who remain in bed till twelve, and read only wicked French novels, brought up in unconsciousness of classical studies by dingy priest tutors, who run errands and carry lapdogs for their pupils' mothers. All this there is of course, for unless we placed the ignorant apathy by the side of the restless inquisitiveness we should give a false picture of the eighteenth century, whose characteristic peculiarity was that it united the evil things that remain with the good things that are coming. All this there isignorance, sloth, and corruption; but there are also good qualities. There are the innumerable ladies who, as soon as they have exchanged the convent for their husband's house, become refined, literary, nay learned; poetesses, composers, and presiders over intellectual society, the friends, patronesses, and counsellors of the greatest writers in Italy, yet without aspiring to the position of the Dottoressa Bassi, who lectured on Newton's Optics before she was twenty. There are also the innumerable young men, elegant dancers, and fencers, and sturdy players at racket, who in their youth are spoken of by wellknown writers as of excellent morals and great literary acquirements, and who, later in life, when dancing, and fencing, and racket have been abandoned, collect libraries, write verses and satires on surrounding frivolity, take interest in agriculture, imitate the Georgics in poems on the cultivation of rice or silk, and in a few places keep up some amount of

The

industry and commerce.2 domestic life is strange enough; the marriages are mostly made up by the families, though, according to Baretti, not usually against the desire of the young people. The husband and wife are not permitted to be on bad terms, yet there is the inevitable cavaliere servente, chosen by the husband or the wife's family, obsequious, useful, tiresome, meddlesome, treated with contemptuous consideration, often much in the way of both husband and wife, as Goldoni shows him in the play, where Don Roberto and Donna Eularia run away from town and bury themselves in a village where society will not force cavalieri serventi on to them; that he disturbs family peace or endangers family ties none even of the satirists, no, not even Parini, will admit; he is a respectable institution. Another institution is that of putting all the daughters for whom no eligible husbands can be found into rich convents, where they can enjoy comparative freedom; and of mak ing the younger sons enter the Church or some military order, unless they can turn magistrate or something similar. The upper middle classes do without cavalieri serventi, convents, and military orders, and make their sons lawyers, doctors, professors, or priests, commerce, except in the sea-ports, being reduced to shopkeeping. The social life is a queer mixture of gaiety and dullness, unless we go into the madly spendthrift society of the dissolute Venetians or Frenchified Lombards and Floren

tines; the same people meet day after day; everyone is intimately acquainted with his neighbours. The literati-and every educated person belongs more or less to them-sit in the bookseller's shop, and discuss new works and enter into a literary conversation with any stranger who comes in, as the amiable people at Padua did with Goethe when he was in search of Palladio's works. They meet also in the garden or palace of one of the company, and the lofty rooms, hung with faded tapestry and portraits of worthies in black doublets and scarlet caps, or shining with new gilt stucco and high-backed white and gold chairs, are crowded with senators in full-bottomed wigs, poor literary priests in rusty little cloaks, smart young men with their hair tied in quenes and their pockets crammed full of sonnets, and beautiful ladies with rouged cheeks and longsleeved brocade dresses; they read and recite verses, talk of the new books from Paris, and of the new opera from Naples; play at cards and sing. Often, in the long winter evenings, they learn some French tragedy, translated or imitated by one of the party, and act it with all posssible solemnity; nay the noble ladies and gentlemen even dance ballets, as was particularly the fashion at Verona, where Ippolito Pindemonti, Knight of St. John of Jerusalem, gained such applause in performing the part of Pygmalion that he determined to turn balletdancer and unite his fortunes to those of the famous Le Picq, a plan which, luckily for poetry, he was prevented from executing. In some towns, Bologna for instance, the young men have little tournaments; in the winter, if it snow very hard, they drive sledges, and, incredible though it may sound, the young ladies of the highest birth go out on riding parties dressed in

almost masculine fashion, no one taking offence thereat, and the poets telling them that in this garb they look like Paris and Endymion.3 In the autumn the nobles retire for the vintage to their villas, from whose belvederes they can see the old, silent, many-towered town, and their friends hurrying to and fro on the dusty road. The villas are never without literary guests; some of them, like the splendid Villa Albergati, near Bologna, contain large theatres, and even in comparatively poor country-houses there are enthusiasts, like Count Giacomo Gozzi, who make their children act when scarcely more than babies. A place of villeggiatura, some shady nook, or breezy hillside near a town, is a collection of five or six large villas, whose owners live in each other's houses, meet twice and thrice a day, play at cards, go out shooting together, read to each other, and saunter about the primly laid-out grounds, or among the upturned fields strewn with decaying leaves. The lawyers, and priests, and poor literati, who have been unable to leave the stifling city, are not forgotten, and presents of grapes, figs, mushrooms, and game are sent to them by beautiful blue-stockings, and are duly acknowledged in verse and paid for with sonnets on lapdogs and elegies on canary birds. Then there are little musical farces performed in the open air, in suburbs or villages, and to them rush all the listless villa inhabitants, and laugh at the drollness of the music or the inexhaustible witticisms of the masks. Once or twice a year the great theatre is put into order, the senators, prelates, or delegated managers enter into treaty with some great performer, male or female, and the whole town is in a tumult of excitement. A new opera is composed and brought out

in the presence of all the population and of innumerable visitors from neighbouring places, amidst a shower of sonnets and flowers, occasionally interspersed with oranges and medlars thrown at the head of an offending composer, as he sits directing the performance at his harpsichord. Faction runs high for rival singers; people at the coffee-houses fight with sedan-chair sticks to defend the reputation of their favourite, and in the theatre almost die of rapture; the powdered Achilles or Regulus becomes the tyrant of the place, bullies the nobles and prelates, and condescends to permit the ladies to wear five portraits of him at a time. This annual musical enthusiasm, while showing the life that remains in the people, serves at the same time to dispel for the moment what is trivial and local in Italian civilisation.

Such a state of society was admirably suited to produce a vast amount of worthless poetry. For, while literature had got to be considered as a sort of social amusement, it had by no means gained the honourable independence of the other arts and sciences, and a man of letters, although doubtless considering himself as the perfection of the human type, lived either in a more limited or in a less stable fashion than a surgeon, a painter, an architect, or even a singer Benedetto Marcello's virtuoso remarked to a great poet that the position of literati was far less honourable than his own, as singers had always plenty of money while men of letters were usually starving. Nor was this entirely erroneous; the man of letters, who was neither a noble nor a well-endowed priest, nor a well-paid lawyer or professor, and who, according to Baretti, had no chance of reasonable remuneration for his literary productions, the profits of which belonged entirely to the publisher; the man

of letters who was nothing but a man of letters, was necessarily more or less of an adventurer, living off flattery and humiliation. His life was spent in continual efforts to obtain some fixed employment, which, if he was nothing more than a poet, was naturally more or less a sinecure, and in the gift of some great personage; most often the employment was promised and not given, or, if given, taken away from caprice, and the poet had to continue his vagabond life, hunting for dedication fees, translations, odd jobs, and occasional dinners. The happiest thing for such a poet was to live in the midst of literary nobles, who would give him lodging and food for a minimum of flattery instead of making him loiter_about ministerial antechambers. Literature was a trade, but scarcely an independent or honourable one, for what was sold were not books, but dedications of books. Romance literature, that rich field for poor mediocrities, did not exist in Italy, the few novels that were read then being translations from Marivaux, Le Sage, or Richardson. Theatrical literature could hardly be said to exist either; there was no tragic stage whatever, for there were only singers and mask comedians, the few tragedies written for the closet by men like Maffei and Martello, and the translations from the French, amply sufficing for private performance. There was only the old mask comedy, which consisted mainly of mere adaptations of old Italian and Spanish plays, all the best scenes of which were left unwritten and were filled up by the wonderful extemporary performance of the Brighellas, Truffaldinos, and Tartaglias who had taken possession of comedy ever since the fall of Italian national literature and the reign of dialects in the seventh century; nor was it till Goldoni that Italian written comedy reappeared. There remained, it is true,

the opera stage, which was as splendid as its rivals were miserable, but in a time when the same play could be set to different music twice or thrice by the same composer, Metastasio's operas were quite sufficient, being, as they were, a mine of beautiful dramatic and lyric poetry. There remained, therefore, nothing but the smaller forms of lyric poetry-the ode, the elegy, and above all the sonnet; and luckily, as people could not live off such trifles, especially when the market was overstocked with them, the number of poets who were not something else besides was-as indeed is still the case in Italyvery small.

Here we have, then, a national literature in which the tragic and the comic stage are respectively monopolised by two men, Metastasio and Goldoni, from which the epic is excluded by the very nature of the civilisation, which could afford neither natural nor imaginary historical colouring, in which the minor lyric forms, the ode, the canzone, the elegy, and the sonnet, are not spontaneous, but maintained by mere scholarly habit, and in which these latter forms are yet the commonest, because within the reach of almost everyone. And what are the subjects of this lyric poetry, whose forms, well-nigh petrified, belong to very different states of civilisation? All political subjects are excluded because there is no political interest in a country cut up into little despotic governments, mostly of foreign extraction, and in this line there remain only general lamenta tion over the decline of Italian arms and influence since the days of ancient Rome-lamentations which, if sometimes genuinely felt, are yet too vague and aimless either to alarm the police or to interest the reader. Then there are religious lyrics, but in the eighteenth century religious ardour is not

sufficiently strong to be poetical, and when a man writes canzoni to the Virgin and sonnets on Judas in the style of those of Bettinelli, and Lamberti, and Varano, we cannot help thinking him either narrowminded or hypocritical. After political and religious subjects come personal ones, but the individual was not much more poetical than the patriot or the believer; neither married life nor conventional cavaliere-serventism was prolific of inspiration, and as to unhappy and ill-fated affections, never surely were fewer to be found than among the Italian poets of the last century; not that these good people were without such sorrows, but the time had passed when men did not shrink from weeping in public over their dead loves, while consoling themselves with living ones, like Dante, Petrarch, and Lorenzo de' Medici, and the time had not yet come when romanticism taught them to alleviate their woes by retailing them to the public, and to tear open their bleeding wounds for the amusement of their readers. There were doubtless Werthers and Consalvos, but they preferred to keep their misfortunes hidden, and to write poems on the cultivation of silkworms, or on the absurdities of pedants, rather than declare themselves ready to commit suicide for their Charlottes, and to be kissed when corpses by their Elviras. Lyric poetry-we mean the poetry which is lyric in spirit as well as in metre-requires the constant appearance of the poet himself, the constant laying bare of the poet's personal feelings, and, whether from obtuseness of feeling, reserve, or any other cause, the Italian poets of the last century could not and would not make themselves their own subject-so much so that Rolli takes care to impress on his reader that his love poems are all addressed to ladies as purely imaginary as his feelings towards them

yet lyrics were written in plenty, very correct and elegant in language, and very cool and vague in sentiment. There are the elegiac patriotic pieces, in which, after a splendid description of ancient Rome, and the loudest lamentations over the fallen state of Italy, we are informed that the man, the hero, the demigod has come from whom the country expects deliverance from her woes, and this hero and demigod may be a viceroy of Naples, a Venetian procuratore, a Tuscan senator, or, as Manfredi thinks, Don Annibale Albani, 'who with universal applause has just taken his doctor's degree at Urbino.'

There are the long, intensely subtle, and metaphysical canzoni to ladies taking the veil, who, either forced into the convent by their families or entering it from worldly disappointment and ennui, are supposed to be so many St. Catherines and St. Theresas; there are the sonnets for the same occasions, full of Capids, Dianas,and flourishes, as profane as the fat cherubs and languishing saints overhead among the stucco and gilding, and printed off by the dozen to be handed round to the guests with cakes and ices, while the powdered hair of the novice is being shorn to the accompaniment of church music, with fiddles, flutes, and roulades. There is the still more numerous and nauseous class of bridal poems, mostly written by priests, in which Venus, the Graces, Cupid, and every manner of personified feeling are introduced to bring about the union of two persons who, in all probability, care nothing for each other, and are merely following the will of their parents or the suggestions of their worldly wisdom; when the marriage is an aristocratic one, Italy is brought in as a spectator, and prophesies that a new Alcides will be born, and that the proud Turk will soon tremble at the name of the

heroic infant. Sometimes-and this is often the case when the poet is a superior one, and cares nothing for the marriage-the bride and bridegroom are left behind after a few lines, and some classic fable is brought forward in their stead; but even then the best we get are poetical paraphrases of Albani, with loves climbing into trees, coquettish nymphs, and languishing heroes. After this we meet poems on all sorts of trifles-lapdogs, canaries, horses, gifts of fruit and wine, new hats, and what not; some of which, written under the influence of beautiful poetic ladies by elegant, frivolous poets like Frugoni, are certainly very pretty; and finally, to exhaust the stock of lyrics, we come to the sonnets destined to be showered down on to successful performers, and which, although often written by celebrated poets, are so trivial, vague, and verbose that we can only hope that they were used as curling papers by the singers, a few of whose extemporary flourishes and embellishments contained infinitely more genius, more art, and more poetry than all the verses of all their admirers. But, despite this miserable poverty of subject and sterility of fancy, the amount of lyrics written in Italy during the last century passes all belief: for everyone who could hold a pen —men, women, priests, nuns, lawyers, doctors, barbers-everyone wrote poetry; the works of each poet are excessively voluminousfive, six, seven, eight, ten, fifteen huge volumes being quite usual, and the greater portion of their contents, as well as that of the innumerable collections printed at weddings, deaths, veil-takings, christenings, and the still more innumerable academical collections, consist of this uninteresting, vapid, verbose, intolerable rubbish. In the presence of all these myriads of sonnets, odes, elegies, and canzoni per nozze, per monacazione, per