Modern Italian Poets | Page 8

most unaffected people, the

Italians,--for such they are,--that, far from disgusting a nation
accustomed to romantic impulses and to the singing of poetry in their
streets and gondolas, their gravest and most distinguished men and, in
many instances, women, too, ran childlike into the delusion. The best
of their poets", the sweet-tongued Filicaja among others, "accepted
farms in Arcadia forthwith; ... and so little transitory did the fashion
turn out to be, that not only was Crescimbeni its active officer for
eight-and-thirty years, but the society, to whatever state of
insignificance it may have been reduced, exists at the present moment".
Leigh Hunt names among Englishmen who were made Shepherds of
Arcadia, Mathias, author of the "Pursuits of Literature", and Joseph
Cowper, "who wrote the Memoirs of Tassoni and an historical memoir
of Italian tragedy", Haly, and Mrs. Thrale, as well as those poor Delia
Cruscans whom bloody-minded Gifford champed between his tusked
jaws in his now forgotten satires. Pope Pius VII. gave the Arcadians a
suite of apartments in the Vatican; but I dare say the wicked tyranny
now existing at Rome has deprived the harmless swains of this shelter,
if indeed they had not been turned out before Victor Emmanuel came.
In the chapter on the Arcadia, with which Vernon Lee opens her
admirable Studies of the Eighteenth Century in Italy, she tells us of
several visits which she recently paid to the Bosco Parrasio, long the
chief fold of the Academy. She found it with difficulty on the road to
the Villa Pamphili, in a neighborhood wholly ignorant of Arcadia and
of the relation of Bosco Parrasio to it. "The house, once the summer
resort of Arcadian sonneteers, was now abandoned to a family of
market-gardeners, who hung their hats and jackets on the marble heads
of improvvisatori and crowned poetesses, and threw their beans, maize,
and garden-tools into the corners of the desolate reception-rooms, from
whose mildewed walls looked down a host of celebrities--brocaded
doges, powdered princesses, and scarlet-robed cardinals, simpering
drearily in their desolation," and "sad, haggard poetesses in sea-green
and sky-blue draperies, with lank, powdered locks and meager arms,
holding lyres; fat, ill-shaven priests in white bands and mop-wigs;
sonneteering ladies, sweet and vapid in dove-colored stomachers and
embroidered sleeves; jolly extemporary poets, flaunting in
many-colored waistcoats and gorgeous shawls."
But whatever the material adversity of Arcadia, it still continues to

reward ascertained merit by grants of pasturage out of its ideal domains.
Indeed, it is but a few years since our own Longfellow, on a visit to
Rome, was waited upon by the secretary of the Arch-Flock, and
presented, after due ceremonies and the reading of a floral and
herbaceous sonnet, with a parchment bestowing upon him some very
magnificent possessions in that extraordinary dreamland. In telling me
of this he tried to recall his Arcadian name, but could only remember
that it was "Olympico something."

GIUSEPPE PARINI
I
In 1748 began for Italy a peace of nearly fifty years, when the Wars of
the Succession, with which the contesting strangers had ravaged her
soil, absolutely ceased. In Lombardy the Austrian rulers who had
succeeded the Spaniards did and suffered to be done many things for
the material improvement of a province which they were content to
hold, while leaving the administration mainly to the Lombards; the
Spanish Bourbon at Naples also did as little harm and as much good to
his realm as a Bourbon could; Pier Leopoldo of Tuscany, Don Filippo I.
of Parma, Francis III. of Modena, and the Popes Benedict XIV.,
Clement XIV., and Pius VI. were all disposed to be paternally
beneficent to their peoples, who at least had repose under them, and in
this period gave such names to science as those of Galvani and Volta,
to humanity that of Beccaria, to letters those of Alfieri, Filicaja,
Goldoni, Parini, and many others.
But in spite of the literary and scientific activity of the period, Italian
society was never quite so fantastically immoral as in this long peace,
which was broken only by the invasions of the French republic. A
wide-spread sentimentality, curiously mixed of love and letters,
enveloped the peninsula. Commerce, politics, all the business of life,
went on as usual under the roseate veil which gives its hue to the social
history of the time; but the idea which remains in the mind is one of a
tranquillity in which every person of breeding devoted himself to the
cult of some muse or other, and established himself as the conventional
admirer of his neighbor's wife. The great Academy of Arcadia, founded
to restore good taste in poetry, prescribed conditions by which
everybody, of whatever age or sex, could become a poetaster, and good

society expected every gentleman and lady to be in love. The Arcadia
still exists, but