their wild rush onwards towards chaotic change. Add to this the difference in national character, the impossibility of an Italian being satisfied with wit, paradox, and elegance, the difference in traditions, and consequent impossibility of an Italian, with Dante, Ariosto, Tasso in the past, and Metastasio, Goldoni, and Gozzi in the present, being satisfied with the philosophical, colourless, emotionless, pseudoclassic literature of France; sum all this together, and it will be evident that as long as there was only French influence in Italy there was comparatively very little foreign influence at all. But, little by little, as the middle of the eighteenth century was left behind, another influence-that of England -began to be felt in Italy, first indirectly through the French, and then directly from the English themselves.

The Italians had early in the century got acquainted with a few English writers-Milton, Pope, and especially Addison-whom not only Baretti but Gasparo Gozzi largely imitated. Richardson's novels had also reached Italy, and even suggested plots to Goldoni; but on the whole there was but little intellectual communication between the two countries until after the year 1750. Till then the English had been too insular, too coarse, too overbearing, to see in the Italians anything more than opera singers and vermicelli makers, and for the Italians to consider the English otherwise than as stupid, pedantic milordi, a fit prey for innkeepers and ciceroni. Besides this, England could influence Italy and Germany, and strongly influence even France, only when she had shaken off that French element which permeated her literature from the time of Charles II. to that of George III. The force of England lay in her intellectual originality, in her being at the head of what was afterwards

called the romantic school, as opposed to the pseudo-classic French one. Dryden, Pope, Addison, pleased the Italians and the Ger mans, as they pleased the French; but they could not strongly move any of them, for they were not sufficiently unlike the long-established Racine, Boileau, and La Bruyère. But when Shakespeare reappeared in the hands of Garrick, when Sterne and Gray threw aside all the traditions of the age of Ann, then England made a sudden and deep impression on foreign literature. This return to nature, to passion, to imagination, on the part of English literature, shook the French literary world, loosening the foundations of the merely elegant and clever school, which was to be finally destroyed by Madame de Staël and Chateaubriand; it threw the new-born German literature into full romanticism, and it made the Italians feel that at last there were people who could sympathise with them, who could see in Dante something beyond monster, and in the comic masks something more than barbarians; making them acquainted at the same time with a people who could be free without licence or profanity, and philanthropical and utilitarian without rhetorical grandiloquence; whom they could follow on the path of progress more safely and easily than they could their overexcited French neighbours. Then it was that Italians began go to England for their education and amusement, as even Parini's giovin signore is supposed to have done, though without becoming acquainted with anything else than the racecourse. The Italians could get acquainted with English life and thought only by going to England, for the English travellers, although, according to Goethe, they carried their tea-kettle up Etna, came to Italy for the sake of art and antiquity, but not

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at all to propagandise their political and literary notions. In this point Baretti was the forerunner of the men of the generation of Pindemonti and Alfieri. He knew England and English institutions twenty years before the rest of his countrymen, and his independent utilitarian spirit, his hostility towards the French, towards grandiloquence and persiflage, did much to form the school which culminated in the Misogallo, the first assertion of Italian political feeling since the time of Machiavelli.

So, gradually, as the nation moved onwards in the wake of its neighbours, as foreign, and especially English, or at least Anglo-French, influence became stronger, people grew either more indifferent or more hostile towards Arcadia. At Milan its members themselves began to despise it. The Verris and Beccaria had set up a journal called the Caffè, in which, together with literary topics, they discussed whether the aristocracy would not do well to resume commerce. The journal succeeded. Young men of the nobility studied agriculture and legislation, Pietro Verriand Beccaria nobly carrying out their own recommendations, the former in his works on political economy, the latter in his famous treatise against the then existing criminal laws. Joseph II., then master of the Milanese, did all he could to further this philosophical movement, being himself, after a fashion, philosophical. In Naples the minister Tanucci, while letting the young king grow up in the most woeful ignorance, set about reforming the State in the arbitrary manner then in vogue, while Filangieri spread liberal and philanthropical doctrines in the Court of Ferdinand and Caroline-doctrines which were to be paid for terribly in the year '99. In Parma the French minister Du Tillot set up as a wiser and more philosophical sort

of Sully, building factories, suppressing convents, and sending for Condillac to be tutor to the heir apparent, who, however, did not profit much by his teachers, since he spent his life serving at mass and ringing church bells. In Tuscany Peter Leopold changed the rather barbarous laws dating from the early grand dukes, and expelled a few dozen monks; finally, in Rome itself, after the death of Lambertini's bigoted successor Rezzonico, Clement XIV., better known as Ganganelli, signed the bull suppressing the Jesuits, although probably aware that he was, in so doing, signing his own death warrant.

While in the rest of the world philosophy reigned in more or less boisterous fashion, Italy accepted it quietly, prudently, rather timorously. Even poetry was influenced by this philosophical tendency; not only were utilitarian odes written in imitation of the one by Parini on the salubrity of the air, or, more strictly speaking, on the bad Milanese drainage, but poets, although probably not grown careless of dinners and pensions, began to hold up their heads and talk of human dignity-a quality of which they had never before suspected the existence. Here again Parini, as the poet of civilisation, to use the modern phrase, was the general model. He had said, what he doubtless sincerely believed, that 'he was not born to knock at the hard doors of the great; that the kingdom of the dead should receive him a poor, but a free man'—

me non nato a percuotere Le dure illustri porte, Nudo acorrà, ma libero, Il regno della morteand men, quite destitute of his proud, honest spirit, repeated the sentiment in other words, while continuing their modest little raps at illustrious doors. Virtue began to be talked of no longer as a neces

sary accompaniment of high birth, but as something infinitely to be preferred to it; poverty was declared to be a sort of advantage; war was decried as an abomination; ladies were abjured not to give out their babies to nurse; late hours, fashionable dresses, and rouge were execrated; in short, there was a general enthusiasm for nature and virtue, an enthusiasm which seems to have had but little effect on things artificial and vicious. These doctrines of course brought the fact that the Arcadian Academy was not a very rustic or natural institution into great relief. It began to be thought that all this verse-scribbling was not really poetical; and the excessive enthusiasm for Ossian, who had just been translated by Cesarotti, induced very unlucky comparisons between the Celtic bards and the Roman abati, between the rocks of Morven and the Serbatoio d' Arcadia. People began to suspect that Poetry positively refused to inhabit the halls of an academy, and that she asked for crumbling ruins, virgin forests, and misty mountain tops. In default of these places, where people of fashion might find it inconvenient to visit her, the Muse was invited to little quiet circles in palaces or villas, where, under the patronage of some beau tiful lady, and out of reach of hungry little priests, poetical enthusiasts might meet without fear of artificial or prosaic interests being thrust upon them. The colonies of Arcadia began to be neglected for the drawing-rooms of women like the Countess Castiglione at Milan, the Countess Grismondi at Brescia, the Marchesa Silvia Verza at Verona, the Countess Roberti at Bassano, and, above all, of the lovely Isabella Teotochi Albrizzi at

Venice, where the most eminent poets, Parini, Pindemonti, Pompei, Cesarotti, were constantly to be met, together with an occasional classical sculptor or emotional singer like Canova or Pacchierotti.

Very delightful those little literary circles must have been, where the most talented men lavished their intellectual gifts to please beautiful and refined women; little circles meeting in some cosy drawing-room in the quiet, dark town, or on the terraces and in the cypress and sycamore alleys of the villas along the Brenta and between the Monti Berici; so delightful that their remembrance made those who long survived them, and even ourselves, who have merely heard of them, feel quite elegiac at the sight of the now desolate country-houses where they met, and of the faded pictures of the ladies who presided over them. The poetry which was produced in such societies was, of course, far less conventional, verbose, and worthless than that of the large academical assemblies; less was written, and that better, than in the days of Frugoni; but great excellence was scarcely attained to. The poems of Pompei, Mazza, Mascheroni, and even of Ippolito Pindemonti, who far surpassed his contemporaries, give us the impression that, agreeable and elegant though they are, their authors were more interesting than they. There was a general, mild, elegiac tone prevalent, which, though not without a certain charm, was rather languid and insipid; nor was there produced, towards the end of the last century, any work to be compared with those of Metastasio, Goldoni, Parini, or even of the Gozzis. The spread of philosophical and humanitarian ideas had no perceptibly good influence on literature,

one.

for, although a tendency to take interest in individual sentiment had arisen, it was neither sufficiently strong nor sufficiently spontaneous to produce true lyric poetry; and the gradual adoption of foreign and the revival of antique modes of thinking and feeling merely weakened the national literature.

Metastasio could not have written his operas, nor Goldoni his comedies, had either been fresh from reading Ossian, and Homer, and Gray, and Rousseau, and Gessner, so true is it that intellectual cultivation by no means implies intellectual productiveness. Imitation was in vogue, as it must always be when anything striking first becomes known to a whole people; and by the side of the newly acquired knowledge of foreign literature came the newly revived interest in antique art, the enthusiasm for both mingling strangely towards the end of the last century, but without a better effect than that of making people tolerate tiresome classicism by the side of tiresome romanticism. In Italy the classical tendency was on the whole the stronger of the two, although largely tinged with northern romanticism; Italians began to go to Rome with the express purpose of seeing ruins and statues, which had hitherto interested only professed archæologists, and more especially for the purpose of musing over them. Winckelmann's Italian works, and those of his followers Fea and Visconti, excited interest in antique art, while the gradually spreading liberal doctrines revived interest in Roman history, which for two centuries had been a kind of dead letter; in short, romanticism, which, being in reality only the revival of literary and artistic appreciation due to critical study, included even classicism-romanticism made Rome once more a capital, of which we personally are very glad, since it enables us to return once more to

Arcadia, and to show it in a more flourishing state than it had been since the middle of the century.

This revival of Arcadia was marked in the year 1775 by an event which brought back for a moment the glory of the Academy, and at the same time cast great ridicule on it. The reputation, if not the talents, of Perfetti had fallen to the share of a woman who became famous under the Arcadian name of Corilla Olimpica. Maria Maddalena Morelli was born at Pistoja about the middle of the last century, and her early years are involved in such obscurity that, betwixt the enthusiastic lyrism of her admirers and the vile scurrility of her lampooners, it is impossible to tell whether she was a pattern of virtue or the very reverse. She married a Spanish gentleman named Fernandez, whom, together with her children, her enemies accused her, among other wickednesses, of having shamefully abandoned. However, her iniquities could either not be proved or were hushed up in consideration of her amazing talents, for we meet her everywhere feceived, honoured, and courted in the most signal way, despite an ominous hum of contempt on the part of the less polite or more scrupulous literati. She received several invitations from Joseph II., from the Republic of Venice, and from the Bolognese Senate; Clement XIV., an austere man for his time, gave her, in the most flattering manner, a permission to read books prohibited by the Inquisition; and all the most distinguished of the foreign visitors-Orloff, the Corsican chief Paoli, and the Duke of Dorsetlavished honours on her. Her receptions were much frequented by the most brilliant company, for, besides her poetic talents, she was pretty despite a squint, amiable, and accomplished. She was also a musician, for when Dr. Burney

went to her house in Florence10 he heard her play the violin; and she was particularly gracions to Mozart as a boy, for whom she even condescended to write a sonnet. In 1775 she was invited to Rome by her fellow Arcadians, and excited such enthusiasm that the Senator spontaneously sent her the diploma of citizenship, and the Abate Gioacchino Pizzi, Custode Generale d' Arcadia, crowned her at a private meeting of the Academy. To this first ebullition of admiration is also due a beautiful bust of Corilla, presented by an English sculptor, Christopher Hewetson, to the Arcadians, in whose possession it still remains. Judging from it and from a smutty portrait of her dressed in brown brocade decorated with flowers, Corilla Olimpica must have been at that time a stout woman of thirty-five, handsome, lively, intellectual, withal rather heavy and coarse in feature; she had besides a squinting eye, which was supposed to make the immediate conquest of anyone upon whom she chose to fix it while in the enthusiasm of improvising; and, if contemporary scandal may be credited, Corilla had made frequent use of this faculty. At any rate she turned the heads of many people in Rome, filling them with madness of some sort or other-love, ambition, or avarice to serve her purposes. The young Prince Gonzaga Castiglione (the Prince Castelforte of this rather realistic original of Corinne), a certain Monsignor Mazzei, and, above all, the Custode Generale d'Arcadia, Pizzi, moved heaven and earth, begged, and promised, and threatened, until the Pope consented to give Corilla the crown which had been worn by Perfetti. But times were changed since the solemn

reign of Crescimbeni. A Custode Generale d'Arcadia was no longer omnipotent over men's minds, a Pope was no longer infallible in all his decisions, an improvvisatore was no longer an inspired poet; things could no longer be looked at in the grave and dispassioned style of the year 1725; the coronation was regarded as a farce or a profanation, the Arcadians as conceited pedants, Corilla herself as an impudent adventuress, and, above all, the feelings of the Romans were conceived to be outraged by this arbitrary and undeserved bestowal of what had once been a national reward. Corilla's dubious antecedents, her theatrical profession, the exaggeration and intrigue of her partisans, did much to awaken public contempt and indignation: the ready buffoonery of the Roman people burst out in more or less scurrilous fashion; it was solemnly announced by Pasquino-that undaunted stone advocate of an oppressed but not disheartened people-that

Ordina e vuole Monsignor Mazzei
Che sia la Corilla cinta dell' alloro,
E che non le si tirin buccie nè pomidoro
Sotto multa di bajocchi sei.

Other epigrams averred that this coronation, like that of Baraballo, was meant as a jest and ought to be taken as such :

Venez-y, riez-en; et puis vous pourrez dire Que tout cela n'a été fait que pour rire.

Pizzi and Corilla's other partisans seem to have taken fright at these pasquinades, and, fearing perhaps that, despite the alleged fine of six baiocchi on whomsoever should throw orange rinds and tomatoes at the poetess, they might run the risk of some unpleasant scene if they performed the coronation in the daytime, they determined that the cere