopes fostered by the triumphs of his youth. He wrote to many of the nobles and princes of Italy, imploring them to use their influence to obtain his release. These letters do not seem to have been either intercepted or delayed. Strong representations were undoubtedly made to the Court of Ferrara to obtain the liberation of one so gifted and so unfortunate. Unhappily for his credit and honour, Alfonso proved inflexible, and what was originally salutary discipline became at last detestable tyranny.

Many different opinions were expressed as to whether Tasso was really insane. Montaigne, who was travelling in Italy at the time of his incarceration, visited him in his cell and left a pitiable description of the apathetic misery in which he found him, as if his powers of endurance were exhausted by suffering, and nothing but the stupor of despair remained. Others pointed to the poems, the essays, the letters he wrote in captivity, and asked in indignant tones whether the author of compositions so pregnant with thought and so perfect in diction could possibly be insane? Peculiar, he undoubtedly was; but he had expiated his errors by severe suffering, and was it not reasonable to suppose that he had learnt a salutary lesson, and would not, if restored to freedom, repeat the regrettable follies of the past?

This consideration, doubtless, after the lapse of so many years, inclined Alfonso to clemency, and when his brother-in-law, Vincenzo Gonzaga, interceded for the luckless poet, he did not meet with the harsh refusal given to others, but was able to boast that he alone of so many petitioners had obtained Tasso's release.

The door of the cell where the author of the Gerusalemme had languished for so many years was opened, and he was free to go wherever he liked. As may be imagined, he was cured of his wish to figure at the Court of Ferrara, and he left the inhospitable dominions, never to return.

Vincenzo Gonzaga took him to Mantua, where he passed the time immediately following his release. But the re-action, after so long a period of wretchedness, was too trying for his enfeebled frame. He forsook the brilliant circles of Mantua for a quieter retreat at Bergamo with some of his relatives. Here he finished his tragedy of Torrismondo, begun many years previously, but thrown aside, at first because he was engaged on the arduous task of his great epic, and then because his own life drifted into a tragedy far transcending the mimic sorrows of the stage.

At Bergamo, he learned that his liberator, Vincenzo Gonzaga, had succeeded to the Duchy of Mantua. Something of his old hope of courtly success revived in the wounded heart of Torquato. He left his provincial abode and hurried to the palace of his benefactor to lay the dedication of Torrismondo at his feet. He doubtless indulged in dreams of rich appointments and gratifying distinctions. But, alas! Vincenzo, kind and humane to the captive, seems to have turned a deaf ear to the courtier. Tasso had an unfortunate knack of making his presence irksome to his patrons. His ever keen sense of injury was stung to the quick by the Duke's neglect, and he lost no time in leaving Mantua to repair to Rome. But here new mortifications awaited him. Cardinal Scipio Gonzaga lodged him in his Palace, but was neither cordial nor gracious. Probably the dread that his insanity might burst out again, made people desirous of keeping him at a distance. Sixtus the Fifth, who then occupied the Papal Chair, took no interest in literature, and did not show him any attention, and the example of the Pope was followed by the Society of the capital.

He left Rome with even greater disappointment than he had felt in leaving Mantua. He hurried to Naples, where he had no cause to complain of the reception that awaited him, for he was overwhelmed with demonstrations of admiration and affection. But sorrow, captivity, and anguish of mind had done their evil work; he was but the wreck of himself, and he could no more endure the sweetness of praise than the bitterness of neglect. He fled from the kindness of the Neapolitans and flitted from place to place in a weary pilgrimage, without happiness and without repose. The wonder is, in his destitute condition, where the money came from to enable him to travel. His mind and his health were in a wretched condition. Distrustful and melancholy, he repelled even those who most admired his genius and pitied his misfortunes, and his ever-ready sense of injury magnified the slightest offence into bitter unkindness. But in spite of agonising thoughts and disturbing peregrinations, his pen never rested. He completed the Gerusalemme Conquistata, that unfortunate "improvement" on his masterpiece, which is never mentioned but to be regretted; he wrote a long poem in blank verse on the Creation, and dialogues and essays in abundance and letters innumerable. Indeed, he was throughout his life an indefatigable correspondent, and he seemed never to doubt that the outpourings of his mind about his wrongs and grievances would be as interesting to the recipients as to himself. Some of these letters are noble and affecting, but too many betray a mind sore and festering from constant brooding over his calamities. But in the presence of such misfortune, we can only pity, we cannot condemn.

Great though his errors were, and wayward as was his temper, he was a man of whom his country had reason to be proud, and it is pleasing to be able to narrate that he was destined to receive a tardy recognition for all the works with which he had enriched the literature of Italy. Cardinal Aldobrandini had been raised to the Papal Chair and had assumed the name of Clement VIII, and he and his nephews were anxious to signalise his Pontificate by reviving the Coronation of Petrarch in the Capitol in favour of a poet not less illustrious and more unfortunate. Accordingly, Tasso was summoned to Rome, and he was met outside the gates by an immense concourse of people and a brilliant galaxy of Cardinals, Prelates, and Nobles. But his frame was worn out, and the excitement of this great reception hardly infused sufficient animation to conceal from the bystanders the rapid approach of death. He was lodged in a noble suite of apartments in the Vatican; the poet who for so many years had been doomed to a madman's cell, found himself an honoured guest in the Palace of the Popes.

But the state and ceremony with which he was surrounded were more than his ebbing strength could bear. Religious feelings had always held powerful sway over his sensitive mind, and now, when he felt his end drawing near, he retired to the Monastery of Sant' Onofrio, situated on an eminence outside the town. Here, in prayer and meditation, he devoutly awaited release from all his sorrows. The monks tended him with care and assiduity; but it is recorded of him that his old suspicions revived by fits and starts, and on one occasion he made his attendant swallow the medicine he was directed to take in order to have ocular proof that it was not poisoned.

Worn out by his many sufferings, he passed away peacefully on the twenty-fifth of April, 1595, the day before he was to receive the laurel in the Capitol. But he probably did not regret that death prevented him from enjoying this symbol of greatness. As Leopardi, himself no less familiar with sorrow, beautifully says:

"Morte domanda
Chi nostro mal conobbe, e non ghirlanda."

There is a peculiar fitness in the circumstance that a poet, so singled out for misfortune, was not destined to wear the wreath of a conqueror. Peaceful after so much agitation, calm after such bitter resentment, he sank to rest in that secluded monastery, and for thirteen years he lay in the Church adjoining the quiet cloisters without a stone to mark his resting-place, until Cardinal Bonifazio Bevilacqua raised a noble monument to his memory, which may still be seen by the visitor who wends his way to Sant' Onofrio to pay the tribute of a sigh to so much glory linked to so much misfortune.

Tasso was tall and active; his countenance was handsome, though in later years much clouded by melancholy. In his younger days he was an expert swordsman, and skilled in all bodily exercises.

The vicissitudes of his life afford such picturesque material for narration and description that we cannot wonder that it became a favourite theme with poets and biographers. The noble play of Goethe is familiar to all lovers of poetry. Of his biographers the earliest was Manso, a Neapolitan nobleman, who had the singular fortune of being, in the course of his long life, the friend of three renowned epic poets, of Tasso himself, of Marino, and of the greatest of all, Milton, whose acquaintance he made during the travels of the English poet in Italy. Tasso mentions him in the Gerusalemme Conquistata:

"Fra cavalier magnanimi e cortesi
Risplende il Manso."

Marino did not leave his praises unsung, and Milton addressed him in one of his finest Latin poems. He must have had striking qualities to endear him to men so eminent and so different; but his biography, probably because it was the first, gave rise to many legends which have been repeated down to the present day. He seems to have been somewhat credulous, and to have relied too much on the statements made to him by Tasso himself, without distrusting his informant's wild and heated imagination.

The Abbé Serassi, in his biography published in 1785, did what Manso had neglected to do. He sifted the evidence and examined the documents; and gave to the world a picture much nearer the truth than had yet been presented; but it was reserved for the indefatigable labours of Angelo Solerti to produce a really exhaustive history of the poet.

It must be confessed that in turning from Tasso's life, so full of passion and romance, to his poetry, we experience a certain sense of disappointment. Had he not been so striking an object of sympathy and interest, it may be doubted whether his works would have arrested quite so much attention as they actually did. Considering the varied panorama of life that had been unfolded before him and the mental sufferings he underwent, he does not sound those depths of impassioned meditation that might be expected. What traces there are of them, will be found rather in his letters than in his poems. This fact is very strange and points to the limitations of his talent. He had materials in his life sufficient to inspire him with great lyric poems, and yet we find nothing in his odes, sonnets and madrigals to compare to the finest passages of Petrarch, or of Leopardi, or even of Filicaia. None of his shorter poems impress themselves indelibly on the reader: none glow with the intensity of lyric fire.

Not being able to give him the title of a great lyric poet, we proceed to enquire whether he was a great epic or a great dramatic poet.

His narrative poems are four in number; the Rinaldo, the Gerusalemme Liberata, the Gerusalemme Conquistata, and the Sette Giornate del Mondo Creato, a long work in blank verse on the subject of the Creation. His Rinaldo is remarkable because it was written in such early youth; his Gerusalemme Conquistata was admitted even by his admirers to be an utter failure. It has only one striking passage, a prophecy of evil to the house of Bourbon, which seems clearly to foretell the crimes and horrors of the French Revolution, and which deserves to rank among poetical prophecies next to the celebrated prediction of the discovery of America in the tragedy of Medea attributed to Seneca. The Sette Giornate furnished some hints to Milton when he came to the description of the Creation of the World in Paradise Lost. It has, however, no intrinsic merit to recommend it, being heavy and uninteresting to the last degree. These three poems had hardly vitality enough to keep them alive until the close of the Century in which they were written, and to modern readers they are quite dead. And yet the subjects were of sufficient interest to afford brilliant opportunities of displaying the powers of a great writer. We cannot help asking the question, can he be a great poet who allowed such brilliant opportunities to escape?

His pastoral play, Aminta, has much sweetness and freshness of style; his tragedy, Torrismondo, has some touches that lead us to think that under happier circumstances and with a mind less pre-occupied with his own distresses, he might have become a fine dramatist; but the shepherds and nymphs of the Aminta seem vapid and mawkish to readers of the present day; and the Torrismondo has not that convincing power that a tragedy ought to possess.

In all these works, lyric, epic, and dramatic, Tasso's style, though sweet and flowing in the earlier productions, is strangely devoid of originality, and, therefore, of colour; and no writer was more deeply imbued with the conventional phraseology of the poetry of his age. Thought and style are alike devoid of those vivid touches that command admiration and ensure immortality. We are left under the impression that the poet is not fixing all his powers of mind on his verse, and that his attention is largely engaged elsewhere. This absence of full power is the only trace in his poems of the disordered state of his mind. Many poets, whose sanity has never been questioned, have passages far more morbid and eccentric than any that can be found in Tasso's pages. He never indulges in wild flights of fancy, the order of his thoughts is lucidity itself; and there are no incoherent and very few exaggerated metaphors. On the contrary, they would rather gain by a little more irregularity. They are so logically thought out as to become occasionally almost exasperating.

Thus it will be seen that his claims to rank as a great poet rest entirely on the Gerusalemme Liberata.

In considering that celebrated poem, the first thought that must occur to the reader is the extremely happy choice of the subject. It was unhackneyed; it was picturesque; it was noble. We cannot help feeling that Ariosto is sometimes dragged down by the frivolous stories he tells; we cannot help feeling that Tasso is sustained and inspired by the magnificent episodes it is his duty to narrate. He is rather too fond of imitating passages from Homer and Virgil, but such imitation was universal in his day, and in his case it is skilfully executed. The Oriental colouring of the scenes laid in Palestine and Syria is, perhaps, not very vivid, but it is quite as vivid as his contemporaries expected. On the whole it would be harsh to deny that he has done justice to his subject, and in one respect he deserves the highest praise: he imparts a human interest and an air of reality to his characters that cannot be too highly extolled. Ariosto often treats his characters merely as puppets, and is himself the first to laugh at them. Very different is the attitude of Tasso towards his creations. He believes in them with unshaken sincerity, and he loves them because he believes in them. Erminia, Sophronia, Armida, Rinaldo, Goffredo, Tancredi, all stand before us in the life, moving and breathing. As Goethe says, in his play on the subject of Tasso:

"Es sind nicht Schatten die der Wahn erzeugte;
Ich weiss es, sie sind ewig, denn sie sind.
["They are not shadows by illusion made;
I know they live for ever, for they live.">[

This great quality undoubtedly explains the universal popularity of the Gerusalemme. That poem even penetrated to classes of the community to whom, as a rule, literary poets appeal in vain. Detached passages were set to music, and sung by the people like ballads. For two centuries the gondoliers beguiled their work with the musical stanzas of the unhappy poet. Who does not remember Byron's lines?—

"In Venice Tasso's echoes are no more,
And silent rows the songless gondolier."

When they first began to be neglected is not recorded. They seem only to have been handed down orally. Alterations would inevitably creep in, and losing their accuracy, they lost also their charm.

Writing in the same stanza as Ariosto, Tasso could not fail to resemble him in some respects. They are both clear, rapid, and musical. But the style of the earlier poet is richer, stronger, more original, and, I think, in spite of an occasional want of tenderness, more truly poetical. Tasso too often indulges in conventions and common-places, hence he becomes feeble and unimpressive. To give samples of the two poets, I will quote a passage from each.

Ariosto.

A ship of the enemy approaches incautiously the fleet of Charlemagne.

"Quivi il nocchier, eh' ancor non s'era accorto
Degl' inimici, entrò con la galea,
Lasciando molte miglia addietro il porto
D'Algieri, ove calar prima volea,
Per un vento gagliardo ch' era sorto,
E spinto oltre il dover la poppa avea.
Venir tra i suoi credette, e in loco fido,
Come vien Progne al suo loquace nido.
Ma come poi l'imperiale augello,
I gigli d'oro, e i pardi vide appresso,
Restò pallido in faccia, come quello
Che 'l piede incauto d'improvviso ha messo
Sopra 'l serpente venenoso e fello,
Dal pigro sonno in mezzo l'erbe oppresso;
Che spaventato e smorto si ritira,
Fuggendo quel ch'è pien di tosco e d'ira."
"Orlando Furioso," c. xxxìx, st. 31 ani 32.

Tasso.

The Saracens hearing from the walls of Jerusalem the chorus of the Crusaders in the distance.

"Colà s'invia l'esercito canoro,
E ne suonan le valli ime e profonde,
E gli alti colli e le spelonche loro;
E da ben mille parti Eco risponde;
E quasi par che boschereccio coro
Fra quegli antri si celi e quelle fronde,
Si chiaramente replicar s'udia
Or di Cristo il gran nome, or di Maria.
D'in sulle mura ad ammirar frattanto
Cheti si stanno e attoniti i Pagani
Que' tardi avvolgimenti, e l'umil canto,
E l'insolite pompe e i riti estrani.
Poi che cessò dello spettacol santo
La novitate, i miseri profani
Alzâr le strida; e di bestemmie e d'onte
Mugì il torrente e la gran valle e 'l monte."
"Gerusalemme Liberata," c. xv, st. 11 ani 12.

Tasso's style has a pathetic air which is very taking at first sight; but when we examine it minutely, we find certain weaknesses which cannot be detected in the style of Ariosto. The magnificent passage from the Orlando Furioso is without a flaw and could not be improved. The same cannot be said of the stanzas from the Gerusalemme, musical as they are. We may be sure that Ariosto would never have been guilty of the feeble repetition of the feeble epithet, "gran nome, gran valle."

It is owing to his pathos that Tasso loses so much less in translation than Ariosto. All the renderings of the Orlando Furioso that I have seen, are somewhat colourless, even the Elizabethan translation of Harrington, and even the careful and accurate translation of Rose. The German translations of Griess and Donner are as admirable as they can possibly be, considering the great difficulties of the task, but even they do not quite succeed in reproducing the exquisite flexibility of Ariosto's style. Tasso, in many respects the most unfortunate of poets, was singularly lucky in the translators who introduced him to foreign nations. He has been translated into many languages with signal success, and with remarkably little loss of spirit and beauty. The earliest English rendering, that of Fairfax, is the best. It is not always scrupulously accurate, but it is delightfully fresh, vigorous, and musical. I will subjoin one of the most successful passages which will give the reader a favourable idea of the skill of Fairfax, and of the thoughts and conceptions of the illustrious Italian poet, illustrious in spite of the shortcomings which occasionally detract from his qualities.

The Christian Knights in search of Rinaldo, find him in the enchanted Palace of Armida.

(Gerusalemme Liberata, Canto XVI.)
I.
The palace great is builded rich and round,
And in the centre of the inmost hold
There lies a garden sweet on fertile ground,
Fairer than that where grew the trees of gold.
The cunning sprites had buildings reared around,
With doors and entries false a thousandfold.
A labyrinth they made that fortress brave,
Like Daedal's prison or Porsenna's grave.
II.
The Knights passed through the castle's largest gate.
(Though round about a hundred ports there shine),
The door leaves framed of carved silver plate
Upon their golden hinges turn and twine;
They stayed to view this work of wit and state,
The workmanship excelled the substance fine,
For all the shapes in that rich metal wrought,
Save speech, of living bodies wanted nought.
III.
Alcides there sat telling tales, and spun
Among the feeble troups of damsels mild;
(He that the fiery gates of Hell had won,
And Heaven upheld); false love stood by and smiled.
Armed with his club, fair Iole forth run,
His club with blood of monsters foul denied;
And on her back his lion's skin had she,
Too rough a bark for such a tender tree.
IV.
Beyond was made a sea, whose azure flood
The hoary froth crushed from the surges blue,
Wherein two navies great well-rangéd stood
Of warlike ships, fire from their arms out flew;
The waters burnt about their vessels good,
Such flames the gold therein enchased threw;
Cæsar his Romans hence, the Asian Kings
Thence Anthony and Indian Princes, brings;
V.
The Cyclads seemed to swim amid the main,
And hill 'gainst hill, and mount 'gainst mountain smote;
With such great fury met those armies twain,
Here burnt a ship, there sank a bark or boat;
Here darts and wildfire flew, there drowned or slain
Of Princes dead the bodies fleet and float;
Here Cæsar wins, and yonder conquered been
The eastern ships, there fled the Egyptian Queen.
VI.
Antonius eke himself to flight betook,
The Empire lost to which he would aspire;
Yet fled not he, nor flight for fear forsook,
But followed her, drawn on by fond desire.
Well might you see, within his troubled look,
Strive and contend love, courage, shame and ire;
Oft looked he back, oft gazed he on the fight,
But oftener on his mistress and her flight.
VII.
Then in the secret creeks of fruitful Nile,
Cast in her lap he would sad Death await.
And in the pleasure of her lovely smile
Sweeten the bitter stroke of cursed Fate.
All this did art with curious hand compile
In the rich metal of that princely gate.
The Knights these stories viewed, first and last;
Which seen, they forward pressed, and in they passed.
VIII.
As through his channel crook'd Meander glides
With turns and twines, and rolls now to and fro,
Whose streams run forth there to the salt sea-sides,
Here back return, and to their spring-ward go;
Such crooked paths, such ways this palace hides;
Yet all the maze their map described so
That through the labyrinth they go in fine
As Theseus did by Ariadne's line.
IX.
When they had passed all those troubled ways,
The garden sweet spread forth her green to shew;
The moving crystal from the fountains plays,
Fair trees, high plants, strange herbs, and flowers new,
Sun-shiny hills, dales hid from Phœbus' rays,
Groves, arbours, mossy caves at orice they view;
And that which beauty most, most wonder brought,
Nowhere appeared the art which all this wrought.
X.
So with the rude, the polished mingled was,
That natural seemed all, and every part.
Nature would craft in counterfeiting pass,
And imitate her imitator art.
Mild was the air, the clouds were clear as glass,
The trees no whirlwind felt nor tempest's smart,
But ere their fruit drop off, the blossom comes,
This springs, that falls, that ripeneth, and this blooms.
XI.
The leaves upon the self-same bough did hide,
Beside the young, the old and ripened fig.
Here fruit was green, there ripe with vermeil side,
The apples new and old grew on one twig.
The fruitful vine her arms spread high and wide,
That bended underneath their clusters big;
The grapes were tender here, hard, young and sour,
There, purple, ripe and nectar sweet forth pour.
XII.
The joyous birds, hid under greenwood shade,
Sung many notes on every branch and bough;
The wind that in the leaves and waters played,
With murmur sweet now sang, and whistled now;
Ceased the birds, the wind loud answer made,
And while they sang, it rumbled soft and low;
Thus, were it hap or cunning, chance or art,
The wind in this strange music bore his part.
XIII.
With party-coloured plumes and purple bill
A wondrous bird among the rest there flew,
That in plain speech sung lovelays loud and shrill,
Her leden[1] was like human language true;
So much she talked, and with such wit and skill
That strange it seemed how much good she knew;
Her feathered fellows all stood hushed to hear,
Dumb was the wind, the waters silent were.
XIV.
"The gently-budding rose (quoth she) behold,
The first scent peeping forth with virgin beams,
Half ope, half shut, her beauties doth upfold
In their dear leaves, and less seen fairer seems;
And after, spreads them forth more broad and bold,
Then languisheth and dies in last extremes;
Nor seems the same that decked bed and bower
Of many a lady late and paramour;
XV.
"So in the passing of a day doth pass
The bud and blossom of the life of man,
Nor e'er doth flourish more, but like the gratis
Cut down, becometh withered, pale and wan;
Oh, gather then the rose while time thou has:
Short is the day, done when it scant began;
Gather the rose of love which yet thou may'st;
Loving be loved; embracing, be embraced."
XVI.
She ceased; and as approving all she spoke,
The choir of birds their heavenly tune renew;
The turtles sighed, and sighs with kisses broke;
The fowls to shades unseen by pairs withdrew;
It seemed the laurel chaste and stubborn oak,
And all the gentle trees on earth that grew,
It seemed the land, the sea and heaven above
All breathed out fancy sweet and sighed out love.
XVII.
Through all this music rare and strong consent
Of strange allurements, sweet 'bove mean and measure,
Severe, firm, constant, still the Knights forth went,
Hardening their hearts 'gainst false, enticing pleasure;
'Twixt leaf and leaf their sight before they sent,
And after crept themselves at ease and leisure
Till they beheld the Queen sit with their knight
Beside the lake, shaded with boughs from sight.
* * * * * * *
XXVII.
The twain that hidden in the bushes, were,
Before the Prince in glittering arms appear.
XXVIII.
As the fierce steed for age withdrawn from war,
Wherein the glorious beast had always won,
That in vile rest, from fright sequestered far,
Feeds with the mares at large, his service done:
If arms he sees or hears the trumpet's jar,
He neigheth loud, and thither fast doth run,
And wisheth on his back the armed knight,
Longing for jousts, for tournaments and fight:
XXIX.
So fared Rinaldo when the glorious light
Of their bright harness glistered in his eyes;
His noble spirit awaked at that sight.
His blood began to warm, his heart to rise;
Though drunk with ease, devoid of wonted might,
On sleep till then his weakened virtue lies.
Ubaldo forward stepped and to him held
Of diamonds clear that pure and precious shield.
XXX.
Upon the targe his looks amazed he bent,
And therein all his wanton habit spied,
His civet, balm, and perfumes redolent,
How from his locks they smoked and mantle wide
His sword that many a Pagan stout had shent,[2]
Bewrapped with flowers, hung idly by his side,
So nicely decked that it seemed the knight
Wore it for fashion sake, but not for fight.
XXXI.
As when from sleep and idle dreams abrayed[3]
A man awaked calls home his wits again,
So in beholding his attire he played,
But yet to view himself could not sustain;
His looks he downward cast and nought he said,
Grieved, shamèd, sad, he would have diéd fain;
And oft he wished the earth or ocean wide
Would swallow him, and so his errors hide.
XXXII.
Ubaldo took the time, and thus began—
"All Europe now, and Asia be in war
And all that Christ adore and fame have won
In battaille strong, in Syria fighting are;
But thee alone, Bertoldo's noble son,
This little corner keeps, exiled far
From all the world, buried in sloth and shame,
A carpet champion for a wanton dame!
XXXIII.
"What letharge hath in drowsiness append[4]
Thy courage thus? What sloth doth thee infect?
Up! up! Our camp and Godfrey for thee send,
Thee fortune, praise and victory expect;
Come fatal champion; bring to happy end
This enterprise begun, and all that sect
(Which oft thou shaken hast) to earth full low
With thy sharp brand strike down, kill, overthrow."
XXXIV.
This said, the noble infant stood a space
Confused, speechless, senseless, ill, ashamed,
But when that shame to just disdain gave place,
To fierce disdain, from courage sprung untamed,
Another redness blushèd through his face,
Whence worthy anger shone, displeasure flamed;
His nice attire in scorn he rent and tore,
For of his bondage vile that witness bore;
XXXV.
That done he hastèd from the charmed fort,
And through the maze passed with his searchers twain.
Armida of her mount and chiefest port
Wondered to find the furious keeper slain;
Awhile she feared, but she knew in short
That her dear lord was fled; then saw she plain
(Ah! woeful sight!) how from her gates the man
In haste and fear, in wrath and anger ran.

[1] Leden—language.

[2] Shent—Iniured.

[3] Abrayed—Awaked.

[4] Append—Tied-up.

[CHAPTER X.]

MARINO, CHIABRERA, FILICAIA AND OTHER POETS OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY.

The Annals of Italy during the Seventeenth Century were not signalised by disasters as terrible as those of the Sixteenth Century. The country was not desolated by the invasion of foreign conquerors. Rome was not sacked for a second time. Florence was not convulsed with civil dissensions. But the nation was sick at heart, and the tyranny of her rulers gave only the choice of submission or death. Lombardy, Naples and Sicily were groaning under the iron yoke of Spain. The petty sovereigns ruled with irresponsible despotism over their dominions. Venice and Genoa boasted that they were free; but the freedom of Venice consisted in the rule of a suspicious oligarchy, guiltless, indeed, of wanton oppression, but upholding its rule by merciless punishment of the slightest disaffection. The Papal States were exhausted in their endeavour to minister to the splendour of the families of a rapid succession of Popes, for never was nepotism more rampant than in the Seventeenth Century, and the illustrious houses of Rome, the Aldobrandini, the Borghese, the Pamphili, the Barberini, the Chigi, the Altieri, the Odescalchi, the Albani, date their greatness from that epoch. The Catholic reaction subsequent to the Reformation established a rigid code of theology, from which it was fatal to dissent. Leo X had underrated the importance of the Reformation, but his successors made up for the error by exercising unceasing vigilance over their spiritual subjects. The only rising in favour of freedom was that of Masaniello in Naples, which was rather a riot than a rebellion. Still, some great minds pined for happier things, and the finest flashes of poetry in the Century were kindled by the fire of patriotism.

It has always been the policy of despots to supply their subjects with plenty of amusements. Accordingly we find in the Seventeenth Century records of gorgeous pageants and brilliant theatrical entertainments, and the already waning wealth of the nation was further exhausted by reckless prodigality of governments and individuals. Italian Opera took its origin early in the Century, and Rinuccini was the first Librettist. The theatre more and more engaged the attention of writers, but nothing remarkable was produced, with the exception, perhaps, of the tragedies of Cardinal Delfino, Patriarch of Aquilea, which present here and there touches worthy of a fine poet. The death-scene of his Cleopatra bears a striking resemblance to the corresponding scene in Anthony and Cleopatra, although he doubtless never so much as heard of Shakespeare's name.

Battista Guarini, who died in 1612, was pre-eminent, by reason of his Pastor Fido, among writers of Pastoral Plays; but these insipid and unreal creations have no attraction for modern readers. The Pastor Fido is a work of much skill and ingenuity; but it is tainted with that fondness for quibbles and conceits which disfigures so much of the literature of the Seventeenth Century, not only in Italy, but also in other countries. If Italy had her Marino, Spain had her Gongora, France her Benserade, and England her Lyly, Donne, and Cowley. It is curious to remark how a literary fashion spreads from one country to another, and in that age of scanty travel and difficult communication, it is doubly curious. Thus, in the early part of the Nineteenth Century, Byronism became a universal epidemic.

The love of far-fetched conceits originated in the latter half of the Sixteenth Century. We see much of it in Shakespeare's early comedies, and the traces of it in Tasso gave ground to Boileau one hundred years later to sneer at those who preferred "the tinsel of Tasso to the gold of Virgil."

"A Racan, à Malherbe, préférer Théophile,
Et le clinquant du Tasse à tout l'or de Virgile."

It is, however, unjust to blame Tasso for an inordinate profusion of conceits. He presents some, it is true, but they are almost always ingenious and imaginative, and not so far-fetched as to be unnatural.

The poet who really set the fashion of fantastic ingenuity, was Giambattista Marino (or Marini, for both forms of the name seem to have been used by his contemporaries), a Neapolitan, born in 1569, died in 1625. His chief work is the Adone an epic poem in twenty enormous cantos on the loves of Venus and Adonis. If it were not for its appalling length, the poem would have much to recommend it. He also wrote other epics, not quite so voluminous: La Gerusalemme Distrutta, La Strage degl' Innocenti, on the Massacre of the Innocents, and numerous lyric effusions. When he was at Turin, he had a vulgar dispute with a rival poet of the name of Murtola, and numerous satires and pasquinades were the result. Murtola was so incensed at the biting sarcasms of Marino, that he waylaid him one evening and fired a pistol. The shot killed, not Marino, but a favourite courtier of the Duke of Savoy, who was walking with the poet. Murtola was thrown into a dungeon, but Marino interceded for his fallen rival, and it is a curious illustration of the absolute power of the Princes of those days, that all proceedings against Murtola were stopped, and he was granted a free pardon. Marino had reason to regret his intercession for so unworthy an object. Murtola accidentally discovered a copy of verses written by Marino many years previously, reflecting on the Duke. He lost no time in forwarding them to the Duke, who was so incensed that he would doubtless have inflicted upon Marino the punishment from which he had saved the treacherous Murtola, had not Marino prudently taken refuge in flight.

He repaired to Paris, where he was enthusiastically received, and Marie de Medici, the second wife of Henry IV, and Regent during the minority of Louis XIII, gave him a large pension and many other tokens of Royal favour. He enjoyed full leisure to complete his Adone, and when it was published in 1623, it fully satisfied the expectations of his admirers. He returned to his native city of Naples, where a magnificent ovation awaited him. He did not, however, live long to enjoy his triumph, and Italy had to mourn his loss in 1625.

Marino exactly hit the taste of his contemporaries, and the praises lavished upon him are almost incredible in their exaggeration. The poet Claudio Achillini wrote to him from Bologna: "There is not a doubt in my mind that you are the greatest poet the world has ever seen." Cardinal Bentivoglio, one of the most brilliant intellects of the age, addressed him in terms hardly less rapturous.

There must assuredly have been something remarkable in Marino's works to produce such a dazzling effect on his contemporaries.

In early youth Marino formed a theory that a poet in order to succeed ought to astonish his readers. In every line he wrote, it was his object to excite astonishment. He fully succeeded. The most ingenious thoughts, the most dazzling metaphors, the most vivid descriptions, are crowded together in his pages to such an extent that it is impossible to deny that he was prodigally gifted by Nature with some of the rarest attributes of thought and imagination. But his works present no human interest, no patriotic fire, and no religious inspiration. They are fantastic and unreal, but then they do not pretend to be anything else. His imagination presented him with an inexhaustible succession of brilliant and striking images, and provided they glittered and sparkled in his verse, he was careless whether they were true to nature or consistent with each other. He is a delightful poet to read in detached passages when the mind wants to indulge in the refreshing vagaries of fancy. He is very even in his style; possessing consummate mastery over his language, the most elaborate difficulties of rhyme and metre present no obstacles to him. I do not think that he is in any respect inferior to Spenser in strength of poetical inspiration, and he is certainly less heavy and slow. But the subject of his principal work is frivolous, and it is, in truth, a mere bubble of the imagination, made to expand, glitter, and burst. But for that purpose it is much too long. Heroic thoughts alone should assume heroic proportions. Even in Ariosto, we have the same effect too often. Much more so in the Adone. Marino had nothing of the classical simplicity of Ariosto. He probably disdained it as insipid. But high seasoning involves rapid satiety, and the mind derives no nourishment from condiments so artificial. This circumstance alone solves the problem why Marino has fallen into such neglect. Take each stanza of his poems and consider it separately, and it appears a marvel of fancy, ingenuity, and musical diction. But take his productions as a whole, and it cannot be denied that they are wanting in sustained interest, in human pathos, and in philosophic intention. Indeed, he had nothing of a philosopher. No great problems occupy his mind; no sublime aspirations raise him above sublunary things. He spends the wealth of his intellect, not on noble monuments, but on filigree trinkets. Hence, probably, his popularity. His contemporaries did not want to be shaken with tempestuous sublimity, or led to an abyss of profound meditation. They wanted to be lulled into voluptuous repose by a singer skilful enough to delight their fancy with strains sufficiently beautiful to compensate the absence of higher qualities, and yet not too elevated to soar beyond the range of the limited horizon to which they confined themselves. Hence Marino's brilliant success. But he sacrificed to immediate popularity the admiration and gratitude of future ages, which with his prodigal gifts of song and imagination he might possibly have acquired.

As a sample of Marino's style, I subjoin the beautiful opening stanza of the seventh canto of the Adone.

"Musica e Poesia son due sorelle,
Ristoratrici delle afflitte genti,
De' rei pensier le torbide procelle
Con liete rime a serenar possenti.
Non ha di queste il mondo arti più belle,
O più salubri all' affannate menti,
Nè cor la Scizia ha barbaro cotanto,
Se non è tigre, a cui non piaccia il canto."

As Marino aspired to be the first epic poet of his age, Gabriello Chiabrera, of Savona, aspired to be its first lyric poet, and he took Pindar for his model. He obtained much applause, but it may be doubted whether he was quite so successful as his contemporary. He has nothing like Marino's teeming wealth of imagination, and his more ambitious Odes are often turgid and heavy. On the other hand, it must be allowed that his most successful passages are splendid and sonorous. The Adone is the best of the long-winded Italian epics with the exception of the two unapproachable masterpieces, the Orlando Furioso and the Gerusalemme Liberata. But it cannot be said that Chiabrera comes as near to Petrarch as Marino does to his two illustrious predecessors. He is full of those hackneyed mythological allusions which encumbered poetry up to the end of the Eighteenth Century, nor has he the excuse of indulging in them for the purpose of conjuring up gorgeous and romantic visions. His powers of description are but slight, a remarkable circumstance, as his powers of versification were beyond doubt very extensive. Some of his lighter poems are gay and vivacious, and he wrote a series of epitaphs known to English readers by Wordsworth's noble translation. Not often did Chiabrera indulge in a strain so natural and impassioned as the following:

"Not without heavy grief of heart did he
On whom the duty fell (for at that time
The father sojourned in a distant land)
Deposit in the hollow of this tomb
A brother's child most tenderly beloved!
Francesco was the name the youth had borne,
Pozzobonelli his illustrious house;
And when beneath this stone the corse was laid,
The eyes of all Savona streamed with tears.
Alas! the twentieth April of his life
Had scarcely flowered; and at this early time
By genuine virtue he inspired a hope
That greatly cheered his country; to his kin
He promised comfort; and the flattering thoughts
His friends had in their fondness entertained,
He suffered not to languish or decay.
Now is there not great reason to break forth
Into a passionate lament? O Soul!
Short while a Pilgrim in our nether world,
Do thou enjoy the calm empyreal air;
And round this earthly tomb let roses rise,
An everlasting spring! in memory
Of that delightful fragrance which was once
From thy mild manners quietly exhaled."

The following epitaph on an Admiral is also fine:

"There never breathed a man who, when his life
Was closing, might not of that life relate
Toils long and hard. The warrior will report
Of wounds, and bright swords flashing in the field,
And blast of trumpets. He who hath been doomed
To bow his forehead in the Courts of Kings
Will tell of fraud and never-ceasing hate,
Envy and heart-inquietude, derived
From intricate cabals of treacherous friends.
I, who on shipboard lived from earliest youth,
Could represent the countenance horrible
Of the vexed waters, and the indignant rage
Of Auster and Bootes. Fifty years
Over the well-steered galleys did I rule.
From huge Pelorus to the Atlantic pillars,
Rises no mountain to mine eyes unknown;
And the broad gulfs I traversed oft and oft.
Of every cloud which in the heavens might stir
I knew the force; and hence the rough sea's pride
Availed not to my Vessel's overthrow.
What noble pomp and frequent have not I
On regal decks beheld! yet in the end
I learned that one poor moment can suffice
To equalise the lofty and the low.
We sail the sea of life—a Calm one finds,
And one a Tempest—and, the voyage o'er,
Death is the quiet haven of us all.
If more of my condition ye would know,
Savona was my birthplace, and I sprang
Of noble parents; seventy years and three
Lived I—then yielded to a slow desease."

A poet who may not have equalled Chiabrera in the general excellence of his work, but who far surpassed him in sudden and brilliant flashes of inspiration, was Vincenzio Da Filicaia, a Florentine, born in 1642, died in 1707.[1] A few of his very finest verses are so renowned, that when we turn to an edition of his complete works, we are disagreeably surprised to find that the bulk of his poetry is far from coming up to his most striking passages. He is often conventional and turgid, sometimes heavy and awkward. He has not Chiabrera's technical skill, nor has he the vivacity of lighter poets. Hallam complained of a want of sunshine in his verse, and in truth his elegies are occasionally doleful where they ought to be tragic. The man seems to have been greater than his works; but when a chord of his lyre touches his heart, he breaks forth into song so noble and impassioned that he fully deserves to be acclaimed the greatest Italian poet in the Seventeenth Century. First and foremost stands his celebrated Sonnet on Italy, especially the four opening lines:

"Italia! Italia! O tu cui feo la sorte
Dono infelice di bellezza, ond'hai
Funesta dote d'infiniti guai
Che in fronte scritti per gran doglia porte."

But there is something heavy and slow in the continuation and conclusion.

Superior in general excellence, though not possessing the inimitable pathos of the passage just quoted, is the sonnet beginning:

"Dov'è, Italia, il tuo braccio? e a che ti servi
Tu dell' altrui? non è, s'io scorgo il vero,
Da chi t'offende, il difensor men fero,
Ambo nemici son, ambo fur servi."

Another sonnet on the same subject opens very impressively:

"Vanno a un termine sol, con passi eguali,
Del verno, Italia, e di tua vita l'ore;
Nè ancor sai quante di sua man lavore
A tuo danno il Destin saette e strali."

So does a fourth:

"Sono, Italia, per te discordia e morte
In due nomi una cosa; e a si gran male
Un mal s'aggiunge non minor, che frale
Non se' abbastanza, nè abbastanza forte."

Christina, Queen of Sweden, took up her residence in Rome after her abdication, and delighted in attracting a brilliant circle to her Court. Filicaia does not seem to have left his native city, but she extended her patronage to his sons, and he celebrated her munificence in many odes, and wrote a noble Sonnet on her death. In one of his poems he exhorts Rome to rejoice in Christina's presence:

"Non lungi là dal gelido Boöte
Sorse indi a poco imperiosa Stella,
Ma fausta si, che se mentir non vuoi,
Dire a ragion tu puoi:
Antica Roma, a par di te son bella."

Filicaia received immense praise and universal renown for a series of Odes on the Liberation of Vienna from the Turks by John Sobiesky, King of Poland, in 1683. No lyric poems in the Italian language are more universally known. They are undoubtedly splendid and effective compositions. They inspired Wordsworth with the following Sonnet:

'Oh, for a kindling touch from that pure flame
Which ministered, erewhile, to a sacrifice
Of gratitude, beneath Italian skies,
In words like these: 'Up, Voice of Song! proclaim
'Thy saintly rapture with celestial aim;
'For lo! the Imperial City stands released
'From bondage threatened by the embattled East,
'And Christendom respires, from guilt and shame
'Redeemed, from miserable fear set free
'By one day's feat, one mighty victory.
'Chant the deliverer's praise in every tongue;
'The Cross shall spread, the Crescent hath waxed dim,
'He conquering, as in joyful Heaven is sung;
'He conquering through God, and God through Him.'"

The poems rise to the occasion, but at times they are more rhetorical than poetical, and the constant apostrophes to God to wake up from His sleep are not in the best taste. Filicaia unfortunately devotes almost as much eulogy to the ungrateful Leopold as to the heroic Sobiesky, and the grovelling adulation with which he addresses Royal and Imperial personages, detracts from the loftiness of the whole.

Filicaia was remarkable for tenderness. One of the finest of his sonnets is on Divine Providence:

"Qual madre i figli con pietoso affetto,"

in which thought and pathos are blended with admirable art. Some of his sonnets are strikingly ingenious. Very beautiful is that on the earth-quake of Sicily, in 1683:

"Quì pur foste, o Città; nè in voi quì resta
Testimon di voi stesse un sasso solo,
In cui si scriva: Quì s'aperse il suolo,
Qui fu Catania, e Siracusa è questa!"

Very beautiful are some of his religious verses:

"Avess' io scritto meno, e assai più pianto;
E stil men terso avessi, alma più bella,
Men chiaro ingegno, e cor più puro e santo!"

The final impression left by Filicaia's poems is that he was a great nature rather than a perfect poet, and that it is owing to the loftiness of his spirit rather than to the mastery of his art, that his pages, too often cumbrous and conventional, are irradiated with flashes so brilliant and striking that they leave an indelible impression on the reader and place the poet on a pedestal more lofty and honourable than many writers, gifted with keener wit and more vivid imagination, can ever hope to ascend.

As Chiabrera took Pindar for his model, so did Fulvio Testi endeavour to appear in the character of an Italian Horace. And, in truth, he had many qualities to justify his undertaking the task. He has wit, ingenuity, clear and pointed expression, and a mind genuinely poetical. He seems to have developed early, and some of his best pieces were written before he was twenty-five. He dedicated an edition of his poems to Charles Emmanuel, Duke of Savoy, and thereby incurred the wrath of the Spanish Governor of Lombardy, and had to take refuge in flight. The Duke of Modena became his patron and gave him a pension, and his successor, Francis I, was even more favourable to the poet, and took him in his suite to Madrid in 1638, when Philip IV of Spain conferred upon him a lucrative office. Testi resembled Ariosto in being made Governor of the Province of Garfagnana, and Tasso in exciting the most intense hatred and jealousy. For some unexplained reason, he was arrested early in 1646 and thrown into prison, where he met his death on the twenty-eighth of August. It is suspected that he was executed within the precincts of the prison, but nothing certain is known; all is suspicion and mystery. If he has not left anything very memorable, his poems are at least spirited and elegant, and, unlike many of his contemporaries, he is never dull and ponderous. Some of his letters are witty and vivacious.

The great painter, Salvator Rosa, often amused his leisure with writing verses, and if his attention had not been so strongly directed to the sister art of painting, he might have achieved notable success in poetry. Some of his ballads are spontaneous and natural, and his satires show genuine powers of observation and ridicule. That on the painters of his day is, perhaps, the best, and is well worth reading.

Another satirist of merit was Benedetto Menzini. Like Filicaia, he enjoyed the patronage of Christina of Sweden. Never, since the terrible catastrophe of the sack of Rome under Clement VII, did the Eternal City present such a magnificent aspect as in the latter part of the Seventeenth Century. The stately days of Leo X seemed to be revived. Alexander VII signalised his Pontificate by extraordinary splendour. The colonnade enclosing the square before St. Peter's was erected by Bernini in his reign. Christina vied with the Pope in the magnificence of her Court. The Ambassadors to the Vatican endeavoured to out-shine each other in pomp and luxury. If Menzini who lived in the heart of this splendid society, did not transfer more than a dim reflection of its brilliancy to his pages, he writes at least as a man who has seen and observed much, and he is neither a pedant nor an empty declaimer. He wrote an Art of Poetry—in verse, almost as good as that written in France at the same period by Boileau. His sonnets and serious poems are much more conventional. He was a good Latinist, but the great series of Italian writers of Latin poems closed with the sparkling epigrams of the brothers Amaltei.

Another lyric poet attracted to Rome by the liberality of the Queen of Sweden was Alessandro Guidi. He found a patron not only in that Princess, but also, early in the Eighteenth Century, in Pope Clement XI, whose Latin homilies he turned into Italian verse. Previous writers had, in the composition of their Odes, observed the most rigid rules of metre and rhyme. The same stanza, the same order of rhymes, was maintained throughout each poem. Guidi, whether from want of skill, or from indolence, or from love of originality, was thé first to discard this iron regularity, and to write Odes in irregular stanzas, even occasionally leaving verses without giving them a succeeding rhyme. This was followed at intervals by other writers, until it culminated in the boundless freedom of Leopardi, who, in his last productions, introduces rhymes so sparingly as to make his metre little more than a modification of blank verse. After Leopardi's imitators had tired the public ear with their slipshod effusions, a reaction set in, and regular stanzas are now more than ever in favour, the long and elaborate stanzas of Filicaia being, however, neglected for the lighter and more pointed quatrains.

By this license, strongly censured at the time, Guidi undoubtedly gained greater freedom of movement, and he is never obliged to force his thoughts and twist his phrases. But it cannot be said that his conceptions are more natural and unconventional than those of his predecessors. He has no great glow of imagination, no rainbow hues of fancy, no depth of thought, nor has he any powers of pathos or tenderness. But he is always tasteful and scholarly, and his works are perfectly free from any taint of coarseness or vulgarity.

Alessandro Marchetti was remarkable rather for his magnificent translation of Lucretius than for any of his original productions. The book was considered in Italy of a tendency too dangerous to be allowed to pass the censorship, and it had to be printed in London and smuggled surreptitiously into the country of its origin.